Print on Demand Roundup

There's a lot going on in Print on Demand these days. So let's take a look at the best ways to maximize the potential of your online business.

Making Money Online

In print on demand there are generally two ways merchants make money: uploading to a marketplace that takes care of everything in exchange for a commission, and creating an online store on a platform like Shopify or Etsy where you have to print and ship the product. 

Each of these business models have their pros and cons, but both can generate significant income. Our goal is to help merchants make the most of either of these revenue sources, so let's compare some of the available options and help maximize the revenue of your business.

Fulfillment

Let's start with the tricky one first, doing fulfillment on an online store. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here, and you may end up using several of the available services. The main players in fulfillment are certainly Printify and Printful.

Printify

Printify has a massive catalog of products available, over 600 currently. These products are fulfilled by a host of different suppliers who may vary in quality and fulfillment times. Order routing can be done by region, but their algorithm does not necessarily pick the closest provider or take into account inventory. Printify integrates with many outside sales channels making it a good choice for fulfillment if you're selling on one of the major sales platforms.

Printful

Printful has good product selection, but is on the higher end for price. Unlike Printify, Printful does all the printing itself using its own fulfillment centers, so quality tends to be more consistent and customer service a bit more seamless. Printful has lots of integrations with outside sales channels, but some of them are very bare bones. The Gumroad integration for example requires you to manually transfer mockup images over from Printful for each listing, and configure each variant individually. If you're looking to integrate with WooCommerce or another popular online store platform it may be worth a look.

OrbitKit

OrbitKit automates publishing to both Printify and Printful for free, no subscription required. So if you have a large library of designs you want to publish using these platforms, creating an OrbitKit account and connecting to Printify or Printful can save you a lot of time and effort. Check out our video for more detail.

OrbitKit Fulfillment

In addition to automation for publishing to Printify and Printful, OrbitKit has its own print network similar to Printify's. OrbitKit integrates with Shopify and Etsy, and automatically fulfills orders that come in from those platforms. And you can create manual orders for sales you make from other sales channels.

Our product catalog is not as large as the other guys, focusing on the most popular apparel items and mugs currently, but there are some good reasons to choose fulfillment with OrbitKit for the products we offer.

• Quality: OrbitKit only partners with print providers that care about quality prints and ship on time.
• Integrations: OrbitKit has the best integrations with Shopify and Etsy available. You have the ability to offer multiple products in the same listing, like a shirt, a hoodie and a mug, which results more opportunities to upsell. Synchronization of changes you make to your listings' titles and descriptions is fully automatic and seamless.
• Smart Order Routing: Orders are automatically fulfilled at the geographically closest print facility, with realtime inventory checks making sure that stock is available.
• Mockup Options: You have a lot of control over mockup images with OrbitKit. You can use OrbitKit's built-in mockup images, or supply your own. You can also add backgrounds to the mockup images provided to personalize your listings.
• Support: If there is a problem with an order we handle it quickly. You have a direct line to the developers through the in-app chat so any issues or features you'd like added will be considered.

Marketplaces

The other way to monetize your design artwork is through a marketplace site. The marketplace model is fairly straightforward. Uploading to a marketplace that takes care of printing, shipping, and collecting and distributing payment has clear benefits. Not needing to deal with customer complaints and returns is a major advantage. The main downside is the effort it takes in uploading your design artwork, positioning it and filling in titles and descriptions.

Other considerations are that you usually don't get customer email info to market to in the future, and you don't have control over quality or customer support. There is also the possibility that a sale at one of these marketplace may steal a sale you could have made at another sales channel you make a higher margin on.

If you're trying to build a brand you may want more control than you get with these sites, but otherwise a sale is a sale and the audience traffic they bring can be well worth the effort.

An OrbitKit Plus subscription takes away the major pain points with uploading to marketplace sites. For the starter plan we'll create 5 new listings every day at Redbubble, Spreadshirt, CafePress, Fine Art America, Society6, Teespring, TeePublic, Shirtee and Tostadora. 

Once it's set up listings will be created with artwork positioned and all metadata like titles, tags, and descriptions set automatically.

Conclusion

The print on demand landscape is vast, and merchants have a lot of choices out there. The best providers and services are a constantly shifting target, but OrbitKit's goal is put merchants first and provide tools to help their businesses succeed. Check out our website to learn more.