Printify vs Printful vs Gelato: Which Is Better?
After I write my recent article on $3 million print on demand Etsy shops, it reminded me of a little detail called profit margins. Profit margins are the part of the sale that you get to keep after you've paid all of the fees and product costs.
If you've thought about running a Print on Demand store, you'll know that there are a lot of options when it comes to choosing a print provider.
In my opinion, the biggest three platforms are Printful, Printify and Gelato. These three seem to have the biggest market share and are used by the most sellers overall, but they're actually extremely different from one another.
So today I wanted to break down the main differences between these platforms so you can see how each one actually works. Then I'm going to break down the cost differences so you can see how much profit you'd bring home depending on which platform you decide to use.
And then finally, I'll go over exactly what I would do if I was starting over from scratch before I had ever made seven figures and 50,000 sales.
If you plan on having success with Print on Demand or you want to be a six or seven figure seller, it's extremely important to choose wisely when you're picking a print provider because you're essentially trusting them with your entire business. So let's get right into the breakdown.
Which is best platform for print-on-demand
If you're unfamiliar with Print on Demand, here's a super quick breakdown so you can see how everything works and then you'll be able to understand how these platforms are different from one another.
First, a customer places an order for one of your products either on a website or an online marketplace. This could be anything from T shirts and mugs to posters and phone cases. Next, the order is sent to the print provider where the product is printed and shipped directly to the customer, usually within a few days.
So if you're using Printful as your print provider, once you get an online order and you click "Submit", it'll go directly to a Printful warehouse where they'll print and ship the item directly to the customer.
Now this is where we start to see the main differences in how Printify and Gelato are slightly different. First of all, Printify doesn't actually print and ship any products at all. They allow you to choose from a variety of third party print providers to connect with.
If you're selling T shirts or mugs, you might have several different options for print providers for who's going to handle that order. One of the benefits to this is you can Find specific print providers that are holding the inventory that you need. If you need to sell extra small shirts in a specific color, you can probably find a print provider who can offer that.
Having multiple different fulfillment options also means there's competition. This competition keeps the prices lower, and it incentivizes each fulfillment center to ship out their products faster than all the other guys.
Having multiple third party fulfillment centers also allows Printify to expand much faster than Printful. They can just integrate with a new facility once it's ready to go, instead of having to purchase new warehouse space, hire staff, and fill that entire warehouse with the printing equipment.
The downsides to this multi fulfillment center approach is that some print providers are far better than others as far as quality, production speed, and responsiveness, whenever there's an issue with an order.
If a product hasn't been shipped on time, you have to reach out to Printify and have them contact the facility to see what's causing the delays. And once this happens, it could take a few days for the smaller facility fulfillment centers to respond to Printify, and then you still have to wait for Printify to respond to you. But this can usually just be avoided by picking the best print provider for each product, so you don't have to worry about these kind of delays.
Printify handles these issues by assigning a performance score to each fulfillment center. This score includes quality control, production time, and stock reliability to help you decide on which center is best for you.
I'll put a list of my favorite fulfillment centers now to help you decide depending on what products you're selling:
- Monster Digital
- SwiftPOD
- District Photo
- SPOKE Custom Products
Gelato is more similar to Printify, where they're just a software company that connects you to different printing facilities around the world. The issue here is that you don't get to pick which fulfillment center is printing and fulfilling your orders. Instead, their advanced algorithm will decide this for you.
This could obviously create some issues because you don't have the same control that you have on Printify and Printful. There's also no competition between the centers on Gelato, so they'll just continue to charge you a flat rate and there's no other price options.
Now, it's fairly standard for all of these platforms to have great quality and great customer support. So the main differences here are just the that they're operated. Printful handles everything in house. They'll print and ship everything from a Printful facility. Printify allows you to pick and choose which print provider you want to work with. And with Gelato, they'll use their algorithm to determine which print provider at the time is best for that order.
So ultimately, the main differences are how much control you want over the products and what the price differences are going to be. There isn't much difference in the ease of use on these platforms either. All three of these platforms are very streamlined and easy to use, especially once you get going.
So main differences aside, assuming that the quality and delivery speeds are roughly the same, now we can talk about price. We looked at several stores in my article covering $3 million shops, and since T shirts and mugs are the most popular items to sell, we're going to use these products to compare the three platforms.
Okay, so here's how I'm breaking down the costs. We're going to find the average price that mugs and shirts sell for on Etsy and then I'll compare the costs for if you're brand new and just starting out, or if you're an established seller getting lots and lots of sales, which is the end goal.
To find the average selling price. We're going to look at these seven figure shops to see what they're selling at and then try and use a conservative estimate. If you want to see how I find these seven figure shops, make sure you read this article.
For the mugs, we're looking at two shops. The first shop, called UltimateGiftShop, sells each mug for 1799 with 5.95 of shipping totaling 2394 each mug. Another shop we can look at is called StrictlyBusinessMugs. And they're selling each mug for 14.96 and 7.99 of shipping, totaling 22.95.
So we'll use $23 as an average mug price. This is what our hypothetical store is selling each mug for, including shipping. Now on Printful, to fulfill the mug order, you'll pay 14.44 for the mug, leaving you with $8.56 in profit before Etsy fees. On Gelato, without any discounts, you'll pay $14.11 for the same exact mug, leaving you with $8.89 in profit before Etsy fees.
Now, if we're using the high quality but still very cost effective print provider called District photo through Printify and we're not paying for any discounts, then the same exact mug is going to cost $9.62. That leaves us with a $13.38 profit before any Etsy fees. Look to this picture below if you want to see the individual profit breakdown for each platform. Okay, but that's for if you're a complete beginner without any discounts.
But what if you're an established seller and you're doing, let's say, 10,000 mug orders per year? You're going to want the best discount from each platform. So let's see what that would come out to be.
Now on Printful, you have to earn each discount. To earn the largest discount of 9% each month, you have to spend a total of $10,000 in product costs. And that does not include the shipping. But assuming that you earn this 9% discount every single month, that $7.95 mug becomes $7.23 plus the $6.49 shipping, which means each mug is going to cost you $13.72 to fulfill.
So if we made 10,000 mug orders at $23 each order, that's $230,000. If you're using Printful, you would pay $137,200 in product and shipping costs and you'd be left with $114,200 in profit before any Etsy Fees.
Now, a little detail here is that you have to re earn that 9% discount every single month to keep it for the next month. Which means if you're selling mugs, you have to sell 1384 mugs each month to keep that 9% discount coming in. But for the sake of easy math, we're going to ignore that fact.
Gelato's membership costs $1,000 a year and gives you essentially 50% off all the shipping. So on Gelato, the mugs cost us 7.49 plus 331 in shipping totaling $10.80 after we have the discount. That means we would pay $108,000 to fulfill 10,000 mug orders, leaving us with $122,000 in profit before Etsy Fees. And that's before we subtract the $1,000 Gelato Gold memberships.
On Printify you can purchase the Printify Premium plan for about $25 a month, and after about 25 mug orders you'll break even because you save about a dollar a mug, you would pay $8.55 per mug order, leaving you with $14.45 in profit before Etsy Fees.
Or if you are selling 10,000 mugs out of your $230,000 of revenue, you would pay Printify $85,500 to fulfill all those orders. That leaves you with $144,500 before the Etsy fees and the $300 Printify premium cost. Again, Look to this picture below if you want to see the individual profit breakdown for each platform if you sell 10,000 mugs a year with the maximum product discounts.
So what about a successful T shirt business? If you're selling 10,000 plus T shirts a year, here's the breakdown. And yes, this is absolutely possible if you want to see then make sure you check out that article I did on the $3 million print on demand Etsy shops. We're going to use the average prices from those shops we looked at, which is between 20 and $22 per shirt order.
So we'll use $20 as a conservative estimate. But in my experience, shirts usually sell for about 22 to $23. So assuming we sell 10,000 shirts at $20 apiece, that's $200,000 in revenue. Printful is going to charge 1178 plus a 3.99 shipping after the 9% discount. So that's 1577 for 10,000 orders is $157,700. That leaves you with about $42,000 in profit before all of the Etsy fees.
But again, to keep that $11.78 price, you'll have to sell about 850 shirts each month to keep that new discount coming in. Gelato Plus Gold, they'll charge you about 1405 per shirt order, meaning for 10,000 orders you would pay $140,500. And that would leave you with about $59,500 in profit.
Again, before the Etsy fees and the cost of the subscription, you'll pay $13.35 for a T shirt from Monster Digital on Printify. Meaning for those 10,000 orders, you'd pay $133,500 on the products and shipping, leaving you with a $66,500 profit before Etsy fees and the $300 Printify Premium subscription.
Look to this picture below if you want to see the individual profit breakdown for each platform selling 10,000 T shirts a year with maximum product discounts. But this is just for a proof of concept, so that you can see the percentages that these platforms run on.
Now for a little more context not every order that you get is going to be a single item, like a single shirt or a single mug. You're probably not going to be charging the exact same as these platforms that we looked at, and a lot of orders might qualify for free shipping, which would drastically decrease your revenue.
But this is absolutely still possible. And almost all of my orders are single items, like one mug or one shirt. So that's just another piece of the puzzle to keep in mind when you're deciding between these platforms.
The last thing that I do have to point out that not everybody talks about, and I'm definitely not trying to throw shade at anyone, but we have to talk about the affiliate commissions. Gelato and Printful have the highest commissions at 15 and 10% compared to the 5% that Printify pays out to their affiliates.
This could be a complete coincidence and I am biased because I am a Printify affiliate. But I'm also biased because I fulfilled tens of thousands of orders with Printify and if I could go back to day one and start all over, I would use Printify all over again.
To me it makes sense to use the most cost effective option that gives me the most control. Even though their partners are third party, a lot of them are still outstanding and produce great quality at really fast shipping times.
Not only that, but Printify will also assign you a sales success manager to help you grow your business once you reach a certain sales threshold.
They have not paid me to say this, I just really like their platform more than all of the other platforms. And it's made me substantially more money than I would have made if I had used the other platforms.
And since their quality is the same, I have better control and their profit margins seem to be much better to me. I'm going to continue using Printify as long as they're providing amazing service. I hope this helps, I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for reading.
