Bye Bye Printful

 If anyone has been wondering how the Printful experiment went, well, it was ok. I have to say I had zero issues with the products themselves, they were very good quality and the print quality was also great. 

My issue was, and maybe it was just because of the kind of Etsy store I have, is that it didn't really fit in what I was looking for. My profit margin just wasn't there and I know I'm not alone. If you start off with a shirt that costs $13 and add in shipping, that shirt is costing you at minimum $17, say you are selling the shirt for $22-$25, your profit is less than $10 per shirt. Where as I can get a blank shirt from All Day Shirts for less than $2 each, cut out my own design from my vinyl stash for less than $1 and all of the profit is mine.

I don't sell a lot of shirts or physical products anymore anyway so losing the POD (Print on Demand) part of my Etsy won't hurt my sales much. In fact, my plan is to take the designs that I did have on Printful, redo and revamp some of them so they are SVG's and sell those. That way I can share my designs with other crafters and not have any of the overhead once the design is complete.

 

Goodbye CafePress, Hello Printful

Sometimes you have to take a chance on something new. Since 2003 I had a shop (ok, multiple) on CafePress. At the time it was a pretty revolutionary thing. You could upload your design, put it on items, carry no inventory and make money doing it. For the first few years this worked great. Any amount over the base price was your profit no matter how the customer found you.
A few years ago, they changed their commission structure to a flat 10% of your sale. You could raise the amount of your commission based on a few factors, but one of the main ones was of getting followers and following other designers. After seeing tiny commission for an item that cost the customer $25.00 I had decided I had enough, I needed to find another print on demand business.
I had heard of Society6 and Zazzle but wasn't impressed with them or the others like it. I was looking around on YouTube and kept seeing Printful pop up. I was intrigued but skeptical. I looked into it further and decided to try it out.
I really like the way they handle things down to the packaging. You can put your black and white logo on the packing slips and the envelopes/boxes that they use to ship. So it looks like it's coming from your online store and not a third party printer. I also like the integration to Etsy, all I have to do is link my store, upload my designs, select the products and once you sync, the item will automatically be dumped into your Drafts on Etsy where you can finalize it.
Another cool feature is you can buy from your own shop at a discounted rate and also order samples. I set up some items a few months ago and haven't really promoted it but I have had a few sales. I'm not going to depend on this for my income or anything but it's a nice option. Anyone that is into designing full time should look into it. Oh, and they integrate with tons of sites, not just Etsy. Shopify, BigCommerce and even Ebay are a few of them. There are also detailed video tutorials on setting everything up.
One aspect I was confused about was the payment structure. Printful allows you to have a "Wallet" which you can load money into. When someone places an order the money is taken from the wallet/your paypal account/your bank card to pay for the initial order. Your profit comes from whatever store platform you use. For example. One of my t-shirts is priced at $25.00, the base price for the shirt is $17.00 so Printful charges me the $17.00 for the shirt and everything else is handled through Etsy. I get the full $25.00+shipping but you just have to subtract the initial $17.00. It isn't clearly spelled out but once I got my first order I figured it out pretty quickly. $8.00+ profit is much better than the dollar or less I was getting from CafePress.
I haven't ordered a sample yet as of the time of this post, but I am planning on it very soon. Once I do I will review it.
Happy Crafting!