Redheaded Jill

I have recently learned some things about the print and demand site Printful that I wanted to bring to your attention.

1. Printful will charge you BEFORE they charge the customer. What I mean by that is, whatever website you are selling on (for me it’s Etsy and Shopify) before Printful will fulfill the order they will charge your card or your “wallet” (printful money account) and then you will get paid later by Etsy or Shopify. If you don’t have a positive balance in the wallet or a credit card to use you can hold off on fulfilling the order until you are paid by Etsy or Shopify.
   • For example: If you have the orders set to manual fulfillment, when someone places an order. You can wait until Etsy pays you, or you can set your Etsy payment settings to be daily so that you aren’t waiting long to receive payment. Then when you have the money from Etsy you can turn around and fulfill the order on printful.
   • If it is set to automatic fulfillment, printful will automatically charge your card and you will be in a deficit until you get paid by Etsy (or whichever website you sell from).
2. Printful allows for a certain number of products to be purchased by the designer/store owner at a discount every month. (I think the limit is 3 items at cost or 20% off.) I just ordered three t-shirts of my own design and I love how they turned out! The print quality is great.
3. Printful does stickers, but I honestly don’t know if it’s better to use printful print on demand, OR go ahead and stock up on stickers when sticky brand has a sale. It costs $2-3 to print a 4″ sticker on printful. With sticky brand you can sometimes get stickers at a major discount. I just ordered 150 3″ stickers for $40? That’s 26 cents per sticker. Of course you buy up front and if they don’t sell they don’t sell. The alternative is you print fewer and sell fewer at a higher cost. (I sell stickers for $4-5 a piece.)
4. It takes at least 1/2 an hour for your order to go from Etsy to printful. When I got my first Etsy sticker order I was super excited, but then super nervous because it wasn’t showing up on printful! I contacted their Helpdesk and realized they needed more than 5 minutes for it to show up. Once it did the process was seamless. It took 2-3 days for the order to print/process/ship. The order was placed on a Friday afternoon and shipped out by Tuesday. I thought that was impressive considering they had to complete the stickers over the weekend!
5. You still have to fulfill the order on etsy, even though printful does the shipping itself. I had to wait until the stickers shipped, then I took the tracking number printful gave me and went to Etsy, complete order, and entered the tracking number. It isn’t automatic. So if you are blessed with hundreds of orders that either means you need a reliable credit card for automatic fulfillment, OR you need to have the time and focus to go through and manually approve hundreds of orders. Then regardless of whether or not you do automatic fulfillment or manual, you have to go in and update all tracking/shipping info. (With Shopify it was more streamlined, though I still had to manually approve the order. Shipping was hassle free.)