Let's Buy Local review for Printful: Print on Demand

Sept. 11, 2014

PROS: Awesome Concept, Awesome App, Awesome Support, Awesome Integration CONS: Prices are two high to make any real profit so it's a great way to get your brand out there and generate a following and not make any money. Then once you a following stop using them and do everything in house or use a different print company. It's also very hard to setup I had 3 people working on loading 50 designs over the course 2 or 3 months each working 30 hours a week and we finally just got the site going. It works great once you get it setup but there is a lot of prep work you have to do to make it happen. SUGGESTIONS: I don't know if this possible but if there is anyway you can get the costs down on your products that would be great otherwise your force us to sell T-Shirt for $30 to $35 and lets be honest no one is spending that on t-shirts with all the other t-shirt sites out there selling shirts for $10 to $20 a shirt. The canvas prints we can say is "Art" so we can jack the price up because it's an art print but the bread and butter money comes from t-shirts and posters and if there is no more profit in these things where we can reduce prices. We could never count on this as our main source of business. This is just a nice "extra pocket change" type of businesses. If we could get retail prices down to $19 a shirt with shipping included in that price and get the costs down to $13 with shipping included it would be worth it. The problem is by the time you add shipping your costs are around $20 to $22 depending on sizes so in order to make any money you have to sell them at $30 which is a hard sell. Especially if you want to run promos like free shipping on everything over $75. So I would recommend getting the prices down for re-sellers because your prices are like retail prices not wholesale. Also.. yeah it would be cool if it was a little easier to setup but we can deal with that at least.. but the prices are a killer.. I would think they are going to shoot themselves in the foot because all your doing is giving us a platform to get our brand out and the first chance our brand takes off we are looking for ways to reduce the cost and the first way to do that is to stop using printful. So I would think they would want to keep our business and the way they do that is lower their prices otherwise I'm just going to use them for a year, get my business going and say good bye to them and do everything either in house or with another company. VERDICT: I recommend them still even after my little rant about prices, you can't beat an automated business for $30 a month. Once the designs are done and you recovered your cost there it's pure profit it's just disappointing that there is not more of it because the margins are so slim so we really need to do volume. Which is hard when your selling shirts at $30 a pop. All that said though.. great company.. great people ... quality products.