Printful vs CafePress (2023): Which is Best?

Printful vs CafePress: Which is the best platform for print on demand sellers?

Print on Demand or “POD” business models have grown increasingly popular in recent years. By 2030, experts predict that the market will be worth over $43.07 billion, representing an incredible opportunity for would-be entrepreneurs and creators.

With print on demand solutions like Printful and CafePress, anyone can launch their own store and sell customized products, without having to worry about inventory or logistics.

However, while both CafePress and Printful are designed for print on demand selling, they each approach the business model in their own unique way.

Here’s what you need to know if you’re trying to choose between the two options.

What is Printful?

Printful is by far one of the most popular print-on-demand solutions on the market today. Supporting more than 1 million registered users, Printful offers access to a diverse selection of products creators can customize, such as hats, backpacks, t-shirts and hoodies.

With comprehensive design tools and integrations with the worlds leading ecommerce platforms and marketplaces, Printful makes it easy to create and sell a portfolio of amazing products. There are no minimum order quantities for items, and the company handles everything after the sale on your behalf, from product development, to shipping.

What is CafePress?

Like Printful, CafePress is a print-on-demand solution. The company works with designers and creators around the world to bring unique products to customers.

However, with CafePress, instead of creating products for your own online store, or a marketplace like Ebay, you sell on the CafePress platform. Sellers earn between 5-10% of the sale price on all of the products they add to the marketplace. This eliminates the need to create your own website and manage an ecommerce platform.

How Do Printful and CafePress Work?

Both Printful and CafePress are relatively similar on the surface. Both platforms allow merchants to sign up for an account for free, and start adding designs to a host of different products instantly.

There are integrated design tools on both platforms, so you can see what your items are going to look like before you start selling them. Plus, as POD solutions, Printful and CafePress manage a lot of the hard work of running a store on your behalf.

Once you sign up for an account, all you really need to worry about is choosing attractive designs, adding them to various products, and promoting your items to customers.

The main difference between Printful and CafePress comes down to how you sell your products, and get paid for your sales. With Printful, you upload your designs to the platform, and use the mock-up generator to create customized products.

Once you have your products, you can use one of Printful’s native integrations with an ecommerce platform or marketplace to list your items for sale. The native integrations ensure you can automatically send any information for orders directly to the print supplier. Printful then produces your products for you, and you pay for the cost of the items, customization, and shipping.

You also receive 100% of the money you earn from selling products with Printful, although you do have to account for the production and shipping costs in your profit margin.

With CafePress, you create a storefront on the CafePress marketplace, and sell them directly on the platform, without integrating anything. Whenever you make a sale, you earn royalty payments, which are paid out via PayPal or check within 60 days.

You can choose to earn money directly (5-10% of the sale price of your products), or you can use the credit you earn as “CafeCash” to pay for merch on the platform.

Printful vs CafePress: Features and Ease of Use

Printful and CafePress have a lot of overlapping features. Both tools come with their own design solutions, to help you add unique components to a range of products, such as apparel and accessories. They also both include design templates and guidance to help you make the most of your business.

For both platforms, you’ll also be responsible for promoting your products yourself. However, with CafePress, your designs appear directly on the platform’s marketplace, so you’ll instantly have access to a wide range of potential buyers, whereas with Printful, you’re listing your products on your own store. Where Printful really stands out from CafePress is with its sales channel options.

You can use the Printful API to integrate with virtually any store platform, ranging from Shopify, to Amazon, BigCommerce, Ebay and more. You can also sell across social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Printful also offers the option to pre-order and store your best-selling items in Printful warehouses, which ensures you can provide customers with same-day fulfilment options. Bulk orders also come with discounts of up to 55%, which can be ideal for high-volume sellers.

In terms of simplicity, both platforms are relatively straightforward to use. However, it’s worth noting that you are responsible for managing your own ecommerce platforms and sales channels with Printful. You’ll need to create an ecommerce store or storefront on a marketplace before you can start selling. With CafePress, you can sidestep this process and start selling immediately.

Printful vs CafePress: Pricing

Pricing will always be a consideration for any entrepreneur or creator looking to start their own online store. However, while POD solutions usually come with lower startup costs, due to the lack of any minimum order quantity requirements, their costs can vary drastically.

Printful Pricing

With Printful, you can get started for free, creating an account with access to all of the core Printful tools, such as the design maker, automated order fulfilment, white label packaging slips, branded packaging, and global order fulfilment. The free plan also includes 24/7 customer support, and integrations with all of the top sales channels.

Plus, Printful’s free plan also includes access to a free logo maker, so you can get help building your brand from day one. As you grow your store, you can choose to access extra resources and benefits for an additional fee. There are extra costs for things like custom packaging and pack-ins, graphic design support, video shoots, and warehousing services.

On top of that, you’ll need to consider the base price of your products whenever you want to sell something new, the price of shipping, and the costs of running an ecommerce store or storefront. This makes it particularly important to price your products carefully.

CafePress Pricing

CafePress is also free to use for merchants. However, you will need to choose between giving CafePress 10% of your royalties every month (with a $10 cap), or paying for services on a monthly basis, with prices starting at $6.95 per month.

However, the way you sell items and earn money is different. You don’t pay for the products you produce, or the shipping, but you also don’t earn 100% of your sale price.

Merchants receive around 5-10% of the sale price of every product when they make a sale, and receive that money within about 60 days. This means the profit margins for CafePress are a little lower, but you also don’t have to worry about running an ecommerce store or handling shipping.

Printful vs CafePress: Shipping and Fulfilment Costs

There are absolutely no shipping or fulfilment costs to worry about if you’re starting your POD store with CafePress. Rather than charging you a fee every time you produce a product and send it to a customer, CafePress simply retains the majority of the sale price for each product.

While this means you won’t earn a huge profit margin from your sales, it also ensures you don’t have to worry as much about fluctuations in product pricing and shipping costs.

Printful, on the other hand, does require you to pay for the base cost of the items you produce, and the price of any customizations. The cost of each item can vary depending on materials and printing methods. You then need to pay for shipping through a connected carrier like DPD, FedEx, and UPS.

As mentioned above, the shipping times can vary with Printful depending on your approach to selling. If you have a number of high-selling items, you can preorder them in advance and use Printful’s warehousing services to offer same-day fulfilment in some locations.

Printful vs CafePress: Integrations

As mentioned above, one of the major differences between Printful and CafePress is how you list your items. Printful allows you to add your products to a host of marketplaces and online stores, with both direct integrations, and a custom API.

You can connect Printful to Shopify, WooCommerce, Weebly, Squarespace, Wix, Ecwid, BigCartel, Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, and countless other platforms. There’s also the option to sell directly on a host of social media channels.

CafePress doesn’t offer any integrations with online stores or marketplaces, as you sell directly on the platform. However, you do get your own CafePress store ID and URL you can use to drive customers back to your storefront.

Printful vs CafePress: Products and Design Quality

While there are various factors that can influence the success of your POD store, few things are more impactful than the quality of your products and designs. The good news is that both Printful and CafePress use quality assurance methods to ensure your customers get great goods.

Printful has a much larger selection of products to choose from, including eco-friendly and sustainable items. It also offers a wide variety of printing methods not available on CafePress, such as all-over printing and embroidery.

The company uses it’s own state-of-the-art printing tools, and runs quality checks on all products. It also offers guidance on design placement to ensure you don’t make any mistakes.

CafePress doesn’t offer quite as many products, or as much guidance for sellers. However, it does offer high-quality items, and invests in quality assurance methods. Like with any POD solution, the quality of the print can vary depending on a range of factors with both platforms.

It’s worth ordering some sample versions of your products if you’re not sure, so you can check the quality yourself.

Printful vs CafePress: Customer Support

If you’re concerned about the complexities of starting your own POD business, choosing a vendor with excellent customer support is usually a good idea. Fortunately, both Printful and CafePress do offer a range of ways for merchants to get extra help.

Printful provides merchants with a variety of educational resources, including videos, blogs, guides, and FAQs. You can also choose to pay for extra support from technical teams, graphic design experts, and more. If you need direct support, you can reach out over the phone, via live chat, or email.

CafePress also offers some handy resources to merchants, including step-by-step guides, FAQs, and basic articles. The company provides customer support through phone or email, but there’s no live chat option at the moment. However, you can follow the company on social media for more help.

Printful vs CafePress: Pros and Cons

All print on demand solution providers have their own distinct pros and cons to consider. Here’s a quick insight into the positives and negatives of selling with Printful and CafePress.

Printful

CafePress

Printful vs CafePress: The Verdict

While both Printful and CafePress are excellent print on demand solutions, they offer a very different experience to would-be merchants. If you’re looking for a company you can work with to create custom products and sell them on existing marketplaces and platforms, Printful is likely to be the best choice. It offers a huge range of products, tons of integrations, and great design tools.

On the other hand, if you want an easy way to start selling without building your own ecommerce store, and you want to keep startup costs low, CafePress is a great choice. There’s more competition on the marketplace, and lower profit margins, but it’s very simple for beginners to get started.