Teespring promises creators an easy way to bring their ideas and projects to life. Currently transitioning to the new name of “Spring”, Teespring is a print on demand store. In other words, with Teespring, you get a print on demand solution built specifically for creative design.
Quick verdict:
Teespring differs slightly from some of the other print on demand solutions in the market, because it aims to be a social platform, as well as a marketplace.
In my opinion, Teespring seems best suited for content creators, influencers, or those just starting out in the print-on-demand business. It offers a low-risk way to test designs and build a following. However, for established businesses or those looking for more control over their brand and higher profit margins, it might be limiting in the long run.
The ease of use and built-in marketing tools make it attractive, but the lack of advanced store customization and potentially lower profits are factors to consider. Overall, I'd say it's a good starting point, but serious sellers might outgrow it as their business expands.
Let’s take a closer look at Teespring.
In this article:
Teespring Pros and Cons
Pros 👍
- Built in tools for marketing and promotion
- Excellent back-end interface is easy to use
- Automated multi-channel selling options
- Lots of product options to choose from
- Great integrations with leading services
- Brilliant boosted network feature
- Same-day and 2-day shipping options
- Automatic categorization
- Easy to start selling as quickly as possible
- Useful drag-and-drop editor
Cons 👎
- Restrictions on styling options
- Barely customizable when it comes to branding
- Limitations on your profit margin
What is Teespring?
Considered by some to be the leading solution for social commerce, Teespring was originally founded in 2011. The company originally used Facebook as a marketing and sales channel, attracting thousands of sellers in a short space of time.
Unfortunately, Teespring didn’t create enough revenue to keep itself afloat. By 2017, the annual revenue of the company was suffering, and the brand had to make some serious changes to get back on top.
Fortunately, Teespring managed to transform once again, operating in a more agile, lean format, and expanding their offering to go beyond simply selling t-shirts. Now, Teespring is a comprehensive print on demand environment which collaborates with huge influencers and companies to generate a unique sales experience.
Teespring now has a vast community of both sellers and buyers, making it a good choice for companies that want to leap into POD selling as quickly as possible. There are tools like a Boosted network for encouraging sales, and various other marketing solutions to keep track of.
Teespring Pricing
Similar to most of the top print on demand services, Teespring is free to use. You don’t have to pay a subscription fee to get started. Instead, you can set up an account immediately, start uploading designs, and start selling without any financial risk.
This makes Teespring a good choice for anyone who hasn’t got a lot of budget to get their business started.
Of course, Teespring still has to make money – so how does it do that if you’re not paying a fee? Simply put, the platform maintains a small portion of the total sale price as a profit. Instead of paying a percentage of your earnings to Teespring, every item comes with a fixed cost.
This means that you pay your fixed cost, and you can set the profit however you like. The key to success is remembering that you still need to attract buyers and convince them to purchase your product.
The pricing for the products offered by Teespring are pretty simple, starting with long-sleeve shirts at around $13, or Short sleeve t-shirts at around $10. There’s a huge range of products to explore, including:
- Unisex tees
- All-over-print hoodies
- Leggings
- Pocket tees
- Sports bras
- Swimsuits
- Dresses
- Bags
- Accessory pouches
- Pins
- Home décor
Teespring will offer volume discounts on a month-to-month basis. This means that if you cross a sales threshold in one month, the cost of your items the next month will be based on your success.
While Teespring isn’t the most expensive POD solution on the market, it’s not the cheapest either. You should be able to make a profit, but you’ll need to plan your product line-up carefully.
Ease of Use
Teespring was built from the ground up to help business owners sell print-on-demand products. The process of setting up your store is quite straightforward. All you need to do is upload your designs and create products based on those artworks. Once you make your account, you can head to the user account environment, and you’ll see a button for creating your first item.
Setting up your store is pretty simple in regards to creating products. You can get tips on how to create designs on the website, and you’ll be able to format your files according to your needs within the account. There are a few things about setting up your store that aren’t quite as clear, however.
For instance, you’ll need to configure your payment options before you can start receiving any cash.
Once you’ve uploaded your design, you’ll be able to select the product you want to place it on, and what kind of design coverage you want (such as all over the shirt). You can add text, and make a few basic changes within the editor.
The color palette available on Teespring is a little limited, so you might find it easier to add text before you upload your design.
Within the editor, you can also receive, drag, and rotate images and text in the printable area. The elements should snap and stick to the center of the item, as you drag them. This is a pretty simple process. Just keep in mind that the design might look different depending on its dimensions as you explore different shapes and products.
The more items you want to make, the more you might start to find Teespring a little clunky and frustrating. This service does require some patience.
The User Dashboard
Teespring offers users a comprehensive dashboard environment where they can interact with their products, track information and more. The dashboard is very clean and intuitive, but it does have a lot of tabs to get to know, such as:
- Overview: Where you can manage your Teespring account at a glance, check your sales performance, examine hot-streak challenges and find promotional tools.
- Listings: This is where you can view and edit all of your listed products, as well as ordering samples of products, and archiving listings.
- Storefronts: The section for displaying multiple product listings in a single place, for sharing a host of products in one URL.
- Analytics: Insights into your business delivered by in-depth analytics. You can check out your most popular products and sales channels here.
- Orders: Track your personal orders, see the number of units ordered, order numbers, order dates, delivery status and purchase costs.
- Marketing: This section lists all of the tracking pixels you can access for platforms like Twitter, Google, and Facebook.
- Integrations: This section is where you can integrate your store with things like Twitch, Google and YouTube.
- Messages: Here you can message previous buyers and download buyer emails. This is ideal for promoting new campaigns and giving out discounts.
- Promotions: In this section, you’ll be able to create unique promo codes for your buyers, and discounts based on previous purchases.
- Pricing discount: if you want a higher profit margin, you can switch to a flat pricing solution, or pricing discount tier to access greater earnings.
- Payouts: This is where you can access the money you make through Teespring. You can choose whether you want your money to be sent via Payoneer or PayPal.
- Settings: You can use the Dashboard settings to update information like your phone number, display name, contact email, and more. You can also opt-in to things like the Boosted Network
Store Customization
TeeSpring isn’t the most advanced product on the market for building a memorable branded store, but it does offer some options for business owners. The content management system within Teespring allows you to adjust a few things in your store front.
You can choose a color for the background of your header, which gives you a decent pallet to work with if you want to ensure that you’re sticking to your brand colors.
You can also choose whether your site title or logo will appear at the top of your page, and whether it will be present on every page.
Teespring also allows you to add an image underneath your header, and you can create an “About” page, where you can offer a brief description about yourself, and your store.
The interface won’t tell you how much space you have for your bio, but you won’t get a lot of information here.
Ultimately, that's the extent of what you can do to brand your store with Teespring. From the design/storefront page, you can also add your products, which shouldn’t be confused with creating products.
We created products in the initial stage of setting up our Teespring store, but this just gives the database access to the items you’re going to be selling.
Teespring products are categorized automatically, and the categories are automatically added to the navigation menu at the top of the storefront too.
Read more:
Unique Features
Teespring might be a little limited in some aspects – like building a memorable online store, but it has a variety of notable features which do help it to stand out from other print on demand solutions.
Unlike most POD companies, Teespring can provide same-day and 2-day shipping options, so anyone can create an amazing experience for their customers.
Teespring can also handle things like taking payments, while eliminating the need for merchants to hold inventory, and take ownership of customer service. Beyond that, there’s some pretty innovative features to check out like:
Boosted Network
When you build your store with TeeSpring, there are various things you can do to promote products and increase sales. However, there’s also some stuff TeeSpring does behind the scenes to help out too. For instance, Teespring currently integrates with seven different marketplaces online, to create multiple channels of sales for customers.
There’s an algorithm within the Teespring environment which can handle the load for the most part, finding products and sellers to meet the right criteria for your store. This means that Teespring can offer your products for sale on a range of platforms.
The Boosted Network is easy enough to opt-out of, but we’d definitely recommend giving it a try if you want to get more sales overall.
With Surfer, your item will appear on the most appropriate marketplace, and all the sales and support happen without you having to do any extra work. Your items appear automatically on the most appropriate marketplace, and the algorithm decides the selling price on other channels too.
Email Marketing
To help you sell your Merch, Teespring.com also has support for ecommerce email marketing. There are two ways that Teespring will help you to boost your sales with email marketing. The first option involves mentioning your products in branded marketing emails direct from Teespring. Not every product will be mentioned, but it’s a nice bonus.
You can also use the “messaging” feature within your account to send promotional emails directly from your account to your customers.
You can only contact people who have previously purchased from your store before, but there are options to segment your email marketing contacts to create more targeted content about things like phone cases, clothes, and more.
Unique items
There are plenty of print-on-demand companies out there offering a variety of simple products, like tee shirts, sweaters, and hats. However, it can be difficult to make your brand stand out when you can only sell “the basics”. If you want to make more of an impact, Teespring could be the ideal ecommerce platform for you. You can create a range of unique items like beanies, keychains, and pop sockets, even if you’re just making your first design.
While custom t-shirts and other POD essentials are also available, you’ll be much more likely to push customers to the checkout when you have some unique items to offer. You can even create entirely custom plush dolls – which is something you simply can’t do on most of the other competing Print on Demand stores available today.
Teespring Go
If you want to really improve your product portfolio and branch out of the print-on-demand space, you can also experiment with Teespring Go. This is a function which allows you to sell virtually anything online.
The Teespring Go initiative comes in two flavors. The first option is the fulfillment service, in which you send the products you want to sell to Teespring, and they manage them for you.
To use the fulfillment service, you send Teespring your inventory, and they’ll store it for you in their warehouse.
There’s support for creating product mock-ups, launching listings, fulfilling orders, and more. The service fee will be around 15% of the product selling price, and you’ll keep all of the profit. It is up to you to source products from a reputable company, however.
The alternative way to use Teespring Go is for both sourcing and fulfillment. This is a good option if you don’t know how to find custom products yourself.
The company will give you the tools you need to source a custom product from a reputable vendor, store your inventory, and launch your listing. Teespring will fulfil orders and take care of your customers, all for a service fee of around 15% of the product’s selling price.
Since the items you sell in this environment aren’t produced “on-demand”, you need to stock up on inventory to make sure you’re ready to sell.
Tracking Pixels
For social selling, you can set your Teespring account up with tracking pixels within Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Google. The result of the tracking will feed directly into the analytics module in Teespring, giving you more meaningful and helpful data.
Integrations
To further boost your chances of successful sales, Teespring has a range of integrations to offer for popular tools. For instance, you can start by plugging into the YouTube merch shelf.
If you’re an influencer or YouTube personality eligible for monetization, the plugin creates a merchandise shelf of your products in the virtual world.
This can appear below your videos when you publish them on YouTube. This is an excellent way to boost your chances of making sales as an influencer. There’s also a “Merch Alert” option for use during livestreams.
The merch Alert solution allows you to run promotions for a limited time period. You can even pin products to the top of a livestream YouTube chat. Other integrations include:
- Instagram checkout: Not every Teespring store will be eligible for this feature, but you can request to have access to the Instagram checkout. If you want to build on your Facebook ads with Instagram sales, this is the product for you.
- Google shopping: Similar to the Instagram integration, you’ll need to apply with customer support to get approval for Google shopping. Google will need to determine you’re not a scam store, and that you’re selling your own designs ethically.
- Twitch merch: The Twitch extension allows you to integrate your entire shopping experience into your livestream, so you can take credit card transactions from customers, even when they’re in the midst of watching your content.
- StreamLabs: On Streamlabs, customers will be able to create custom merchandise alerts when purchasing something during a livestream. This is a fun addition, because it means custom messages can appear during your livestream and improve your engagement with your audience. This feature has a lot of positive reviews.
- Discord: Similarly to Streamlabs, when a customer purchases your custom shirt designs, they can push personalized merch alerts to the channel of your choice. The message is written by the buyer, so they can review your side hustle.
Is Teespring Legit?
Teespring is a popular tool for selling your designs online, on everything from tank tops to stickers. However, a lot of people still ask “Does Teespring work”, is it a scam, and even whether they can reasonably make money from the service.
Ultimately, there are plenty of success stories out there from people who have learned how to use Teespring effectively.
However, it’s important to be aware of the upfront costs and limitations before you go in. Unlike selling through a standard ecommerce solution like Shopify, Teespring will have a limit on the profit margin you can reach.
If it’s your first time selling online, you can definitely make money with this service, provided that you add the right margin to the base price when selling. However, don’t expect to make a fortune overnight, unless you’re ready to promote your products like crazy.
Over time, you’ll be able to build your presence with social media, advertising, and customer reviews, but like with most things, it will require some patience before you make a genuine name for yourself on Teespring.
As your business begins to grow, you might decide to build your own website or sell on channels like Amazon and Etsy alongside Teespring, so you can increase your profits.
Teespring Review: Final Verdict
Teespring is a well-known solution for selling creative designs online.
Over years of growth and development, the company has certainly had it’s ups and downs, from complaints about the support team, to issues with what people might be allowed to sell on the platform. Fortunately, the site is once again on the upswing in the print on demand landscape.
In recent years, customer reviews have become increasingly positive, as Teespring continues to make the right decisions for growing its print-on-demand service. For people looking to sell their own merchandise, Teespring is one of the simplest and most risk-free options available.
Marketing tools already come built in, and you can easily integrate with a range of tools to give you more sales channels and opportunities to connect with your customers. There’s really nothing to lose by giving Teespring a go if you want to get a sense of what it’s really like to sell your own products and designs online.