Dropshipped POD: How to Sell Custom Printed Products With Printful

How to Sell Custom Printed Products With Printful

By Ryan Hogue on October 29, 2019

My name is Ryan & I'd like to show you how I used Printful as my print on demand production partner to create & ship over $150K of products to my customers.

Printful is my print on demand production partner of choice.

Print on Demand: An approach to e-commerce where products are created AFTER the sale takes place, or "on demand" / "made to order".

One of the biggest benefits of the print on demand business model is that you no longer have to tie up capital in inventory... you can now produce the inventory on demand.

With print on demand, you can often sell products online at little to no up-front monetary cost to you.

Production Partner: The company that owns the equipment & inventory necessary to create the custom printed products that we're selling online (this is where Printful comes in).

Partnering with a company like Printful is a necessity in most cases.

Think about it: your alternative is either to leverage Printful & their technology + equipment to produce your orders - OR - do it all yourself.

If you're thinking long-term, you know the importance of scalability when it comes to any business model, and seldom do the words "DIY" & "scalability" belong together in the same sentence.

What's cool about Printful's software is that:

It's very easy to setup
It gives sellers more control over their business than any Printful competitor that I've used to date
It's FREE!

If you haven't already, you should check it out for yourself:

Their product selection is HUGE!

Here's a few of their most popular customizable product types:

Two of my personal favorites to sell are the Yupong 6007 Snapback Cap & the Yupong 6245 Dad Cap:

I'm also a big fan of the Gildan 64000 Unisex Softstyle shirt, which I've sold tons of & can attest that customers wear it as a true unisex shirt.

I recorded a video on my YouTube channel showing the various colors we can sell (they've since added a new dark heather):

You can integrate Printful with a bunch of different e-commerce platforms, and their engineers did such a great job that it can often be achieved in a mere few clicks.

Some of the biggest ones include Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, & More.

My personal preference is to leverage the web traffic of trusted names in e-commerce by selling on the large marketplaces:

As you'll see in a second, I'm currently most successful selling print on demand through Amazon & Etsy.

The drawback of selling on these markets is they all take a "referral fee" from each sale, cutting into your profit margins.

I'd still rather pay the referral fee & sell to their massive audiences than have to worry about generating traffic to my own website.

The last thing I wanted to share is that Printful has fulfillment centers in multiple countries. Their focus is truly to become a global print-on-demand POWERHOUSE, and (to my knowledge) they're constantly focused on improving the services they provide us sellers & expanding their facilities.

Having used multiple Printful competitors, I can honestly say that my customers & my business is in good hands with Printful as our production partner.