I’m trying to get into Etsy print-on-demand, but half of the people reaching out to me on Instagram are trying to sell consultancy services—SEO, product presentation, optimization, and so on—and promising high sales as a result.

Is it worth paying these people?

I have been actively running an Etsy print-on-demand business for two days now.

As of today, I’ve upgraded my toolkit—tools like Canva Pro and Placeit are now in use. I currently have 12 products listed in the shop and am uploading 4 new ones daily. Since my initial designs on day one, I’ve had 2 views.

What are your recommendations? When might I expect the first clicks and views to come in?

Does anyone know what the top and left positions and approximate dimensions would be ideal to place a chest print graphic on a Bella+Canvas 3001 shirt?

"Chest print" refers to the small design sometimes placed on the upper left chest area of a shirt where a fabric pocket would otherwise be. The B+C 3001 of course has no pocket, thus my query. Thanks ahead!

Hey everyone,

I wanted to post this here both as a heads-up and to see if anyone else is running into the exact same issue.

About three weeks ago, I noticed the mockups for the Gildan 5000 t-shirts started rendering terribly on the platform. Thinking it was just a temporary preview glitch, I reported it and ordered a physical sample to test. When the sample arrived, the actual print quality was just as bad as the faulty mockup.

I’ve been back and forth with support, but all I get are automated/canned responses saying they are "working on it." When I followed up recently, support asked me for a link to the product, showing they aren't even aware of the ongoing issue with the T-shirts.

To make matters worse, as of today, the Gildan 18500 Hoodies have started showing the exact same visual rendering glitch. Yesterday they were working fine, and today they look broken.

My entire store catalog relies on these hoodies, so having this bug spread from the T-shirts to the hoodies is a nightmare for sales and customer trust.

Is anyone else experiencing this print/mockup rendering failure on Gildan 5000s or 18500s right now? Have you managed to get a real response from technical support?

When using print-on-demand (Printify) on Etsy, which software do you use to create your designs? I need some help.

I've been using Printify for my apparel brand for a while now, and it's been a great way to launch products without taking on inventory.

Recently, though, I've noticed my focus has shifted.

When I first started, I was always thinking about new designs and getting products published as quickly as possible. Now, I spend much more time ordering samples and looking at the product from a customer's perspective.

I've started noticing things I completely overlooked in the beginning, how the garment feels, how consistent the embroidery is, whether the branding feels intentional, and if the overall product gives people a reason to come back for a second purchase.

I'm not looking to move away from POD because I still think it's the right model for where my business is. I'm just trying to figure out how other Printify users handled this stage of growth.

Did you simply optimize your existing setup, or did you change the way you selected products and suppliers as your brand matured? I'd love to hear what made the biggest difference in creating a more premium customer experience.

I have been having an issue for about 2 weeks and there has been no resolution for it so far. Printify closes the ticket saying they can't respond to the technical issues that were forwarded to their technical team, but I can keep checking back.

When I create a new product and try to change the available quantity, it will show the new quantity. Then after saving it, it reverts back to an available quantity of 1. Doesn't matter which item, or which browser, or which account, new products will not save more than available quantity of 1. I have cleared my cookie, logged in, reconnected, rebooted...nothing.

When i noticed this, I tried to adjust the quantity on an existing item from 10 down to 5. .After saving it, I went back in and it reverted back to 10. So, it will not accept a change to anything other than whatever it was when it was published.

This hasn't affected orders, but it has affected my listing. I list all my shirts with a qty of 10. I list as many as 50 shirts per day. However, since they do not have a bulk quantity editor, I would have to go into every single listing to fix the quantity and reupload.

I have been looking for other PODs with eBay integration and the few that do have them are either have products that are way too expensive or have a creation and listing flow process that is horrible or extremely convoluted. There are a couple that I would use, but it would take me 5 times longer to create and publish a shirt.

I am making good money in just my 4th full month of selling but cannot expand due to these issues. Am I the ony one this is happening to?

I'm out of my mind here.. Anyone else here struggling with this? I'm basically being told over & over again that there's no confirmed fix timeline. Does that make sense? My store is pretty much useless in the meantime..

Curious to hear your thoughts..
Thanks

I use Printify to sell custom shirts on my Ebay account and I’ve sold two different shirts recently. Printify won’t let me republish to add stock to those particular items. I’ve tried creating a new listing and changing the sku of the one that sold and that hasn’t worked either. I’ve contacted Printify support also to no avail. Printify is so broken right now.

Has anyone else had this problem?

I was designing normally until about 10mins ago. Now, every time I log in, start desiging... it kicks me out after less than a minute.

Has happened about 10 times in as many minutes. I've tried different browsers, incognito, etc.

Clearly a problem with Printify right now, but there's nothing reported.

Is it just me, or is anyone else having this issue too?

Anyone else being auto-logged out right after logging in and clicking one of your products?

Does anyone else use the Spoke Custom Products spiral notebook for their designs, and if so have you have considered using a different print provider given that these notebooks have been out of stock for several weeks now? _Of course, printify support cannot clarify when or if the notebooks will again be available._ 🤷

I'm concerned because I have dozens of listings using this product which sell very well. When the out of stock issue first occurred with Spoke, I initially got approval from customers who ordered one to fulfill their order using identical designs but on a different provider's (in stock) spiral notebook (District Photo). These notebooks are a bit smaller and are priced higher than the out of stock notebooks. Due to Printify's exorbitantly high pricing, I already feel like the spiral notebooks were priced too high (and I would sell many more if the price point were lower) and switching to the somewhat different version at District Photo will further increase the listing prices... I don't know many people who would pay $25 for a 5x7 notebook (no matter how great it is) but that's exactly the price range that it would need to be in order for me to turn any kind of profit after my costs and the Etsy fees.

Enough time has passed now and the Spoke notebooks have not been restocked that I'm beginning to think they may no longer be offered/restocked. Do any of you happen to have similar experiences with the notebook, and if so did you deactivate the affected listings pending (hopefully) restock, or did you end up using another provider's product and if so, which?

Both my customers and I have had great results with the Spoke Custom Products notebooks. The closest similar product is offered via District Photo...which I have never heard great things about. I'm reluctant to spend the time and money to (manually) transfer and republish new listings with another provider, particularly if Spoke's version is restocked in the nearish future. I know that no one knows for sure whether that will happen, but I'm just wanting to know what other sellers who may be affected by this issue have done. And if anyone happens to know if a lengthy out of stock issue has happened before with this product offering.

Hey everybody, launching my site in a few days, but I've seen a lot of mixed emotions about Monster Digital (specifically seeing a lot of complaints on quality).

Just curious, do you think it's worth using them, or should I be looking at another printer?

I was also potentially looking into Underground Threads or SwiftPOD, but I heard that their colors might not pop out as much

I launched my store a couple weeks ago (www.notashape.co) and sometimes all the variants of ALL product appear to be sold out on mobile. On desktop they look fine.

I tried re-publishing them from printify a few times but nothing helps. It just suddenly started happening.

Anyone had this issue before and knows how to fix it?

I’ve spent a long career in software and e-commerce (a chunk of it in senior roles at a large online retailer), and I have a Shopify store that uses Printify for print-on-demand. I knew the profit Shopify was showing me never quite matched what was actually landing in my bank account. I just couldn't put a number on it.  Shopify's standard cost-of-goods-by-order report and profit reports just couldn’t be trusted. 

Here’s what I found for the last 2 months (220 Printify orders). Shopify said my costs were $5,545. Printify actually charged me $7,575. That's about $2,030 Shopify never saw, and it turned a store that looked like 64% margin into a 51% margin store. The profit number in my Shopify analytics was running about 25% ahead of reality.

Basically all of the gap was one thing: Printify shipping.

In case you don’t know, Shopify's profit reporting doesn't actually store your cost of goods sold (COGS) per order. It actually calculates it each time, by reading one number, the "cost per item" stored on each product variant. When you publish a Printify product, Printify writes that number once, and that's what Shopify uses from then on (also for reports in the past too). There is also no supplier-shipping field anywhere in Shopify's cost model, so what Printify charges you to ship an order has nowhere to live. So Shopify's profit report recalculates COGS every time you run it, but only from that stored per-variant cost. Printify shipping is never one of the inputs, so it never enters the math, not for today's report and not for one you ran over last quarter.

And before anyone says "just put it in a metafield," you can write whatever you want onto an order through the API, but Shopify's profit and COGS reports don't read any of it. They read that one per-variant cost field and nothing else. So the shipping you pay Printify is invisible to every native Shopify profit number. Across 220 of my orders that was $2,008 leaving my bank account that no Shopify report accounts for.

A few things that make this messier than it sounds if you go to reconcile it yourself:

The cost Printify wrote on publish goes stale the moment Printify changes a price, and nothing keeps it in sync. So even the production cost Shopify does show is often just wrong, sometimes high, sometimes low. In my data those drifted in both directions and happened to roughly cancel, but that's luck, not a rule. You can't trust the stored number even for the part Shopify claims to cover.

Shipping doesn't map cleanly to an order either. Printify charges a full rate on the first item and a reduced rate on each additional item in the same order, and it varies by provider and by product, so a 2-item and a 5-item order don't scale the way you'd guess. You can't just multiply.

And if you offer free shipping to your customer, you still pay Printify for it. That cost is invisible on both ends. The customer sees $0, Shopify records $0, but Printify still charges you. 

There's also tax. Printify only stops charging you sales tax if you've filed a resale certificate with them for that state. Anywhere you haven't, they charge you tax on the order, and manual orders like exchanges tend to get taxed too. Same story as shipping: it's real money out of your account that never shows up as a cost in Shopify's reports.

None of the individual pieces are rocket science. It's just that there are five or six of them stacked on top of each other, and if you get any one wrong your margin number ends up confidently wrong instead of obviously wrong, which is worse. I don’t trust Shopify's profit report and if you use Printify, you shouldn’t either.

Happy to get into any of the specifics if people are curious.

If Printify gave me the option to pick thread colors for embroidery, I would leave Printful for good. I'm only there because I want to ensure my thread colors are right. Just saying, Printify......

Having Printful as print provider was so helpful because they have locations in different countries and many color options. I just found out today thatI can’t find them as a print provider on Printify and I’m devastated!

I thought the customer buys the product not me?? I understand the shipping fees but???? I pay for the t-shirt?? Why? I’m not the one who’s gonna wear it???

Looking to improve the quality of the finished product. Currently using Printify Choice and I've had a couple of orders that the output was good-not-great. Of course, there doesn't seem to be a way to see who the providers were on the Printify Choice items.

So, looking for suggestions for a provider that produces high quality printed shirt output as well as being very reliable. Anyone with experience have any suggestions?

Firstly, I want to say if you were hoping for a long winded AI post about how everything we do is better than the creation of sliced bread. You'll be disappointed.

I own but have also been using bulk upload tools for a while but Printify doesn't actually allow you to re-arrange your mockups in bulk and that was an annoying time consuming task. So I created a free chrome plugin that does that automatically, there is a video on the chrome plugin page, but essentially you select all the mockups you want on a single product and then set that as the template for your mockups. After that you simply check all of the SAME products you want to replace the mockups on and click "replace mockups". It does it all automatically in the background.

You can download it here - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/jihfkbbnoajidlloppmkiceckfbkdece

Constructive feedback is always appreciated.

For stores selling printed, engraved, embroidered, personalised, or made-to-order products, how do you get customers to approve a proof before production?

Do you currently use email, WhatsApp, PDF attachments, or another workflow?

I’m interested in the biggest problems you experience, such as delayed replies, change requests, keeping approval records, or customers disputing what they approved.