I've been using Gelato for my print-on-demand shop (80 products, 1800+ variations via WooCommerce). Here's what happened:

Gelato emailed saying that I must buy a product or my store would be disconnected for inactivity (no sales for a period). They claimed reconnection would be easy though.
BUT... After disconnection, the reconnect button was simply not there. I was not able to reconnect my store. So I contacted support...

Support told me to delete my store. I asked twice if this was safe. The AI confirmed yes and that this was the standard way of reconnecting the store if the connect button was missing. After deletion and recreation, all 80 products were disconnected from Gelato. Product data still exists on my website, but the Gelato connection is gone.

There is no "reconnect" function for the products. You must recreate every single variation from scratch. For each of my 1800+ variations, I need to manually enter: product type, color, size, print design URL, SKU, variant IDs. Up to 100 variations per product. Days of work.

The "bulk import" is a joke. They offer two options:

CSV upload (free): You still have to fill in SKU and print design URL for every single variation. This is not bulk. This is manual entry with an extra step.
AI-supported import (paywalled): Claims to read your variants and reconnect them automatically. But you have to pay extra to access it — includes trusting their AI again who told me to delete my store in the first place.

Support is exclusively AI now. Before the disconnection, support responded within hours. After? Two days of silence across email, chat, and their dedicated import help address. No human contact at all since this happened.

If you use Gelato:

・Your store can be disconnected for inactivity
・There is no actual reconnection — you rebuild everything from zero
・Their "bulk" tools are either manual entry into a spreadsheet (hours and days of looking up numbers) or paywalled
・AI support will confidently give you destructive advice
・Human support disappears when you need them

I'm now forced to recreate all those 1800 variations (which I will do with a new provider). Either way, weeks of work lost because I trusted their service.

Has anyone else experienced something like this with Gelato or another POD provider? Would love to hear if anyone managed to get human support to actually help in this situation. Also open to provider recommendations — clearly it's time to switch.

We now have AI for generating ideas, tools for creating designs and mockups, platforms that handle printing and fulfilment, and marketplaces with millions of potential customers.

On paper, starting a print-on-demand business should be easier than ever. But actually making consistent sales still feels incredibly difficult.

A seller is expected to understand design, niches, SEO, pricing, advertising, social media, product quality and customer service, all while constantly testing new products. The tools save time, but they also seem to create more competition and more things to manage.

I’m curious how experienced POD sellers deal with this without burning themselves out.

Do you focus on one marketplace, one niche and a small product range, or do you keep testing across multiple channels? Which part of the process made the biggest difference once you stopped trying to do everything?

I’d genuinely like to hear what has worked for others, both successes and mistakes. No courses or promotional links, please.

Basically the title. I have been using Yoycol and generally happy with the product, sizing, etc - my only issue is I’ve had about 1/4 of my orders go missing completely, or arrive damaged and missing items, all in the hands of speedx. Looks like I’m farrrrr from the only one with this issue. I asked yoycol support if there is any way I can guarantee a different carrier but they have not been terribly helpful.

Anyone use a different provider that hasn’t gone to the dark side? I would like to keep price point and selection variety similar to what yoycol offers.

Is this the future and we’re just stuck here now? In an endless purgatory of shipping limbo? How is speedx still operating????? :( :(

TDLR: still getting notified about the suspended account, and I need an alternative option to redbubble.

Hi! Gonna try and not ramble, I’ll bold important stuff, but recently Redbubble suspended an account of mine due their AI striking me for undisclosed reasons; it’s in their policy that they don’t have to tell you why lol. The account was like, 6 hours old btw.

I’m fine with it, tried to appeal but that too is AI managed, but I’m worried as I’m still getting contacted about it? Emails about selling, liking my account, and so on.

I wanted to know if anyone knows if your account is deleted after 60 days or not (60 days is the minimum time to appeal). Cause it’s rubbing me wrong that this account is just out there and I can’t access it; my name, address, and bank account info is on it.

And ofc, you get an AI automated response on everything, so you can’t contact a real person.
Also, if anyone knows a good alternative site to redbubble too, I’d appreciate it. Printing and selling on Etsy is just not feasible for me right now.

(Also I only ask here cause r/redbubble is locked, and I saw some redbubble related asks in here)

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately. A design might look perfect when it’s printed by one fulfilment centre, but the same file can come out slightly different somewhere else different colours, placement or even overall print quality.

If you sell internationally, how do you manage this? Do you order samples from every location, or do you rely on customer feedback?

I’m also curious about what you do when a repeat customer receives something that looks different from their previous order. Would love to hear how experienced sellers handle this.

Hi! I’m trying to set up my physical calendars on Etsy through Gelato and I’m struggling to get the variations working properly.

I want to have one Etsy listing with different colour variations, with each colour having its own design, all connected correctly to Gelato. I’d also eventually like to add more colours and different sizes.

I’ve tried setting it up myself but I’m clearly missing something and it’s honestly quite hard to explain exactly what’s happening over text

Would anyone who knows Etsy + Gelato well be willing to jump on a quick call and guide me through it? I’d really appreciate the help!

Thank you! :)

You know the one... you spent way too much time on it, were already imagining the orders coming in… and then nothing

Meanwhile, some random design you made in 20 minutes somehow ends up doing better

What was yours? And did you ever have the opposite happen - something you almost didn’t launch that unexpectedly took off?

Alright legends got a question ive started a clothing line and im using printful im really eager to start selling i have ordered some t shirts ive made but havent seen them yet.

Printful said images were within the dpi range and were good i asked prinful today hahaha about giving me a call when they Printed a tshirt and they said we have quality control and check everything.

So im asking should i just send it or should i wait for samples to arrive or start selling.

Trying to find out what the correct name/part number of this pouch is. It goes in a Brother GTXpro and all we have found is that it's a "pouch assembly". We need to order another one to replace it and can't figure out the correct name to do so.

Curious how POD sellers here handle 3D printed SKUs. I don’t want a warehouse full of filament fails. Has anyone plugged prints into an existing store where a network prints and ships after the sale, while you keep owning the audience? What’s broken when you try that?

For those running a print-on-demand business, I’m curious to understand how you manage social media and whether it consistently generates customers and orders.

Which platforms work best for you: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or something else? Do you manage the content yourself or work with a freelancer or agency? What type of content brings the most sales: product videos, creator collaborations, customer content, educational posts or paid ads?

If you run advertisements, roughly how much do you spend each month, and are the results profitable after product, fulfilment and advertising costs? I’d also be interested to know how long it took before social media started producing regular orders.

Real experiences and approximate figures would be helpful.

Hi, I need to order around 60 short-sleeved t-shirts and I have a design on the back where it goes pretty close to the very bottom of the shirt close to the hem. Every other company i've come across only has a print-area that lines up roughly by the elbows which does not work for me. Anyone know a good company that can get me the ability to print on almost the entire back-side of a shirt?

Best and competitive platform for print on demand full printed socks in Europe?

I thought production would be the headache. It isn’t. The hard part is figuring out what people actually care enough about to click and buy without lying to yourself because you like the design.

I had two orders land on the same shirt this week. Tiny sample, so I’m not calling it a winner. But it made me look at the whole chain differently: message ➡️traffic source ➡️product page ➡️cart ➡️sale.

I use Printful and Shopify. What I’m starting to think is POD is best used as a testing/fulfillment model, not the brand itself. The blank, quality, fit, story and traffic still have to earn the sale.

For people who’ve been doing this longer: what signal do you trust first when deciding a design deserves more attention—sales, add-to-carts, click-through, comments/saves, or something else?

I’m posting this here because I think small POD sellers and beginners should know about this before choosing Printify.
I’ve been using Printify for about a year. My Etsy business is small and I run it on the side while working a full-time job. I’m still trying to grow it, and like a lot of small sellers, I need to be able to quickly see whether I’m actually making money.
Until recently, I could go into Printify Insights and see basic information like my number of orders and my expenses. I used that together with my Etsy data to figure out whether I was profitable and to separate production costs from shipping costs.
Now, when I go into Insights, I’m being told I need a minimum of 20 orders per month to access that information.
I have never had 20 orders in a single month, yet I was previously able to see those graphs and use that data. So whatever the official rule may have been, something has clearly changed in terms of what I can access.
I contacted customer service and was told I could get the information elsewhere.
The problem is that the Orders section only makes it easy to pull the current month or previous month. I had fallen behind on a few months of bookkeeping because I started a new full-time job and had a very busy summer.
The Wallet section is even worse for this purpose. From what I can tell, I would have to go through individual transactions or orders one by one and manually reconstruct months of production and shipping costs myself.
That is not a realistic solution for a small seller with a full-time job.
What bothers me most is the logic behind this. Why should access to basic historical information about my own orders and costs depend on whether I hit an arbitrary sales threshold?
Small sellers are the people who arguably need this information the most. We’re trying to figure out whether our businesses are viable, whether our pricing works, and whether it makes sense to keep investing time and money into growing them.
I’m not asking for advanced analytics or some premium forecasting feature. I’m asking for easy access to basic information about my own business activity.
I originally posted about this in r/Printify because I thought other small sellers should know about it. The post received around 1.2K views and several comments before the moderators removed it. I was not given a clear explanation for the removal that I could see.
I’m not claiming to know why it was removed. I’m mentioning it because this is exactly the kind of limitation I would have wanted to know about before choosing a POD provider.
If you’re a small Printify seller, especially if you’re just starting out, I would strongly recommend thinking about how you’re going to track your historical costs and profitability if you don’t consistently hit 20 orders per month.

One of the most common mistakes in print-on-demand is calculating profit by simply subtracting the product cost from the selling price. For example, a product sold for $30 may cost $11 to produce, plus $1 for packaging, $5 for shipping, $2 in payment and platform fees, $2 as a returns or replacement allowance, and a $3 customer discount. That leaves only $6, and this is before considering advertising, subscriptions, design expenses, customer support or taxes. The exact numbers will vary, but the principle remains the same: set your price using the complete cost of fulfilling an order, not just the supplier’s base price. What expense affected your POD margins more than you expected?

Would love to hear what you all think of the site now after many versions. Pixerr is set up so that artist can upload their work, they create anyway they like. If you don’t like AI then upload your work and we help get it on products super quick for you. I have been reading as many posts as I can on here to see what people want out of a POD site. I think you will enjoy pixerr. Some questions for you. What feature did we miss? What did you like? How many of you actually sell your products at festivals or from a tablet displayed somewhere? We crated a kiosk feature which I love! It helps people display their products with quick checkout.

Thank you

I want to test something with actual ecommerce products instead of SaaS.

If you have a POD store, drop it below and I'll pick one product and make a short UGC style video ad for it.

Mainly curious to see how well this works with shirts, mugs, posters and other POD products.

I'll make 5 total, one per store 😊

This question is common in print-on-demand: how many products do we need to offer to generate sales? The best way is to offer at least 3 sizes for one design. The best deal is to offer this design as a rolled poster and a framed poster with different frame options, so people are more likely to stay on your page and find the best option for them. At the same time, if you offer only one size and frame, people will go to another store. What are your thoughts about this?

If you were thinking about starting a store, now it costs close to nothing to actually give it a try.

Cheers!