Custom t-shirts are big business and lots of people are using them to create brand awareness for their small business.
Should you use Customcat or Printful for your custom t-shirts? Both companies offer you the ability to design custom t-shirts and products. They both integrate with the main ecommerce sites as well.
In this post, we’ll review the ease of design, pricing, customer support, and integration with an ecommerce platform. From there, you can decide which option is better for your business.
What Is Printful?
Printful is a print on demand fulfillment company that helps users to sell custom printed products without hassles.
Interestingly, Printful has fulfillment centers in the USA, Mexico, Spain, Latvia, and Canada.
With Printful, designers need not worry about the order fulfillment process involved in getting custom printed products sold to buyers.
How Does Printful Work?
To get started with Printful, you will need to sign up for a free account. After this, you can proceed to link your online store with Printful.
Next, you have to pick from a range of customizable products. Create your designs on the products until you have a sizable product catalog for display. You are also permitted to import designs.
Printful helps you design and sell products online with ease. Try it today!
What next? Start getting orders and let Printful handle the order fulfillment process from printing to delivery.
Printful: The Pricing
You can launch your tee-shirt business on Printful with no costs. This enables you to test out designs and determine which ones to market.
Printful allows you to upload a picture and sell it on your website or through social media immediately. This enables you to start earning money right away.
Instead of charging a monthly fee, Printful will make money from each sale that you make. After you select a product to sell, Printful provides you with a starting retail price for that product.
Printful had a couple of pricing plans earlier but very recently, they made the service free for all, that too with additional features.
So Printful is free. You only need to pay for the products, and shipping. Check out the pricing page for the latest on product and shipping costs.
Printful offers a wide variety of different brand shirts that you can use for your designs. Each product lists the information about it including the pricing, colors, shipping location, and reviews. This can help you determine the quality and price of the shirts you want to offer.
Printful is an excellent option because you can select high quality shirts. The prices are competitive. While some competitors may be less expensive, you will be sacrificing quality.
Printful’s pricing allows for plenty of profit. Therefore, you definitely should be able to create a profit with the Printful sales that you make.
Printful Review: The Sample Order
If you are selling shirts, you want to ensure quality. The best way to do that is through ordering a sample of your design.
Printful allows you to receive a 20% discount off of the sample orders. This allows you to see what you’ll be promoting.
For each sample order, you will receive two products. Printful limits sample orders to one each month. However, if you are integrated with an ecommerce platform and generate more than $300 from the previous month, they will allow you to order more than one sample.
Printful Review: Designing
Printful enables a simple online design process. Simply, select a new order from the dashboard and upload the products. Then select the size, add text, and upload the design file that you’d like printed on the canvas.
Printful helps you design and sell products online with ease. Try it today!
Printful provides you with excellent recommendations for what will be good to upload. For example, not every random JPEG is going to be the right size to print on canvas. You’ll want a large JPEG or PNG that you can export from a RAW file. This can easily be done through Lightroom or Photoshop.
After you have chosen the right print quality, you can crop the photo and continue with the design. Printful provides mockups of the products to show your customers what it will look like in a real world setting.
The image below shows how you can select an image and text or clip art to the canvas. Printful allows you to print the design on the front, back, or the sleeves.
Finally, place your custom order or save it to your online store. If you have connected Printful to your ecommerce store, it will sync automatically.
Printful: Integration
Printful integrates well with ecommerce platforms. Printful can sync products with Shopify, WooCommerce, and all the major ecommerce platforms.
Printful: Product Shipping
Product shipping with Printful usually takes between 3 days to 3 weeks depending on the delivery location. Likewise, the shipping price varies depending on the custom printed product.
Printful helps you design and sell products online with ease. Try it today!
Printful: Customer Support
Based on online reviews, there are compliments and complaints about the Printful customer service. The overall consensus is that Printful is better than the competition when it comes to customer support.
Printful has a website FAQ page to assist its customers. It also has a blog with resources for printing tips, embroidery files, and facts about fabric.
Printful’s shipping is fast. The return policy that Printful uses covers the majority of situations where Printful may be at fault.
The Printful support team is available to help you weekdays via phone. They also have online live chat through their website as well as an email option for support.
Who Should Consider Printful?
Printful is an ideal custom printing service for anyone who is interested in dropshipping tee-shirts. It easily and quickly will link to your website. You can also order affordable samples and integrate it with your ecommerce store. Printful is great for the newbie to dropshipping.
What Is CustomCat?
CustomCat is a printing company with a passionate commitment to customization fulfillment. They offer 3D dye diffusion, embroidery, as well as printing.
They decorate using Aeoon Direct to Garment printers. Therefore, their printing services are fast.
CustomCat also is able to print on polyester. They feature dye sublimation technology which allows for printing on cell phone cases, mugs, jewelry, and hairbrushes.
With CustomCat, you can create beautiful designs for products. After customers have placed orders for these products, CustomCat will handle the product’s printing, shipping, and delivery to the customer.
How Does CustomCat Work?
If you want to get started with CustomCat, you need to create an account. Sign up options are both free and premium. The paid account has more benefits, unlike the free account.
Afterwards, you can start importing your designs and testing them out on products. Products are generally affordable and you get to pick a price you consider competitive.
Once orders start coming in, you just don’t worry, let CustomCat handle the order fulfillment down to the final delivery.
Nevertheless, CustomCat will take the product’s base fee, while you can keep the profit.
CustomCat: Pricing
CustomCat offers a free version, known as CustomCat Lite, and a paid version. The paid version is $30 per month for Shopify users.
By subscribing to CustomCat’s paid version, you’ll have access to t-shirts and products at a lower price. This allows you to sell them with a higher margin.
CustomCat’s prices are reasonable. The cost of t-shirts for CustomCat starts at $5.00. The price of mugs starts at $3.75, and the cost of hoodies starts at $12.00.
CustomCat: Design
Customcat gives you design guidelines to follow. You upload your design. They don’t have a feature to create your design with text and clipart. You can select three types of methods for decoration – sublimation, embroidery, and direct to garment.
CustomCat features the following brands:
- Adidas Golf
- Alternative
- Anvil
- Augusta
- Bella + Canvas
- Boxercraft
- Code V
- CornerStone
You can place your design on the following products:
- T-shirts
- Sweatshirts
- Hats
- Jerseys
- Polo Shirts
- Warm Ups
- Bags
- Jackets
CustomCat: Integration
CustomCat integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and API Integration.
CustomCat: Product Shipping
CustomCat determines the shipping rate based on the weight of the product. Turnaround time for product delivery is between 1 week and 4 weeks.
CustomCat: Customer Support
CustomCat provides support via phone, Monday through Friday, 8:30am to 6:30pm Eastern Time. They also provide customer support via email at contact@customcat.com.
Similarities And Differences
Similarities
- With either CustomCat or Printful, users get to set their profit margins
- They both have built-in analytics
- Worldwide shipping and delivery
- You get quality customer support with either Printful or CustomCat.
- They both support third-party integrations
Differences
- Printful allows designers to make freehand designs, while CustomCat gives strict guidelines for product designs.
- Unlike Printful, CustomCat does not support credit card and debit card.
- Printful supports more third-party integration than CustomCat.
Pros And Cons
Printful Pros
- Quality products
- Multiple third-party integrations
- Comprehensive analytics system
- Worldwide shipping and delivery
- Flexible profit margin
Printful Cons
- Shipping fees can are relatively high
CustomCat Pros
- Affordable products
- Worldwide shipping and delivery
- Designers can have a larger profit margin
CustomCat Cons
- No built-in design tool
- Limited third-party integrations
Frequently Asked Questions
Printful Vs CustomCat – How To Pay For Order Fulfillment
Both Printful and CustomCat facilitate direct integration with payment processors from where your customers can make payment for order fulfillment.
Printful accepts payments through PayPal, credit card or debit cards. On the other hand, CustomCat allows your customers to make payments using either Payoneer or PayPal.
What Are The Best Printful Alternatives?
You can get quality products from POD sites like Printful. Some of these Printful alternatives include:
- Printify
- Zazzle
- Print Aura
- Redbubble
- Society6
What Are The Best CustomCat Alternatives?
Some of the best CustomCat alternatives include:
- Teespring
- Teelaunch
- TeeFury
- Fine Art America
- CafePress
Printful vs CustomCat – Which Is Better?
Printful is our recommendation. While both CustomCat and Printful have a great variety of products to customize and integrate well with ecommerce platforms, the Printful design process is easier. It also allows you to design with clipart and text. Printful also allows you to add designs to the front, back, and sleeves. This gives you more flexibility in your shirt design.
Printful also offers you the ability to use their platform without any extra monthly fees. CustomCat charges a bit more for people who are not paying $30 per month for their service.
CustomCat and Printful both received mixed reviews, however, Printful support seemed slightly better. Therefore, we recommend Printful for starting your online t-shirt business.
Tom loves to write on technology, e-commerce & internet marketing. I started my first e-commerce company in college, designing and selling t-shirts for my campus bar crawl using print-on-demand. Having successfully established multiple 6 & 7-figure e-commerce businesses (in women’s fashion and hiking gear), I think I can share a tip or 2 to help you succeed.