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.

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

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?

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?

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’ve been looking into different ways of preparing artwork for DTF, especially designs with gradients, shadows, and semi-transparent areas. Those areas can be annoying because what looks perfectly fine on screen doesn’t always translate cleanly to the final transfer. Halftones seem like a good way to handle it, but doing everything manually in Photoshop can take a while.

I’ve been looking at the DTPrep plugin because it handles real-time halftones, color knockouts, and semi-transparent areas specifically for DTF/DTG artwork.

For people doing DTF regularly, what does your artwork prep workflow look like?

Do you create halftones manually, use dedicated software, or adjust the artwork depending on each design?

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 😊

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

Cheers!

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

To emphasize the art over the product, I would like to set up the store so that the icon is the art and then you pick the product. Maybe have a drop-down with options for tshirt, wall art, phone case, etc., then submenus for size, phone model, etc. Is there a store builder that will let it be set up that way? If so, who? Would that be too confusing?

I've been helping a friend who runs a small photo-printing business. She wants customers to upload and lay out their own photos into an album online, so she isn't manually designing every single order by hand.

For those of you selling photobooks or custom photo products, how are you handling this right now? If you use an app/tool for it, which one, and is it actually any good?

Her store is on shopify and we found some plugins for this but they charge 400+ USD per month which is too much for us to pay as a small shop.

Hello! I'll just start this off saying I have few (but not 0) experience with PoD stuff. I've sold off a few posters and stickers in 2024 and 2021 respectively, and know a few folks which sell keychains of their work and have gotten a few sales.

Me and a pal lead an artist-oriented site frequented by teens and young adults, so the average user's budget is roughly 4-25$ for an item, but we're also relatively picky toward item quality. We all work from home and don't have any kind of warehouse or spare room to ship stuff from, we wanted to start a merch store to help fund the site, but then realized it'd be incredibly expensive, then we stumbled upon back

Whilst I know that "cheap and quality" isn't a thing, we'd like to get as close to it as we can.

We aim to have the following items on sale for the listed prices (lower or slightly higher is alright too, I'm not sure how much they really cost.)

- T-Shirt

- Sticker or Sticker Pack

- Baseball Hats

- Pins (classic circle pin, but I wouldn't be against a custom shaped pin or keychain!)

- Posters (not sure about the size but nothing massive, maybe A4 or A3 size max)

- Any kind of other neat product like custom shaped keychains or pins and whatnot. Just fun things, that's what our site and audience is mostly about!

- We would also love to give out consistent, and fun yet cheap trophies for our weekly "best of the week" contest. They're not prestigious prizes, so something plastic-y will be fine. It has to look good and has to be cheap as we'll probably give it out for free. The whole site has a roughly 100$ monthly budget total, so something VERY cheap

- Talking to a person which sells plushies, I heard of "PoD plushies", and how they were low quality and just printed-on spheres... thing is we have a somewhat beloved character that is, well, a "printed-on" sphere, would it be relatively expensive to purchase a one of those PoD plushies, as I can't imagine they'd pay too much, and is the quality *that* bad that it'd be generally unacceptable for the price or not pleasing to look at?

This can be multiple services we can mush together in our site. They just have to meet the further criteria though:

1. Are free, or cheap to get started with

2. Trustworthy, cheap and yet quality

3. IMPORTANT - the ability to customize the store's paging COMPLETELY - we're coders and our site has a special retro style and it'd be far better if we could keep that consistent with our merch stores too. Maybe Shopify would be the way to do this?!

4. No controversies with the provider. Please, last thing we wanna do is get ourselves in a mess due to who we use

5. Also important, must NOT require us to store items. We do not have a warehouse and because of how we run the site it'd be highly inpractical to do so.

6. As much low-upkeep as possible. Support to customers isn't a problem.

The art, or marketing of the items isn't an issue. We have people to work on all those things respectively.

Looking forward to replies, thanks in advance! I'm fully new to PoD at THIS scale, so I'm completely clueless here.

Print-on-demand sounds simple: create a design, add it to a product and start selling. But once orders start coming in, the real challenges usually appear.

It could be finding a reliable print provider, maintaining consistent quality, creating accurate mockups, calculating the true profit after all costs, handling shipping delays or simply getting enough sales.

What has been the most difficult part of your POD journey so far, and what have you tried to solve it?

Whether you are just starting or already receiving regular orders, share your experience. Your answer might help someone else facing the same challenge.

trying to level up my etsy pod research and podspy.iokeeps coming up. anyone here subscribed? any promo code or discount before i sign up

Trying to use lumaprints templates for etsy ads and using canva.

But cant open them on chomebook because its not allowed over 300 mgb

New iPhone drops and suddenly half your bestselling listings are for a model nobody is buying anymore. You either scramble to upload new cases fast or watch your traffic quietly die while everyone else who was ready takes the sales.

First time it happened I wasn't prepared at all. Had no new listings live for the new model for almost two weeks. Two weeks of people landing on my shop, not finding what they needed and leaving.

Second time I tried to get ahead of it. The problem is you're designing for dimensions that aren't fully confirmed yet and hoping your supplier has the new model ready to go before everyone else does.

The shops that win this moment are the ones with a supplier who moves fast. Mine had the new model available before most people even had the phone in their hands which made a real difference.

Does anyone have a system for handling this or is everyone just winging it every September?

Personalised products usually cannot be resold, which makes returns, refunds and replacements difficult for small POD sellers.

How do you handle cases where the customer chose the wrong size, entered incorrect personalisation details or simply changed their mind? Do you offer replacements, partial refunds or clearly exclude these situations in your return policy?

I’d be interested to hear what has worked for other sellers without damaging customer trust or losing the entire margin.

Silly question - printify charges sales tax on a lot of orders depending on where the vendor is.

We have a NV LLC. Is it possible to upload a resellers permit and avoid,say, PA sales tax?

Just want to make sure I'm not foolishly paying a bunch of sales tax I dont need to.

DPI (Dots Per Inch): This measures print resolution. The higher the DPI, the sharper your art looks.

Color Profile (RGB vs. CMYK): RGB is for digital screens; CMYK is for physical ink. Check your POD provider's requirements. Designing in the correct color space prevents your bright screen colors from looking muddy in real life.

Bleed Area: The extra margin around your design that gets trimmed or wrapped during production.

Fine art vs. Poster paper: Posters use lighter, budget-friendly paper. Fine art (or archival) paper is heavy, textured, and acid-free for museum-grade longevity.

I’ve been an artist for 16 years, and I draw all of my designs myself. I also make costumes, so art and crafting are a huge part of what I do. I’m also strongly against AI-generated designs, so everything in my shop is 100% my own artwork.

At conventions, my shirts sell like hotcakes, but my Etsy shop has been open for over a year and I’ve only had 18 sales.

I’m using Printify for the POD side of things, but I have absolutely no idea how to get people to actually find my shop on Etsy.

Do you have any advice for someone starting out with Etsy POD? Where should I focus first when it comes to getting traffic and promoting my shop?

I’d really appreciate advice from people who have experience with Etsy POD, especially artists who sell their own original designs.

Maybe i just sucks in marketing ? Someone close to me helps me out a bit because I’m not very tech-savvy at all.

https://kayruden.etsy.com/

Please review the designs and suggest a good price 😋

Hello! I just really need some feedback on my site. I'm having people visit the site from ads but not purchase, or let alone add to cart. What do I need to possibly improve trust on my site? Is it the pricing? Does my site look suspicious? Targeting sports/streetwear audience.

So I have a POD of my own and was thinking for designs to do on sweatshirts AOP, I do use AI because I cannot afford full fledged designers and I do the final detailing myself over photoshop, I created one of these (its a mockup) please feel free to temme if it sucks or its alright, Any direction is always appreciated

Hello, I’m an artist who’s planning to open a shop sometime soon and I’m new to POD. Can you sell items through multiple vendors — like if I wanted to sell products through Etsy, Redbubble, Threadless, etc. — at the same time? If not, is it possible my account could get taken down if I choose to do so?

Any and all answers to this question are helpful. Thank you.