Printify vs. Printful: How the SaaS Model is Disrupting Yet Another Billion-Dollar Industry

Riga, Latvia may not have the same reputation as San Francisco, New York, or Boston when it comes to startup success and tech innovation. However, the city is home to not one, but two, of the top Print-on-Demand (POD) companies in the world.

While you may not be familiar with this offshoot of the dropshipping industry (I certainly wasn’t before diving into this piece), it has proven to be remarkably lucrative over the past decade.

The print-on-demand industry has experienced remarkable growth in recent years, with a projected global market valuation of $28 billion by 2029, representing a 39% CAGR. And the battle for supremacy in this space comes down to two key players: Printify vs. Printful.

But what’s even more interesting, and particularly relevant for B2B SaaS marketers, is that these two companies have achieved their success through vastly different approaches. Printify opted for the SaaS model, while Printful embraced the vertically-integrated model.

Whether you’re planning to start or scale a digital printing business or looking to improve your existing marketing strategy, this case study is for you, even if you’re not into digital printing.

First, I break down the strategies both Printify and Printful are using to shape the future of digital printing. Then, we’ll take a closer look at why Printify, in particular, is experiencing such impressive levels of viral growth:

Other areas we’ll explore in this piece include: 

• What the print-on-demand industry looks like right now. 
• How these two POD companies stack up against one another.
• Why Printify is doing more with fewer integration partners. 
• The unfortunate misstep in blog restructuring that opened the door for Printify.
• How pricing gives Printify a decisive edge over Printful with their key audiences

Let’s get into it, shall we?

What the Print-on-Demand Industry Looks Like Right Now 

The rise in popularity of print on demand can be attributed to a convergence of factors, mainly: the booming ecommerce industry, the phenomenon known as the creator economy, and the rise in “side hustle” culture—with a sprinkling of economic downturn to boot. 

With millions of people facing job loss, reduced hours, and financial insecurity, articles like this one from CNBC are becoming more and more common (and gaining more and more traction). 

Lots of people these days want a way to make more money that doesn’t require a lot of leg work or financial risk, and businesses like print on demand present the perfect opportunity–especially when it’s advertised as a job that pays $14,000 per month for only 30 hours of work! Naturally, this opportunity is particularly resonant with motivated people like creatives and  entrepreneurs.

Here’s a quick overview of how the print-on-demand business model provides such great value to its target audience:

Print-on-demand (POD) services promise high-quality printed materials with no minimum order requirements and quick turnaround times. Customers can quickly design their own products, such as t-shirts, mugs, and phone cases, and have them printed and shipped directly to their door. And the best part: fulfillment fees are only paid when a sale is made. 

As a result, the industry has gained popularity in recent years, especially with the rise of ecommerce, as it offers a low-cost and risk-free way for people to become their own boss or start a side hustle while working full-time. 

POD services have also made it easy for people with large social followings—artists, authors, podcasters, and influencers—to sell their merchandise directly to customers, without the need for a middleman. The convenience, affordability, and flexibility it offers make the service an attractive option for both consumers and businesses alike.

And when these creators finally take the first step into the POD space, they are presented with two front runners operating on two very different models: Printful and Printify.

Printful—The Vertically-Integrated Model

Since its creation by Latvia’s Draugiem Group in 2015, Printful has been both a leader and a pioneer in the POD space. 

It’s a vertically-integrated company, meaning they offer customers an all-in-one service that has complete control over product quality and speed of delivery. With no minimum order requirements and quick turnaround times, Printful quickly became the go-to provider for creators, entrepreneurs, and side hustlers looking to quickly produce custom items online at a low cost. 

Not to mention, it has done well at the enterprise level, sporting big name accounts like Coca Cola, Viacom, Dunkin’, and MTV.

Printful now has 13 fulfillment centers placed strategically near “the world’s hottest e-commerce markets,” with the company present in 5 continents.

With owned production and fulfillment centers, Printful can easily evaluate, produce, and store products. And the strategy has been paying off; here’s a quick overview of its numbers:

• A catalog of 329 customizable products
• Over 1 million items fulfilled every month
• 28 integration partners, including Shopify, Etsy, and Woocommerce
• Nearly 62 million items delivered to date
• $130M in funding and a valuation over $1B

Pretty impressive numbers, but what about the challenger?

Printify—The SaaS Model

At the other end of the spectrum, Printify leverages the SaaS model—offering its customers access to a POD platform. Essentially, Printify is  the largest global print network connecting “merchants” (aka side hustlers, creators, and entrepreneurs) with “top printing houses” aka (third-party POD businesses). 

Instead of spending millions building up its own fulfillment infrastructure, Printify plays matchmaker between the two sides of its business. They connect the two through a sleek interface. 

A simple idea, but a powerful one. 

Powerful enough, in fact, to resonate with some well-known funders during a $45M Series A, with names including Index Ventures, H&M, Virgin Group, RedHat, Squarespace, and Dreamers VC. 

This lightweight approach of connecting micro-brand merchants with a network of print providers increases the Latvia-based startup’s 4-pillared value proposition, dubbed The Printify Promises: 

Printify’s advantage is derived mainly from the two middle pillars—profitability and selection. 

Its catalog of print providers spans 12 countries, with 50 in the United States alone. This expansive network lets it offer over 800 different products without having to increase margins. More profitability, more selection. 

Printify’s network model also allows the company to grow at a faster rate than Printful, with its capacity to reach customers increasing as it partners with more third-party POD companies. 

Now that we have a better understanding of the differences between Printify and Printful, let’s take a closer look at why the former is experiencing such viral growth. 

Unpacking Printify’s Viral Print-on-Demand Marketing Strategy

If we park these two POD giants next to one another and pop the hoods, the marketing engines appear almost identical: they both generate the majority of their traffic via direct search, paid advertising, and organic traffic. 

Take a look at the chart below.

Sure, Printify brings in more direct traffic, while Printful has the edge in terms of organic search and social media. But these minor differences, in an otherwise strikingly similar approach to marketing, can’t explain why Printify has exploded in popularity over the past few months, while Printful, and the rest of the POD market, have experienced relatively small gains. 

Looking at the Google Trends chart below, you can see that “Printify” has lagged behind both “Printful” and “print on demand” since 2018. All three topics have experienced relatively constant growth over the past year, until December 2022, when Printify exploded in popularity. Although it has fallen back to earth, it has found a new search floor that’s nearly double that of Printful or POD in general.

So, the question now becomes: how is Printify gaining an edge in the POD industry despite having a similar distribution of traffic across its marketing channels and fewer resources than its main competitor Printful?

To find an answer we’ll take a look at a few key aspects of print-on-demand marketing strategy, including: 

• • Content marketing and the use of blog pages.
  • Integration partners in the ecommerce space.
  • Free plans and product pricing. 
  • Affiliate marketing programs.

• Network Effects and Virality. 

Building and Protecting an SEO Moat with Blog Content

Looking at organic traffic from a wider lens reveals that Printful seems to have the upper hand over Printify. Over the past 12 months it has  averaged about 850K in traffic at a value of $1.1M, just about doubling Printify who garnered 483K and $609K. This makes sense: Printful has been around longer and raised more money, more time and resources invested into organic performance. 

But look at how things change when we narrow that window down to the last few months: 

Printify’s organic ascension can be attributed in part to a combination of factors: 

• Printful’s decision to drastically overhaul its own blog in 2022

• Printify’s subfolder of high-quality blog content 

Let’s start with Printful’s unfortunate decision. 

If we roll back the clock to the fall of 2022, the vertically-integrated POD company was crushing the competition in terms of organic traffic. Itsblog subfolder contained over 1,200 pages and was bringing in over 60K a month in organic traffic. And then, over the course of a few months, the size of the blog shrank to about 25% of its original size, settling at around 330 pages by early December. 

Now, consolidating blog pages and restructuring subfolders is not a bad thing. It’s a necessary evil that can sometimes unlock even more traffic and ultimately expand a brand’s SEO moat. In fact, if you look at the organic traffic since the consolidation, the traffic is experiencing some healthy growth—a sign that this was probably a good long-term decision. 

The only real issue with Printful’s decision is timing, because its SaaS-based competitor was extremely well positioned to capitalize on this transition period. Just take a look at the net increase in organic traffic metrics for each company over the past six months following Printful’s blog restructuring: 

Printify, at least in terms of organic web traffic, has been growing at a faster rate than its main competitor since then. They’re winning across backlinks, keywords, and traffic. 

To understand why Printify was so well positioned for this opportunity, we simply need to look at a few of its recent posts. Printify is investing in some high-quality long form content, creating educational pieces that help dropshipping and ecommerce novices on all things POD-relevant. 

For an illustrative example, take a look at one of their most popular mid-funnel blog posts: 

The blog post is nearly 3,700 words long (the majority of the top posts clock in at over 3,000), but it’s far from a tough read. The Printify marketing team has completely optimized this piece for content consumption and SEO. Here’s a quick look at how they accomplished this: 

1) Kicking off the piece with a linked table of contents so readers can easily skip to the content that’s important to them.

User experience isn’t just important for SaaS products, you need to keep it in mind for your prospects and readers as well. Printify’s marketing team knows that not everyone has time to read an entire 3,000+ word blog post, so they make it easy for visitors to quickly navigate to the most important content based on their specific needs. 

2) Embedding content from its YouTube channel to explain important concepts in a more engaging way (while keeping visitors on the page). 

Breaking up big blogs of text with images and screengrabs is always a good idea when creating long form content. But what about the people who are audio-visual learners? By including this YouTube video directly in the blog post, Printify ensures that its content is inviting and valuable to all members of its audience. 

3) Placing inspiring, attention-grabbing Call-to-Action modules at the end of each major section within the piece

This one is a logical extension of their decision to include a table of contents and more dynamic forms of media. If your readers are going to zero-in on specific sections of the text, they may not make it all the way through to the typical end-of-piece call-to-action. Placing a CTA after each major H2 section increases the likelihood that potential Printify users are going to take the next step in their customer journey. 

And remember, all of these formatting decisions are in addition to the insightful content that Printify has created for its target audience in the creator economy. 

Ecommerce Integrations and Partner Platforms

While some businesses may have brick-and-mortar locations for merch sales, the creator and side hustler niche that POD companies target is predominantly online. After all, why limit yourself to one geographical area when there are print providers located across the globe? 

All a creator needs to do is set up a website using CMS platforms like Wix, WordPress, Shopify, and SquareSpace, or use online marketplaces like Etsy and eBay to distribute their products. 

This means that Printify and Printful need to be compatible with all of the platforms mentioned above, at the bare minimum. 

Integrations between print-on-demand platforms like Printify and e-commerce websites and online marketplaces are beneficial for the growth of the POD industry. They enable seamless order fulfillment and syncing of product information and inventory. 

These integrations allow businesses to easily sell their custom products online, driving more traffic and sales to the print-on-demand platform and ultimately increasing revenue and growth. By reducing the resources needed to manage orders and inventory, businesses can focus on other aspects of their operations, contributing further to the growth of the POD industry.

But that’s not the online benefit that these integrations provide. 

Sites like Shopify, Etsy, Wix, and Squarespace attract a user base of motivated creators and entrepreneurs, and their integration and partner pages help funnel these users to other platforms—other platforms like Printify and Printful. 

The impact of this funnel effect is particularly pronounced when you look at Printify’s top referral traffic from the past few months. 

According to SimilarWeb, from December 2022 to February 2023 the top referral page directing customers toward Printify’s website was its own page in the Shopify App Store. 

And if we look at the organic traffic going to each of the Shopify pages, the Printify app page is bringing in over 10x as much traffic as the Printful one—with monthly numbers sitting at 65.8K and 6.1K respectively. 

That’s 10x as many high-value Shopify customers finding their way to Printify’s higher- margin POD platform every month.

Pricing and Customer Value

Product pricing is a key component to success in any industry, but it’s particularly important in the side-hustle environment where creators and small businesses are looking to maximize their profit margins with minimal effort. 

In the Printify vs. Printful battle, this seems to be one of the decisive factors driving customers towards the former. 

Printify is purely a tech platform; they don’t have the overhead of in-house printing or owned fulfillment centers that incur more costs. Not only can it afford to take a more customer-friendly percentage of product sales, but the company can also focus on expanding its partner network and improving the experience of customers. 

Essentially, Printify’s SaaS model enables them to provide transparent,  value-based pricing to its customers. 

Printful, on the other hand, does need to factor in overhead costs to its pricing. It’s not cheap running and maintaining POD fulfillment centers across 5 continents, and those expenses ultimately limit the value they can pass on to customers. This cost-based pricing is a major reason why it is better positioned for enterprise clients than the creator economy contingent that seems to be fuelling growth in the POD space. 

Printify also extends the value of its business and pricing models into the content it  creates for customers across its channels. As they ramped up for the busy Christmas season, the Printify team held a webinar explaining how customers can leverage the platform’s value-based pricing to make more money from their ecommerce sites during one of the best times of year for retail.

And, as we’ll see in the next section, this is a big topic of discussion among influencers. 

Social Media and Influencers

The similarities between the marketing strategies used by these two POD companies don’t end at the macro level—just take a look at the similarities between their social media referral traffic: 

Both platforms lean heavily on YouTube for their social strategy, with the video platform making up a greater percentage of social traffic than the rest of their social channels combined. 

As one of the top “side-hustle” industries out there, the POD market is flush with influencers, and understandably so. People are looking to supplement their income and want to find out which tactics are most effective. When it comes to setting up an ecommerce or dropshipping business using POD, the question once again comes down to this: Printify or Printful? 

Here’s a look at the most relevant videos YouTube pulls up for the query “Printify vs. Printful”:

Unsurprisingly, each of these creators includes an affiliate link for one, or both, of the POD platforms, with Printify promoted in 3 of the 4 videos.

And one of the key topics that comes up repeatedly throughout these videos is the benefit that Printify provides in terms of profit margins. It’s not surprising that this is a big point of focus for influencers; their own audiences are people who are just diving into the world of side hustles and POD. 

Virality and Network Effect

We kicked off this comparison with the Google Trends graph depicting how Printify has become a viral topic relative to its top competitor and the industry in general. The success of its blog and affiliate marketing has undoubtedly played into this, but that doesn’t exactly answer all the questions. 

Similar to products like Calendly, Printify’s virality is tied to the network effect—the phenomenon where the value of a product or service increases as more people use it. 

For platforms like Printify, the process looks something like this: 

1. New printing and fulfillment partners join the network and more products become available for customization, leading to increased value for customers. 
2. New customers are drawn in by the catalog size and low prices; they use the platform to create and sell custom products.
3. More printing and fulfillment partners are incentivized to join the network, further increasing the value for customers. 
4. Rinse, and repeat.

This positive feedback loop creates a virtuous cycle that helps platforms like Printify grow and scale rapidly, ultimately becoming more competitive in the market and driving more relationships on both sides of its business.

To further sweeten the deal, Printify offers a feature for customers to rank top printing and fulfillment partners based on factors such as product quality, pricing, and shipping times. 

Because it doesn’t have the in-house control over quality and speed that Printful does, Printify leverages user feedback to direct new customers towards the top partners. A simple tool for sharing experiences and providing feedback helps keep the print partners in check and incentivizes them to maintain a certain level of quality.  

Additionally, the ranking feature helps new customers choose the best printing and fulfillment partners based on the experiences of others, increasing the likelihood of a positive experience and ultimately contributing to the growth of the Printify platform. By using customer feedback to continuously improve the platform’s offerings, Printify stays competitive in the market and refines its own process of attracting future customers and partners. 

Recreating Printify’s Success Across SaaS

The print-on-demand industry, on pace for an 11-figure valuation by the end of the decade, has caught the attention of many investors, entrepreneurs, and creators around the world. 

The battle for supremacy between Printify and Printful showcases two vastly different approaches to success in this space. While Printful opted for a vertically-integrated model, Printify embraced the SaaS model and has experienced impressive levels of viral growth. 

By exploring the strategies and tactics of these two industry giants, we can gain valuable insights into the future of digital printing and how B2B SaaS marketers can leverage these lessons to improve their marketing strategies. When looking at the battle of Printify vs. Printful, you notice these ways the former has used its SaaS model to gain an edge: 

• Building up its SEO moat with high-quality blog content (and capitalizing on an unfortunate decision by its rival)
• Passing the cost savings from its POD network model down to creators and entrepreneurs looking to maximize profit margins 
• Leveraging the network effect of its two-sided platform to create a positive feedback loop of value for both its customers and partners
  

Join our newsletter and get insight like this delivered weekly to your inbox. Subscribe now.