Is Printify Premium Worth the Price?

If you haven’t read my Printful vs Printify post yet, you might want to check that out to help you understand the numbers to determine if the price of Printify Premium is worth it for you or not.

I’m going to assume any person reading this article is not a huge company looking for the “Enterprise” plan so we’ll just focus on the free/basic plan and the $29 per month “Premium” plan.

There are only 2 features that come with the paid plan that aren’t on the free plan: custom order importing and discounted products.

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Custom Order Importing

To be completely honest, I find this really annoying. It actually is a hindrance rather than something I’d want to pay for. I get what they are trying to do, but it can cause some serious road bumps.

The positive of this feature is that items ordered under the same SKU from your stores will only require adding artwork as Printify remembers the product the design goes on from a previous order. So, if someone orders a Large, Black, Bella Canvas 3001 t-shirt and you have it fulfilled by ABC company, then next time you will see an option to add your artwork to a Large, Black, Bella Canvas 3001 t-shirt fulfilled by ABC company.

How can this be a problem?

Sometimes you run into problems with certain Printify providers where you don’t want to use their services any longer. I have run into this problem too many times with My Locker and Dream Junction. Now whenever an order comes through associated with a product that was once fulfilled by one of them, I have no choice but to use them again or do the time-consuming steps below:

• Delete the original order
• Create a new product from scratch to add to your inventory
• — Save it as a draft only, do not import it into your store
• Manually create a new order using the newly created product

This new process takes 10–15 minutes instead of the 2 minutes it should have taken. Imagine the Christmas season if you get flooded with orders like this. That’s what happened to me in Q4 2019.

Printify Product Discounts

This is really the only reason you should consider switching over to the premium Printify account. This is going to be 100% case-by-case to determine who should pay for it or not.

You need to look at your store and see what you sell the most of and what you are currently paying. Do you expect about the same numbers in the next month, or more, or less?

If you are a brand new shop and don’t expect a lot of orders, then definitely don’t pay for it.

Let’s look at a couple of scenarios and see if one lines up with your shop.

Scenario 1 — James’ POD Stores

*Prices used for these comparisons are as of June 2020 Printify pricing. They may be different later, but you can just plug in the current math for yourself.

Let’s do some simple math here to figure out if James should get Printify Premium added to his account.

James has an Etsy store selling some t-shirts and mugs. He is also trying to build a Shopify store that only gets about 3 orders per month for Bella+Canvas 3001 t-shirts. Last month he sold 6 mugs and 10 Bella+Canvas 3001 t-shirts.

Last month James did not have Printify Premium. He had his t-shirts printed by Monster Digital and mugs by Spoke Customs.

With the basic plan these t-shirts cost $9.21 each and the 11oz mugs are $7.09. There is no discount for flat rate shipping, so we’ll ignore that for now.

• $9.21 x 13 = $119.73
• $7.09 x 6 = $42.54
• TOTAL = $162.27

All of those orders cost James $162.27, before shipping fees. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just assume that next month he’ll have the exact same sales totals, but paid for Printify Premium.

With the premium plan these t-shirts cost $8.05 each and the 11oz mugs are $5.46.

• $8.05 x 13 = $104.65
• $5.46 x 6 = $32.76
• TOTAL = $137.38

So here you can see the difference thanks to the Premium plan’s savings is $24.89 (162.27–137.38). The monthly fee for Premium is $29, meaning James would be down $4.11. Hmmm

Here you see that James’ growing shop doesn’t really need to pay for the discounts yet since he’ll actually be losing money by paying for the premium discounts.

Printify Premium is not yet worth the price for James.

Scenario 2 — Mary’s Phone Cases

Mary has an eBay shop set up with a Printify integration where she sells some very cool iPhone cases that she designed. She could branch out into WooCommerce or Etsy, but she’d prefer to just use one platform right now.

In April she sold 25 iPhone cases for varying models. This is a pretty typical month for her. Let’s do some fun math!

Under the basic/free plan, the average price per phone case is $15.49 and fulfilled by SPOKE Custom Products.

25 x $15.49 = $387.25

Had she been paying for Premium it would have been only $12.64 per case from the same POD company.

25 x $12.64 = $316.00

She could have saved $71.25 if she was a Premium subscriber, which would have netted out to $42.25 after you subtract the Premium fees (71.25–29).

Now imagine she averages that amount for an entire year. Paying for premium Printify all year she’d save about $511 over the course of 12 months…probably a lot more when you factor in the 4th quarter.

Printify Premium is definitely worth the price for Mary.

Scenario 1a — James’ POD Stores — Q4

Here is a bonus idea based on James’ shop from the first scenario.

When you sign up for Printify Premium, you are only paying for one month at a time. There are, at least not yet, discounts for annual plans. That means you can cancel it after month, 2 months, or whatever you feel comfortable with.

Let’s look at James’s stores again. He couldn’t figure out how to get traffic to his Shopify store so he shut it down. His Etsy store has been averaging the same numbers every month, but now we’re at the end of October.

You know what that means? Q4 BABY!!

Generally, most sales you are going to get all year are going to be in Q4. They will mainly be from the week before Thanksgiving up until you decide to shut down your shop in December because Printify, Printful, Printed Mint, or the local shop down the road can’t get orders out for Christmas delivery.

James notices in the 2nd week of November that his orders are starting to pick up. He asks me how my shop does during these months and I’ll tell him that my Etsy stores do about five times the normal volume of sales. He decides to be conservative and assume his shop just triples the typical month.

Normal month for James’ Etsy store — 10 shirts and 6 mugs

Tripling his forecast — 30 shirts and 18 mugs

With Basic plan pricing:

• $9.21 x 30= $276.30
• $7.09 x 18 = $127.62
• TOTAL = $403.92

With Printify Premium plan pricing:

• $8.05 x 30= $241.50
• $5.46 x 18 = $100.80
• TOTAL = $342.30

I’m still willing to be he does better than twice his normal sales volume, but at this conservative number we can safely say he’d be saving $61.62 with the discounts. That nets out to $32.62 savings with the Premium discounts.

If James thinks the store volume will go back to normal at the end of December/early January, he should set a reminder to cancel that one month of Premium on the last day of the billing cycle.

Printify Premium is definitely worth the price for James when he expects a busy season.

“Free” Samples

This is the one scenario where your sales don’t really matter.

If you haven’t paid for Printify Premium before, they will give you $29 to order samples. That’s the same price as premium, so it basically just wipes out the cost of each other.

If you were planning on ordering samples from Printify already, you might as well sign up for the Premium service and order all of your samples, which are also at the discounted rate.

You can then use the rest of the month to get the discounts for your stores and cancel at the end of the month if you find the savings don’t add up to the monthly fee.

When is Printify Premium Worth It?

Already busy — You have a busy store(s) and the math works out for discounts versus plan fees.

Seasonally — you expect a higher than normal order volume in the coming month

Samples — You are new to Printify Premium and want to sample products from different vendors

Printify Premium Wish List

At the end of the day, you’re just getting discounted products by paying for Printify Premium. Other POD companies like Printful and Printed Mint will give you product discounts when you hit certain sales volumes, but Printify just offers this way to buy a discount.

Customer service

It’s no secret that Printify customer service is horrible. The “chat” feature just submits a ticket into their system which takes hours, if not days, to get a response.

Paying a monthly fee, I think it is only right that “premium” customers get access to “premium” customer service. Or, well, any customer service.

Production Times

I know this is a total hail Mary, but paying for premium would be so much more worthwhile if it guaranteed faster fulfillment times. I would be willing to pay twice as much just for faster fulfillment. You’d have to assume you could get more customers by offering them better turnaround times.

Did I Help You?

I just spent most of a Saturday writing this article hoping to help some people in the print on demand game try to figure out how to maximize their profits.

I’ll never ask my readers for money, but if you haven’t signed up for any of the services below and plan to, please do so through my links where I’ll get either an affiliate commission or some other form of payment (ie free Etsy listings) from you signing up.

• Sign up for Printify
• Sign up for Printful
• Sign up for Etsy Sellers — Get your first 20 listings up for free
• Sign up for Orbitkit — Upload all of your merch designs to multiple POD sites all at once
• Sign up for Merch Informer — probably the best print on demand/Amazon Merch research tool available (Use coupon code 2NDSCREENS to save 20%)

Originally published at https://2ndscreens.com on May 23, 2020.