Printful UK Review: The Best POD Platform in the UK?

Is Printful the Best Choice for Print on Demand in the UK?

If you’re a UK-based entrepreneur looking for a cost-effective, low-risk and high-reward way to sell custom products, working with a print-on-demand partner could be a great choice.

Currently, the market for print on demand is expected to reach a value of $33.6 billion by 2030. While North America is still the biggest region for POD vendors, Canada and the UK follow closely behind. Now could be the perfect time for you to get your foot on the ground floor of the POD revolution.

Of course, before you can reap the benefits of print on demand, you’re going to need the right partner. In this Printful review, I’m going to explain why Printful is one of the most popular POD vendors in the UK, and help you decide if Printful’s platform is right for you.

Printful UK Review: Quick Verdict, Pros and Cons

Printful is one of my all-time favorite print on demand platforms, for a few reasons. Not only does it offer access to a huge range of unique products (including sustainable options), and printing methods, but the platform also integrates with countless sales channels and ecommerce platforms.

Plus, Printful is well-known around the world for its exceptional product quality, 99% of all the company’s products meet with customer’s standards, meaning your chances of a return are slim.

Pros:

• Massive product catalog
• UK-based fulfilment centers for fast delivery
• Eco-friendly and sustainable product options
• Powerful design tools with tons of free assets
• Deals and discounts for students and members
• Excellent support resources for designers
• Integrations with numerous sales channels
• Lots off customization options (including embroidery and all-over print)

Cons:

• Base product prices can be quite high
• No phone support for UK sellers
• Fewer products available in the UK than elsewhere

Key Takeaways

If you don’t have time to read through my entire Printful review, here’s a quick summary of the main things you need to know:

• Printful offers more than 250 products that ship to the UK
• Eco-friendly and sustainable product options are available
• You can save money on products with Printful memberships
• You can integrate Printful with all of the top marketplaces, social media channels, and ecommerce platforms.
• Printful offers embroidery, DTG, and all-over print products.
• The design tools are excellent, with AI-powered guidance, and an intuitive mock-up generator
• You can create a Printful account for free.

Printful UK Review: An Introduction to Printful

Printful is a global print-on-demand company, originally founded in 2013. Over the years, the organization has grown into one of the top POD vendors in the world, selling hundreds of premium products, in a range of categories. Although the types of products you can access (and how quickly they’ll ship) will vary depending on your location, Printful does have fulfillment centers in the UK.

Unlike other popular Print on Demand companies (like Printify), Printful handles order production themselves. This means you’re not working with a selection of manufacturers, so you can rest assured that product quality should be consistent.

When you sign up for an account with Printful, you’ll be able to connect the solution to a huge selection of ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, and social media channels, allowing you to essentially automate your order fulfillment process from end-to-end.

Plus, you don’t need to pay anything to sign up. You can get started with nothing more than an email address, or a Google or Facebook account. There’s even a specialist Printful service for companies that want to share branded merchandise with employees (MerchShare).

Printful prints, packs, and ships every order (with no minimum order requirements) for you. Plus, they offer a range of ways to customize your items, from direct-to-garment printing (DTG) to all over printing, embroidery, and more.

The Printful Product Range: What Can You Customize?

Globally, Printful offers a range of more than 330 products for creators to choose from. In the UK, however, you will be limited to a slightly smaller selection of around 252 products.

The good news is that you’ll still have plenty of high-quality, high-value items to explore. Some of the most popular product categories offered by Printful include:

• Men’s clothing: Custom t-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, all-over-print shirts, long-sleeved shirts, embroidered shirts, jackets, vests, sweatpants, shorts, and more.
• Women’s clothing: Unique crop tops, tank tops, t-shirts, polo shirts, sports bras, hoodies, sweatshirts, skirts, pants, leggings, and more.
• Kids and youth clothing: T-shirts, hoodies, hats, leggings, baby body suits, swimwear, long-sleeved shirts, and more.
• Hats: Customizable beanies, dad hats, baseball caps, trucker hats, mesh hats, bucket hats, visors, and more.
• Accessories: Bags (Tote, drawstring, backpacks, etc.), pins, patches, footwear, hair accessories, sports accessories, tech accessories, and more.
• Home and living: Puzzles, wall art (flags, canvas prints, posters, etc.), candles, blankets, tableware, magnets, stationery, aprons, towels, pet products, and more.

You can search through products by category, or by looking for a specific brand. Plus, Printful gives you the option to filter your catalog choices by focusing on special offers, embroidery products, new products, fast delivery options, and eco-friendly items.

Printful UK Review: Product Quality

It’s often difficult to know for certain whether a print-on-demand company’s products will live up to your customer’s expectations in terms of quality. However, as I mentioned above, Printful has earned a great reputation over the years. The company uses the highest-quality technology and materials to maintain high customer satisfaction rates.

Plus, Printful has implemented a range of quality assurance strategies over the years, to keep returns to a minimum. The team even uses artificial intelligence to help you create upscaled product images, and make sure your prints are crisp and clear.

I love the fact that every product in Printful’s catalog has its own star rating, and reviews from existing customers, to help you make the right choice.

Plus, the product descriptions offer excellent insights into everything from fabric thickness, to style, fit, and “decoration technique”. From what I can tell from other customer reviews on the web, I’m not the only one impressed by Printful’s product quality.

The company has earned a 4.6 out of 5 star review on Trustpilot, with many consumers mentioning the crisp prints and quality materials. Printful also has a 4.7 out of 5 star rating on the Shopify app marketplace.

Printful: Pricing and Fees

Notably, while you don’t have to pay anything to create an account with Printful, there are still costs to consider. I noted above that one potential downside of Printful is that the “base price” of the products it sells are usually a little high.

For instance, one of the company’s best-selling t-shirts costs around £12.90 per unit.

Shipping costs can be a little high too, particularly if you want to offer your customers express delivery. However, you can always choose to pass that cost over to your customers. The good news is that the high quality of Printful’s products makes it easier to validate a higher price.

Printful Membership Options

One excellent way to reduce your costs when using Printful, is to sign up for a “membership”. If you sign up for a basic free account with Printful, you’ll still get access to:

• Automatic order fulfillment via integrations
• Global delivery and shipping
• Printful’s Design Maker and Mockup Generator
• White-label packaging slips
• Around-the-clock customer support
• Access to Printful’s resource hub

However, members can also take advantage of additional perks. There are two options available:

• Printful Growth: Free for companies with $12k or more in annual revenue, or $24.99 per month: This includes up to 20% off DTG products, 30% discounts on other product categories, 7% off product branding discounts, free digitization for your sample orders, unlimited stores per account, and personalized product transfer support.
• Printful Business: Only available to companies with $60k or more in annual revenue: This includes all the features of Growth, plus sample order discounts of 25%, branding discounts of 9%, up to 22% off DTG products, and up to 33% off other product categories. You also get larger front prints for some products, free digitization for embroidered products, and priority support from the Printful team.

Printful UK Shipping and Fulfillment

Since Printful has its own fulfillment center in the UK (Wolverhampton), it can offer relatively quick delivery times. In fact, some products can reach your customers within as little as 5 business days (this includes production times). When your products are already printed, delivery usually takes between two and four business days, depending on what you’re shipping.

The costs for shipping vary too. For instance, the price of shipping a single t-shirt will start at around £3.59, and you’ll pay an extra £1.20 for each additional shirt. Notably, Printful notes that shipping times are estimates, not guarantees, so there can be some variation.

The good news is you can track the progress of each order within your Printful dashboard, so you can keep customers informed if there are any delays.

Plus, Printful does offer a handy shipping calculator you can use to estimate the pricing for each order.

If you want access to additional services (like custom packaging mailers), there may also be additional fees to pay. As far as I can tell, Printful doesn’t offer Express shipping for UK retailers.

Printful UK Review: Ease of Use and Integrations

One of the reasons I consider Printful to be one of the best Print on Demand solutions around, is that it’s incredibly easy to use. Signing up for an account only takes a couple of seconds. Plus, the dashboard is extremely simple to navigate, whether you’re checking on orders, creating new product templates, or monitoring sales statistics.

You’ll even have access to a few handy extras in your dashboard, like a “Promo Maker” tool to help you advertise your new products. Creating and editing products is straightforward too. All you need to do is click on the product you want to customize in Printful’s library, and select “Create a template”.

Printful even shares a handy video with beginners.

Once you’re ready to start designing, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to experiment with layers, custom uploaded images, and a range of free graphics and assets. Plus, there’s a handy link to Fiverr included in the editor, in case you want to hire a designer to help you.

Notably, some features do have a slightly higher learning curve. For instance, you might need to spend a little more time setting up your warehousing requirements, and creating reports. However, all around, I think Printful is incredibly intuitive.

Printful’s Integrations

Another thing that’s very easy to do with Printful is link your online store and sales channels. There are more than 20 integration options available, including options for:

• Ecommerce platforms: Shopify, Square Online, Squarespace, Wix, ECWid, Prestashop, WooCommerce, Big Cartel, Weebly, Adobe Commerce, Shift4Shop, etc.
• Marketplaces: Gumroad, Etsy, Ebay, Walmart, Amazon, and more
• Social media: TikTok Shop

Plus, you can take advantage of Printful’s API for custom connections. Printful’s help center includes comprehensive how-to guides for each integration options, so linking accounts is a breeze.

Printful UK Customer Support

One thing I noticed when reading other Printful reviews online, is that the company has earned a few complaints for slow or poor customer service in the past.

Personally, I didn’t encounter any problems when I sent messages to the team via live chat and email. The responses were pretty prompt in both instances, and the team shared knowledgeable, and helpful insights.

I also think Printful’s self-help resources are excellent. You can access a comprehensive range of FAQs, video tutorials, and guides on the website. There are even tooltips and videos embedded into your dashboard when you’re first getting started.

If you want advice on things like marketing your store, or boosting sales, Printful’s blog is a great resource, as are its social media accounts.

Further reading:

• Printful vs Printify
• Printify vs Printed Mint
• Printful vs Gelato
• Printify vs Gelato
• CustomCat vs Printful

Printful UK Review: The Verdict

Printful is far from the only print on demand solution available to UK retailers, but it’s definitely one of my favorites. Although there are some downsides to this platform, such as limited products available to UK sellers, and high initial product costs, the benefits of using Printful outweigh the negatives. Printful is a great choice if you’re looking for:

• Fast product development and shipping times
• Excellent quality products (with great prints and materials)
• Powerful design tools with dozens of free assets
• Access to simple integration for a range of platforms
• An intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard

Overall, I’d definitely recommend Printful to any UK ecommerce company looking to boost their sales with incredible custom products.