Print-on-demand has emerged as a game-changer since it allows you to run your business without the burden of inventory or upfront costs.
One of the best ways to promote your POD and reach a wider audience is to use eCommerce platforms.
The eCommerce platform market size is expected to grow at a 13.8% CAGR by 2028, making it a place to be and sell your POD products.
But which eCommerce platform should be your top choice to leverage its benefits?
Find out on our list of the 7 Best eCommerce platforms for print-on-demand.
Let’s dive in!
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What Factors Should You Consider When Choosing The eCommerce Platform?
Although eCommerce platforms are a great place to be, you should take into account to which extent they have the following capabilities:
✨ Ease of Use
Look for a platform with a user-friendly interface, which will make it easy to set up your store, manage products, and navigate the dashboard.
✨ Integration with Print-on-Demand Services
Ensure that the platform seamlessly integrates with popular print-on-demand providers.
Furthermore, compatibility with your chosen POD service will streamline order fulfillment and inventory management.
✨ Customization Options
A good platform should provide customizable templates and design tools, allowing you to create a brand identity and tailor your customers’ shopping experience.
✨ Payment Gateway Flexibility
Check the payment options the platform provides.
It should support various payment gateways, including credit cards, PayPal, and others, to provide customers with convenient payment methods.
✨ Scalability
As your business grows, you should be able to easily upgrade your plan, add more products, and access advanced features without migrating to a new platform.
✨ Analytics and Reporting Tools
Look for built-in analytics capabilities that provide insights into sales, customer behaviors, and traffic sources.
This will help you make data-driven decisions to optimize your store.
✨ Mobile Responsiveness
With an increasing number of people shopping on mobile devices, ensure that the platform offers mobile-responsive designs or apps to provide a seamless shopping experience.
✨ Customer Support
Strong customer support is crucial, especially when you’re starting.
Check the availability of resources such as tutorials, forums, chat, or email support to help you solve any issues promptly.
✨ SEO Features
A solid eCommerce platform should provide tools to optimize your store for search engines, such as customizable URLs, meta tags, and sitemaps.
Naturally, your preferred platform doesn’t need to meet all the above criteria. They are more of a guideline to see what is currently most important for you in your POD journey.
7 Best eCommerce Platforms for Print-on-Demand You Should Check Out
Here’s a quick overview of the eCommerce platforms we’ll cover.
1. Shopify
Shopify is undoubtedly one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that enables you to create, customize, and manage your online store.
It’s user-friendly and automatically updates listings when products are out of stock. Shopify integrates with Printful, Printify, SPOD, Apliiq, and over 400 Print-on-Demand apps.
Key Features:
✨ Online Store Creation — Enables you to create and design your online stores with customizable templates, themes, and drag-and-drop tools.
✨ eCommerce Features — Host product listings, inventory management, order processing, secure payment gateways, and shipping integration.
✨ Multi-Channel Selling — Lets you sell products across multiple sales channels, including your online store, social media platforms, and marketplaces.
✨ Analytics and Reporting — Provides sales reports and performance metrics to track key eCommerce metrics, monitor sales trends, analyze customer behavior, etc.
Pricing
Shopify has 4 Premium Plans, starting from $32 per month, with a 3-day Free Trial.
2. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform for POD that enables you to turn a WordPress website into an online store with product listings, a shopping cart, and checkout.
Thanks to WordPress integration, you can access numerous WordPress plugins and themes.
As of recently, WooCommerce also integrates with Dynamic Mockups, a robust automated mockup generator tool for POD businesses.
Key Features:
✨ Themes — Offers a great variety of themes you can filter by category or industry.
✨ AutomateWoo — Provides marketing automation for setting up abandoning card emails, follow-up emails, SMS notifications, referrals, etc.
✨ WooPay — Enables a one-click checkout with mobile-optimized buy buttons on your cart and product pages.
✨ Payment Options — Offers a wide range of payment options, such as credit cards, debit cards, WooPay, and digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
✨ Multi-channel Selling — Enables you to sell across multiple channels, including marketplaces, social media platforms, search engines, etc.
Pricing
WooCommerce is free, but you will need to pay for additional plugins and themes.
3. Wix
Wix is a great alternative for small POD businesses that allows you to build an online store with a drag-and-drop editor.
It offers fully customizable website templates for Fashion, Electronics, Home&Decor, and other categories.
Key Features:
✨ Pre-orders — Allows customers to pre-order products before you launch them or when they’re out of stock.
✨ Back-in-stock Notifications — Inform customers when a product is back in stock.
✨ Payment Options — Provide multiple payment options with debit and credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Tap to Pay, etc.
✨ Product Reviews — Gathers and displays customer feedback and reviews.
✨ Abandoned Cart Recovery — Reminds visitors they left items in the cart with automated emails.
Pricing
Wix has 4 Premium Plans, starting from $17 monthly, with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
4. BigCommerce
BigCommerce primarily caters to enterprise-level eCommerce businesses and offers web hosting, customization options, eCommerce solutions, marketing tools, etc.
It integrates with major POD companies, as well as with online sales channels and social media platforms.
Key Features:
✨ Localized Storefronts — Enables you to set up storefronts tailored to new regions, localized languages and payment methods, unique product filters, etc.
✨ Headless Commerce — Separates your store’s front end from its back end to create multiple storefronts for multiple customer groups or brands.
✨ Payment Options — Include digital wallets like Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, PayPal One Touch, etc., and cryptocurrencies, such as BitPay.
✨ Cross-Border Fulfillment — Enables accurate quoting for cross-border shipping due to native integration with ShipperHQ.
✨ Drag-n-Drop Page Builder — Provides customizable themes and WordPress integration.
Pricing
BigCommerce has 4 Premium Plans, starting from $39 monthly, with a 15-day Free Trial.
5. Ecwid
Ecwid is an eCommerce platform that is suitable if you already have an existing website.
Nonetheless, you can also create a simple online store with Ecwid’s Website Builder.
POD integrations aren’t Ecwid’s strongest suit, but it compensates with marketing tools.
Key Features:
✨ Order Management — Enables you to monitor orders from all sales channels on one dashboard, including filters for payment and fulfillment status, dates, etc.
✨ Selling Options — Allows you to sell across multiple channels, such as social media, your website, Google, marketplaces, etc.
✨ Multiple Payment Gateways — Provide over 30 payment options, such as PayPal, Stripe, Square, etc.
✨ Automate Store Management — Automates tax calculations, payments, and shipping.
✨ Built-in Reports — Measure customer behavior, marketing efforts, cash flow, etc.
Pricing
Ecwid offers 1 Free Plan to create an online store and 3 Premium Plans starting from $25.
6. Sellfy
Sellfy allows you to sell digital and physical products, merchandise, etc., and it comes with built-in print-on-demand features.
In addition, you can also create your own online store.
Key Features:
✨ Storefront Creation — Allows you to customize your storefront with logos, colors and language.
✨ Marketing Features — Host various email types, tools for affiliate marketing, discount codes, upselling offers, etc.
✨ Embed Functionality — Enables you to sell from your website, social media, or anywhere else.
✨ Payment Options — Offers PayPal and Stripe payments.
✨ Order Fulfilment — Automates production and shipping process.
Pricing
Sellfy has 3 Premium Plans, starting from $29 monthly, each with a 14-day Free Trial.
7. Square Online
Square Online is an eCommerce platform that offers website-building possibilities together with integration with print-on-demand services.
It is great for beginners since it’s user-friendly but lacks features such as abandoned cart recovery or multi-currency support that larger businesses may require.
Key Features:
✨ Payment Options — Supports payment options such as Square Pay, Apple Pay, Cash App Pay, Google Pay, etc.
✨ Afterpay — Enables your customers to pay in 3-4 installment rates.
✨ Themes — Provides various customizable themes for retail, restaurants, and services.
✨ Marketing Tools — Include automated email and text campaigns.
✨ Оrder Fulfillment — Automatically sends products for fulfillment, enabling you to create and print shipping labels from your dashboard.
Pricing
Square Online has 1 Free Plan with limited features and 2 Premium Plans, starting from $29 monthly.
eCommerce Platform vs. Marketplace: What’s The Difference?
Both eCommerce platforms and marketplaces are great for promoting your POD business.
eCommerce platforms allow more customization than marketplaces and cover all the steps: from creating your online store to order fulfillment.
Marketplaces cater to a large customer base and offer many products with fewer customization options. Therefore, you can list your products and upload your designs.
Which eCommerce Platform Should You Choose?
The choice will largely depend on where your niche and target audience is. Other contributing factors would be the price and overall features.
You need a solution that caters to your current needs, but that can also scale as your business grows.
If you are a smaller business, Wix would make a logical choice. On the other hand, if you need a self-hosted solution, Ecwid is your go-to platform, and so on.
However, regardless of your choice, there is a “pre-step” you must take to list your products — Mockup generation.
Without visuals, you can’t have an online POD shop or attract customers. And we have a solution to take care of that part of your POD journey.
How Can Dynamic Mockups Boost Your Presence on eCommerce Platforms?
Dynamic Mockups is a mockup generator that goes beyond mere mockup creation.
It provides advanced customizing options backed up by integrations with WooCommerce and Etsy, with Shopify integration coming soon.
How can we help?
🔥 Imagine you want to sell 100 designs on T-shirts, hoodies, and let’s say, mugs in 3 different colors — That amounts to 900 mockup variations.
Now imagine the time it would take.
With our tool, you can create high-quality mockups in bulk without manually uploading them.
🔥 Customize your or other Photoshop mockups to reflect your brand, upload them to our platform, and we will create a mockup automatically thanks to our API.
🔥 Store all your designs in one place so you can easily find them and apply uploaded designs to new mockups.
🔥 Layout your design flexibly and perfectly place your design assets, move and resize them, do post-adjustments, automate fitting modes, etc.
🔥 Customize your designs with the color picker and integrated Printful and Printify color combinations, and apply various Photoshop blending modes to create more realistic and customized designs.
🔥 Browse our ever-growing library with mockups, including T-shirts, Hoodies, Wall art, Pillows, Blankets, Tote Bags, Phone Cases, etc.
Overall, Dynamic Mockups is a great assistant in kickstarting your POD business, saving you loads of time and at a fraction of the cost compared to the traditional manual image creation.
Ready to take Dynamic Mockups for a test drive?
Join Dynamic Mockups for free and showcase your products in the best way on any eCommerce platform you’ll use.
Start creating for Free!
Showcase your E-commerce products like big brands, without costing a fortune
Keep Learning:
How to Start a Print-on-Demand Business [11 Expert Tips]
