RedBubble and Printful are big names in the POD industry, offering robust features to boost your POD efforts.
However, they are also very different platforms, and knowing which one to use from the start can save you a lot of time and eliminate the guesswork.
We’ve compared these 2 tools in great detail so you don’t have to.
Read on to learn more about RedBubble vs. Printful battle of features and make an informed decision.
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RedBubble vs. Printful: How Do They Differ?
Here’s a quick overview of the main areas of difference between these 2 platforms.
RedBubble: Overview
RedBubble is an online marketplace that operates on a print-on-demand model and specializes in POD products featuring artwork submitted by users and the community.
The platform handles manufacturing, printing, and customer service.
RedBubble: Key Features
1. Product Catalog
RedBubble’s product catalog is smaller than Printful’s and primarily focuses on apparel, home deco, and accessories.
Popular categories include:
- Gifts
- Clothing
- Stickers
- Magnets
- Phone Cases
- Wall Art
- Home & Living
- Kids & Babies
- Accessories
- Stationery & Office.
Each category has multiple subcategories. For example, within the Clothing category, you can find T-shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts, socks, leggings, skirts, tank tops, etc.
The Home Deco category offers wall art, posters, various prints, and so on.
Although RedBubble’s product catalog is on a smaller scale, it has an outstanding capability: Fan Art Program.
It allows you to create and sell officially licensed fan art on the Redbubble platform. Thus, you can get legal permission from major brands to use their trademarked content in designs.
So far, RedBubble has partnered with brands like Netflix, Captain Scarlet, KISS, Dune, etc.
2. Store Creation
The possibility to create your own store is the biggest difference between RedBubble and Printful.
As a marketplace, RedBubble allows you to create a storefront and upload designs. It accepts JPEG, PNG, or GIF files with a minimum resolution of 1000px.
RedBubble doesn’t accept images above 300MB or 13500×13500 pixels in size.
The good thing is that you have recommended guidelines depending on the product category.
In addition, RedBubble provides PNG and PSD design templates for their most popular products.
On the other hand, unlike Printful, you can’t create mockups and tweak your designs directly on the platform. Thus, you’ll need an external platform for that.
3. Product Pricing
You earn a commission on each sale based on the base price of the product plus the markup.
- The base price includes Redbubble’s service fee for hosting the marketplace and the manufacturing fee charged by the 3rd-party manufacturer.
Thus, prices can fluctuate depending on the manufacturer.
- The artist margin shows how much you make from a sale, whereas the markup represents a percentage of the base price.
The margin is the actual cash amount.
- It defaults to 20%, but you can raise or lower it in the Product Pricing section of your Account Details page.
Since the Product Pricing page displays these amounts based on your local currency and shipping settings, they may differ for international customers.
- Finally, the last piece of the puzzle is a VAT collected on each sale.
Another factor to consider is RedBubble’s flat fee. It is based on your monthly earnings and only applies if you make a sale.
Furthermore, you don’t have to pay the fee if you have Premium or Pro accounts.
- Bulk Order Program provides special discounts on certain product categories for larger orders.
It includes:
- A special sample coupon to check out the product and print quality,
- A one-time use Bulk Order coupon for up to 55% off your Bulk Order,
- Free standard shipping for qualifying orders and other benefits.
4. Getting Paid
The payment process starts at the beginning of each month, and you should receive the payment by the 15th. Thus, you are paid monthly and not after each sale.
In order to receive a payment, you must meet the Payment Threshold – you must earn $20/20€/£20 or more and provide complete payment details on your account.
5. Fulfillment and Shipping
One of RedBubble’s stellar features is fast delivery times compared to similar tools.
Although it doesn’t have an in-house fulfillment station, it has a global network of POD partners, so you can print and ship your orders directly to customers worldwide.
An average delivery time is around 7 days.
In addition, it offers anti-piracy and watermark options to protect your work from unauthorized use or copying.
Pricing
Redbubble doesn’t have a monthly subscription, but 3 Pemium plans.
The Standard plan has a fee starting at $1.30, while the Premium and Pro plans are exempt from fees.
RedBubble: Pros & Cons
🟢 Has a built-in marketplace.
🟢 Doesn’t have monthly fees.
🟢 Has a strong community.
🔴 Smaller product catalog.
🔴 Limited integrations.
🔴 Maximum of 30 design uploads per day.
Printful: Overview
Printful is a POD and dropshipping service that allows you to create and sell custom products.
What makes Printful interesting is that it offers warehousing solutions for storing non-Printful products and shipping them alongside your custom items.
Printful: Key Features
1. Product Catalog
One of Printful’s highlight features is its product catalog, which has over 350 customizable designs.
Thus, you can browse categories and their respective subcategories, such as:
- Fast delivery
- Eco-friendly
- Bestsellers
- Apparel
- Hats
- Accessories
- Home & living
- Collections.
2. Design Creations
This is the area where Printful and RedBubble differ the most. Printful has customization options due to its built-in design tool.
You can:
- Apply customization elements like Clipart, text, layers, and fill.
- Use Premium Images with ready-to-use designs such as stock images, vector graphics, and patterns from Getty.
However, each placement of a Premium Image costs an additional $1.
- Customize text by changing colors and fonts and applying outlining, curving, and shadowing effects.
- Create mockups in various styles like lifestyle shots, flat lays, and model images.
- You can also upload designs and customize placements, colors, and sizes.
3. Product Pricing
With Printful, you’ll face upfront costs for each item fulfilled, so you’ll need to set retail prices that cover these base costs while remaining competitive.
Each product on Printful has a base price, which includes the cost of the item and the printing of one standard design.
After determining the base price, you can set your retail price by adding a markup, essentially your profit margin.
Printful recommends adding a profit margin that’s 30% of the base price.
So, what additional factors do you need to consider when setting a price?
- Shipping fees aren’t included in the base price, so you must factor them into your retail pricing strategy.
Printful charges shipping based on the product type and destination.
- Keep in mind other costs, such as transaction fees from your eCommerce platforms and payment processing fees, listing fees, etc.
Like RedBubble, Printful also offers Bulk orders, allowing you to save up to 55% when ordering at least 25 of the same items.
You can apply different colors, sizes, and designs.
4. Getting Paid
With Printful, you’ll face upfront costs for each item fulfilled, so you’ll need to set retail prices that cover these base costs while remaining competitive.
On Printful, the payment process for sellers differs from traditional platforms because Printful doesn’t directly pay out profits to users.
Instead, here’s how it works:
- When a customer purchases a product from your online store, such as Shopify or Etsy, they pay you directly through your chosen payment platform, PayPal or credit card, for example.
This is the retail price you set, which includes your profit margin.
- After the sale, Printful fulfills the order. They charge you for the production and shipping costs of that order.
Based on your setup in the Printful dashboard, the charge is deducted from your Printful Wallet or billed to your registered payment method, credit card, or PayPal.
- The Printful Wallet is an internal account where you can deposit funds to cover fulfillment costs. You can add money to this wallet via credit card or PayPal.
Overall, the frequency of receiving your earnings doesn’t depend on Printful but on the payment platform you use and its policies.
Thus, you can receive earnings weekly, monthly, etc.
5. Fulfillment and Shipping
Printful has a global network of 13 in-house facilities, making it easier to control printing quality fully.
In addition, you can order product samples to test your product before selling it – Printful offers a 20 % discount.
Fulfillment
- When a customer orders from your store, the order is automatically sent to Printful for fulfillment. Printful handles printing, packaging, and shipping directly to your customer.
- Printful typically takes 2 to 5 business days to fulfill orders. This timeframe includes producing custom-printed items and packaging them for shipment.
- Fulfillment for larger orders may take longer but will generally be completed within the 5-day window.
Shipping
Shipping times depend on the destination and the shipping method you choose.
For example:
- Domestic Shipping (USA): Typically takes 3 to 7 business days.
- International Shipping: Can range from 5 to 15 business days, depending on the destination country and local postal services.
Pricing
Although Printful has a Free Plan that allows you to pay only after an order is placed, you can opt for 2 Membership Plans with special discounts and perks.
The prices start from $24.99, with a 14-day Free Trial.
Printful: Pros & Cons
🟢 Has a built-in design tool.
🟢 Has more diverse printing methods.
🟢 Offers eCommerce integrations.
🔴 You can’t create a storefront.
🔴 You can’t choose a production facility.
🔴 Has no built-in analytics.
RedBubble vs. Printful: The Final Verdict
Comparing Redbubble and Printful reveals distinct differences in their business models, pricing structures, product offerings, and target audiences.
The ultimate choice largely depends on your goals as a seller:
- If you are an artist looking for a straightforward way to sell POD designs with minimal setup effort, Redbubble may be the better choice due to its built-in marketplace.
- On the other hand, if you aim to build a branded eCommerce business with extensive product options and greater control over pricing and fulfillment processes, Printful seems to be a more suitable option.
Although both platforms have unique strengths that cater to different needs in the POD space, they don’t focus much on mockup creation — a staple of any POD business.
Luckily, there is a solution that enables you not only to create product mockups at scale quickly, but to fully customize them to meet your customers’ demands.
Enter, Dynamic Mockups!
Dynamic Mockups — A Behind-the-Scenes Partner to Elevate Your POD
Dynamic Mockups provides a robust solution if you need efficient and customizable mockup creation tools, making it an excellent choice for the POD and eCommerce sectors.
A common trait for all the mockup categories we offer is high customization, allowing you to tailor your designs fully and quickly adapt to market changes.
With our tool, you can:
🔥 Design unique scenes and backgrounds for your products by typing a text prompt. Our AI mockup tool will handle the rest, allowing you to modify backgrounds while keeping your original designs intact.
This way, you can experiment with various designs until you discover the perfect fit for your brand and target audience.
🔥 Generate hundreds of mockup variations in 10 seconds, reducing the time you’d otherwise spend on manual adjustments.
It’s a convenient feature when you need to create and manage multiple products or designs.
🔥 Edit your designs regarding colors and asset placement by:
- Switching colors with integrated Printful and Printify color options or the color picker.
- Applying Photoshop blending modes for a more realistic effect.
- Perfectly repositioning and aligning design assets and layers to ensure a perfect fit.
🔥 Import custom Photoshop mockups, edit them further, and gain complete control over the design process while creating unique mockups to align with your brand identity.
🔥 Integrate with eCommerce platforms such as Etsy and WooCommerce, but also explore our Zapier and WordPress and Make connections for extended functionality.
🔥 Explore our Free Template Gallery comprised of customizable mockups in evergreen niches such as:
- T-shirts
- Hoodies
- Sweatshirts
- Wall art
- Pillows
- Mugs, and
- Tote bags.
We’re excited to announce that we’re about to launch our iFrame embeddable mockup editor feature. 😎
It will allow you to control the creation process and the printing quality by enabling your customers to design their products directly on your site without relying on 3rd parties.
Ready to see Dynamic Mockups in action?
Start with Dynamic Mockups for free and turn your POD store into a scroll stopper.
Start creating for Free!
Showcase your E-commerce products like big brands, without costing a fortune
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