Why I use Printfection

“There must be a better way.”

A few months ago, while I was working on the redesign of my website (trust me, it was an incredible improvement), I ended up in a conversation with someone who wanted to start selling a couple items and were interested in my thoughts on Print On Demand services that could integrate with their website.  Being in the throes of trying to do exactly that kind of integration, I could pretty much tell them that, if they needed seamless integration, I didn’t have a lot of options to offer. CafePress offers no options at all, and Zazzle’s SiteBuilder is pretty good but is not seamless – see the links in the navigation bar for the best I’ve been able to do.

I thought to myself, surely there is a better way, and went researching.

The other big name out there is still Spreadshirt, but their focus is way different, so they were out of the running.  Then I stumbled across a relative newcomer to the POD scene – Printfection.

Printfection came to print on demand through making promotional products – that is, printing those free tshirts and mugs and bags and other things you get when you buy something or volunteer for something.  This background makes them a little different from the others in some possibly unexpected ways.

I’m still easing my way into using Printfection, but here are some of the big selling points for me:

• The potential for incredible integration
  Printfection gives you total control of the CSS and design of your shop pages, plus allows you to point a subdomain at your shop.  That is, you can have shop.yourdomain.com point seamlessly at your Printfection shop.
• Wait, there’s more integration options!
  They also allow you to make over the invoices and packaging so that they also look like they come directly from you, with your logo and everything.  That is, the entire process can look transparently like they are buying from you directly.
• Oddball items and wide color choices
  They’re missing some things (buttons and stickers), but make up for it by having a wide variety of colors and styles of apparel and some quirky things I haven’t seen anywhere else (like cutting boards).  The only thing they’re really lacking is black shirts. Correction: if you remember to upload images with transparency, you can get quite a few dark colors, including black.
• Small, quirky company with cool culture
  They’re based out of Denver, Colorado (which I’ve spent enough time in that it feels like local to me), have ditched the office, and seem bent on changing the promotional products business model.  They sound like the kind of company I could work for.

For someone who really wants strong integration with their website presence (but doesn’t have a merchant account to do payments) or who plans to do a mix of online and in-person sales, Printfection’s worth checking out.

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