Teelaunch Vs Printful: 13 Things To Compare POD Sites

Deciding between print on demand websites to join? Unsure how to compare Teelaunch vs Printful? Here are 13 things to know!

In this article, I’ll be explaining the 13 main things you should know about Teelaunch and Printful. I’ve also included a summary and addressed a few common questions to help you make the decision on which site is best for you.

*This post may contain affiliate links. This means I may earn a small commission (at no cost to you) if you sign up for a program or make a purchase using my link!

Teelaunch Vs Printful: 13 Things To Know

1. Product catalog

When comparing the product catalog for both Teelaunch and Printful, we can see that Printful has a lot more product choices to offer. This includes a range of premium items as well as eco-friendly print on demand merchandise.

Some things you can find on Printful which are not seen on Teelaunch are – swimwear, hats, footwear and dresses. On the other hand, Printful does not offer yard signs or sports equipment like the ones available on Teelaunch. There is an assortment of sports balls you can design with Teelaunch such as basketballs, rugby balls, tennis ball and softball. I’ve not seen these products on any other POD sites!

Catalog	Teelaunch	Printful
Products	Accessories Hoodies Shirts Baby clothing Drinkware Blankets Doormats Rugs Yard signs Jewelry Kitchenware Lifestyle Office tools Pet products Wall Art Sports	Shirts Bottom Dresses Robes Sportswear Jackets Hoodies Hats Baby bibs Leggings Baby bodysuits Swimwear Kids clothing Bags Hair accessories Face masks Keychains Footwear Jewelry Tech accessories Wall art Home décor Drinkware Stationary Aprons Fabrics Towels Pet products Eco-friendly

Winner: Printful – just because there is a wider range of items to sell. Unless you’re looking to sell sports equipment of course!

2. Product pricing

It’s always more practical to take a similar product and compare it’s price (product cost excluding shipping). Though it’s not always apple-to-apple, some items are more or less the same.

For this sample, we’re taking Gildan’s women t-shirt. On Teelaunch, there’s only a single type available and that’s priced from $10.25 per piece. On Printful, there are two types of Gildan women t-shirt that you can sell, either loose or fit cutting. Using DTG printing, these two are priced from $13.25 and $13.75 respectively.

Here we can see that Printful’s products are slightly expensive compared to Teelaunch. This is true as well for the Bella women t-shirt that’s only $11.50-$13.50 on Teelaunch but $16.50 on Printful. To be fair, skinny tumblers are also more pricey on Printful compared to Teelaunch (by about $4!).

Winner: Teelaunch – products are much cheaper compared to Printful.

3. Shipping charges

While shipping charges might be different for every item, it should be quite standardized for a specific type of product e.g. clothes. It is one of the things that most customers overthink about when shopping online so it’s important for you to know the average shipping fees for each fulfillment company.

Shipping charges for Gildan women t-shirt to the USA for Teelaunch is at $5.50 for the first item, while its only $3.99 on Printful. An additional piece of t-shirt would mean an extra $1.50 on Teelaunch but $2.00 on Printful.

Number of items	Teelaunch ($)	Printful ($)
First item	5.50	3.99
Second item	1.50	2.00

So if you know that your customers are more inclined to purchase just 1-3 piece of t-shirts in a single check out, Printful offers cheaper shipping overall. This decision is highly dependent on the market you’re selling to (Europe, USA, UK or Asia) and the types of products you’re looking to sell (size & weight).

Note: Shipping availability differs for every product. Teelaunch’s sports equipment cannot be shipped outside the USA.

Winner: Printful – shipping rates are cheaper for 1-3 units of t-shirts purchased in a single check out.

4. Discounts on samples

Some print on demand fulfillments offer discounts for artists/sellers to order samples of their own printed designs. Printful is well-known in the market to give 20% off sample orders every month based on your monthly accumulated sales – you can read about it here.

Each seller can order 1 sample order pack per month with maximum of 3 items. Your monthly sample order limit should grow with increase in your monthly accumulated sales on Printful.

Teelaunch on the other hand, has stopped from offering sample discounts. Would be helpful if this information was provided on their site or on the support help page. I submitted a manual ticket just to find out!

Winner: Printful – clarity on 20% sample discounts and how to utilize it.

5. Customer service

When it comes to customer service, more is best. It’s always a game of how to communicate and which channel responds the fastest. So if I were impatient, I would just bombard all channels with the same Q.

I find Printful to be more convenient as there are multiple ways to contact their support. This includes being able to send an email inquiry or have a live chat with the team via seller dashboard. You can also connect with Printful on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or TikTok. The fastest reply might just come from social media!

While Teelaunch also has a live chat on their help page, you can submit an enquiry ticket via your dashboard and state the importance as high or low. My high-importance ticket was replied to within less than 30 minutes even when it was super early in the morning for the US.

Winner: Undecided – both are great in their own ways! But if there’s any reason Printful should win, it’s for their social media.

6. Eco-friendly products

One of the few things sellers are looking for nowadays are eco-friendly print on demand products. Although its fairly more expensive than normal range of items, sustainable wear has become increasingly popular and it’s a niche market of its own!

Printful has a great selection of eco-friendly and organic merchandise made of recycled materials. This includes clothes, tote bags, headwear, aprons and even cut fabric (yes, you can order these!). Likewise, all are priced above $10 where most are in the $15-$30 range.

Unfortunately, Teelaunch does not have an eco-friendly selection of products and does not provide any information if their products are sustainably made (eyes on apparels). However, I did find that their cutting boards are made of organic bamboo.

Winner: Printful – detailed catalog with a lot of eco-friendly organic products, enough for you to make a whole ecommerce store out of them!

7. Product mockups

Mockups play an important role at convincing customers to make a purchase. After all, it is the only thing your customers are able to visualize when making a purchase online. Not the same as in-store!

Printful’s products come with excellent mockups and you don’t need an extra tool to edit. Depending on the type of product, a real live mockup is generated and synced to your store’s listing – even for bags!

The sample below shows a design on a toddler’s t-shirt. Aside from just the main mockup, you can also get mockup for back and inside labels (if you add any design to them).

Uploading designs to Teelaunch is very easy and smooth. Their main product mockup is satisfactory and looks good on its own. Images are super clear and nice!

However, there are no extra mockups you can select to sync with your store – unless you design both front and back (so there will be four images). Unlike Printful, there are no mockups of the t-shirt being worn on an individual. So you’ll have to do it separately using mockup-generating sites like Placeit.

Winner: Printful – multiple real mockups are used which helps to convince customers to make a purchase.

8. User-friendly platform

I’m not sure about you, but I will choose a user-friendly platform over anything else any day. Printful is one of the best POD sites to use which is both up-to-date, interactive and user-friendly. You simply know where to go, what to click on and how to get things done.

As you can see below, their dashboard is lively and inviting!

Teelaunch does not look like the most modern platform to me nor does it have the feel of it. It isn’t very interactive and loads slightly slow than what I would prefer (even when you’re going through their catalog).

When you’re logged in to the dashboard, it’s pretty straightforward with not much information or areas to toggle with. If you love a simple interface, you might love Teelaunch.

Winner: Printful – I like an up-to-date easy to use fulfillment website where everything you need is within a few clicks.

9. Integrations available

When it comes to selling online, the more markets you can tap into, the better. Unlike manning a physical store, selling on multiple marketplaces at once does not take a toll on you and does not necessarily require another person to be hired. You can do everything on your own (if you wish to)!

Almost all fulfillment sites offer free integration with ecommerce platforms like Etsy, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix etc. You don’t need to pay anything to sync to ALL of them because they love it when you make more sales.

Printful offers WAY more integration options compared to Teelaunch. If you don’t find a marketplace/platform that you like down below, you can even connect to these sites via API.

Teelaunch	Printful
Etsy Shopify WooCommerce BigCommerce API	Shopify WooCommerce Etsy Wix Squarespace Magento BigCommerce Ecwid Weebly Prestashop Shipstation Big Cartel Gumroad Shift4Shop Launch Cart Webflow Square Nuvemshop BASE Amazon eBay Storenvy TikTok API

Winner: Printful – just because they have a much longer list of integration options including social media and marketplaces.

10. Online resources

After building my online business from self learning random things online (and not my degree), I am much more appreciative of the abundance of free online resources there is in this era (plus not being born a 100 years ago).

If you’re new to print on demand and a complete beginner, I would highly recommend going with a fulfillment site where you can find help online (aside from customer service). This would mean help pages, forums, YouTube videos, blogs, Facebook groups and even Twitter threads.

Though I’m trying my best to not be bias, I find that there’s a lot more online resources available for Printful compared to Teelaunch. In general, there are a lot more sellers using Printful!

Printful also provides their own online resources for sellers so they’re not leaving you high and dry – including their own courses (4 types at the moment), lessons and YouTube videos. There’s hardly any resources on Teelaunch to guide you aside from their help section and blogs.

Winner: Printful – full-fledged lessons and 5-module courses of their own, you don’t need to search for yourself!

11. Profitability

Profit margins are determined by selling price, cost price, advertisement expenses and selling fees (if any). While POD sites generally do not charge you anything beyond what you’re paying for your customer’s orders, having an ecommerce store isn’t entirely free. This is true even when selling on Etsy or Shopify.

For the sake of making things simple, we’ll consider gross profit to be selling price minus cost price. As seen above, products are more expensive on Printful compared to Teelaunch. Therefore, assuming everything else is the same (you’re selling on the same platform etc.), gross profit should be higher when selling with Teelaunch.

Just to add another sample using a 150 page spiral notebooks. A spiral notebook costs $11.95 on Printful compared to just $6.75 on Teelaunch. If you’re selling at an average price of $17.80 (based on Etsy samples below excl. shipping), your gross profit is only $5.85 with Printful – but $11.05 with Teelaunch.

Winner: Teelaunch – profit margins is higher as most products are cheaper compared to Printful.

12. Custom labelling

If you’re planning to be in the business for the long term, branding is something you’ll have to work on. One of the ways is to add your own brand labels to products and include branding elements within an order package.

Printful lets you do both for an additional charge. You can print your brand logo on the inside/outside labels of clothing, use a custom packaging for all orders and create a customized brand tracking page (free). Want to go an extra mile? Printful also lets you add flyers, coupons, business cards, branded stickers and postcards to any shipment.

While Teelaunch might not have the same, they do offer FREE premium branding services for canvas wraps, framed canvases and framed art prints. You can add any one of the elements below by just uploading a file image. There isn’t an option to add label printing for clothes on Teelaunch though.

Winner: Printful – although most are paid add-ons, there’s a lot more options to consider. A professional in the business shouldn’t worry about spending on branding!

13. Referral or affiliate program

Another way to increase your profit as a seller is to promote the fulfillment site to others you know. Referral programs or affiliate programs can provide another revenue stream for you as an artist/seller and works great if you’re an influencer with an audience of your own.

Printful offers both referral and affiliate programs to their users. You’re automatically given your own referral link to share once you’ve signed up to the site. Anyone who uses your link will get a $5 discount on their purchase and you will receive $5 credit to use yourself. Win-win!

Printful’s affiliate program on the other hand requires you to fill up another form and provide some details on how you would promote the site. For every customer that signs up with your link, you’ll get a 10% commission off their purchase for the first nine months.

Teelaunch does not have any ongoing programs for referrals or affiliates. So you won’t be able to make anything extra than what you’re making with product sales. Totally fine if that’s what you want!

Winner: Printful – it’s always sweet to earn more money by just promoting what you already use and love!

Teelaunch vs Printful: Summary of Differences 

Features	Teelaunch	Printful
Free sign up	🗸	🗸
Ecommerce integration	🗸	🗸
Selling at platform store	🗴	🗴
Discounts on samples	🗴	🗸
Eco-friendly products	🗴	🗸
Custom label your products	🗸	🗸
Include business cards and pamphlets in shipments	🗴	🗸
Live chat	🗸	🗸
Educational content	🗸	🗸
Incentives for higher sales	🗴	🗸
Referral program	🗴	🗸
Affiliate program	🗴	🗸

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Teelaunch vs Printful: How To Decide

Here’s three major things to look at when deciding which print on demand fulfillment you should join:

1. Product selection
   • More choice of items you can sell in a store, the better
   • You don’t always have to sell everything there is but having the option to do so is great
   • Extra points if the POD company have up-to-date trendy collections
2. Integrations available
   • You’re never sure which ecommerce site you’ll be selling on in the future
   • Best to go with a POD company that offers a lot of integrations
   • You can easily duplicate and sync the same product to another marketplace without any extra work
3. Online resources
   • Doing business online is not the easiest thing everyone else thinks it is
   • You’ll face challenges along the way when you’re making progress
   • Best to go with a site where you can easily get help from others and from the site itself!

Selling with multiple fulfillments is not a bad thing either. But not recommended for beginners!

Bottom Line

Here are 13 things you should consider when deciding between Teelaunch and Printful for print on demand:

1. Product catalog
2. Product pricing
3. Shipping charges
4. Discounts on samples
5. Customer service
6. Eco-friendly products
7. Product mockups
8. User-friendly platform
9. Integrations available
10. Online resources
11. Profitability
12. Custom labelling
13. Referral & affiliate program

Determined which fulfillment to go with? It’s your time to decide on a product to sell, check out my product guides!

• Tote bags for print on demand
• Tumblers for print on demand
• Phone cases for print on demand
• Posters for print on demand
• Leggings for print on demand
• Jewelry for print on demand
• Candles for print on demand
• Doormats for print on demand
• Hoodies for print on demand
• Pet products for print on demand
• Socks for print on demand
• Pajamas for print on demand
• Blankets for print on demand
• Baby clothes for print on demand
• Wrapping paper for print on demand
• Puzzles for print on demand
• Stickers for print on demand
• Athletic wear for print on demand
• Hats for print on demand
• Journals for print on demand
• Greeting cards for print on demand
• Mugs for print on demand

Photo by cottonbro studio