19 Best Print-On-Demand Companies to Earn Passive Income Online

Over the course of the past few years and thanks to the advancement of technology, numerous print-on-demand companies have emerged that have given birth to a totally new online income opportunity that leaves even the laziest person on earth without any excuse to earn passive income online.

Unlike the traditional “batch-dependent” mode of production where you have to produce in bulk, these print-on-demand companies can print even on a single piece of merchandise. This has completely scratched out the risk linked to the unused inventory so the manufacturers can be more “liberal” with their designs and test even more varieties of them.

This “risk-free” production has led many print-on-demand (POD) companies to take it even a step further. In addition to relying on their in-house designers, they’ve also started to crowdsource this function thus enabling thousands of aspiring designers to make money online from their cool and catchy designs.

What makes the POD phenomenon even more fun, simple, cool and inclusive is that you don’t have to be Giorgio Armani and create awe-striking designs yourself. Just outsource the designing part to any “real” graphics designer, slap that design on any merchandise and make money online as soon as someone orders that merchandise.

In essence, you will make money just for an idea that popped into your head out of nowhere.

However, this article isn’t about teaching you how to make money from the print-on-demand trend but instead is an attempt to let you know about the best print-on-demand websites that allow people to start their own Print on Demand store and create a steady passive income stream for themselves.

So let’s cut right to the chase and check out the best print on demand companies having their arms wide opened to embrace new and aspiring independent artists.

Best Print-on-Demand Companies to Kickstart your POD Business

Here’s a long list of one of the best Print-on-demand companies, without any particular order, to whom you can approach to kickstart your online POD business.

Threadless

Threadless is one of the most popular print-on-demand websites that more or less follows the same footsteps as RedBubble.

With almost 2 million monthly traffic and hundreds of products to choose from, Threadless is pretty much a go-to choice for many “artists” who want to get on the Print-on-demand bandwagon to create a passive side income.

However, in my opinion, what sets Threadless apart from its competitors is its simple pricing model. Unlike the other POD providers who bombard you with different costing heads and complex formulas to arrive at the profit per unit sold, Threadless provides you a simple “base price” based on each article.

All you have to do is to deduct this base price from your selling price and that’s it. The remainder is the profit.

Additionally, normally, the POD providers take care of all the production and in many cases, the marketing of your products. However, Threadless even goes a step further as it provides a feature of setting prices on behalf of you so that you can completely dedicate yourself just at the designing process.

Printful

With almost 4 million monthly visitors, Printful is a popular choice for beginners who want to get started with the print-on-demand drop-shipping model since in addition to being a POD provider it also provides comprehensive training to its users. Not only that, Printful has an in-built and absolutely FREE Design Maker feature that allows you to create stunning designs for your products. All without needing to invest heavily and install fancy designing software on your own computer.

In addition to its vast network of fulfillment centers distributed all across the globe, the real strength of Printful comes from what seems to be like a never-ending list of integrations. Although Printful lacks its own marketplace, its huge list of integrations with popular platforms makes up for its downside.

Printify

With a monthly traffic of 2.8 million, Printify stands tall among the list of POD providers. It has a large network of print providers hence enabling them to fulfill customer orders at high speed.

As a Print-on-demand business owner, you have access to more than 300 high-quality products to apply your designs and just to make sure that how they look, Printify offers a mockup generator where you can drag & drop your design to upload, switch between color options, pick size variants and preview your designs on a 3D high-quality product image.

Interestingly, so far, Printify seems to be the only POD provider that offers to apply designs on pets supplies. Not sure why others aren’t doing the same or if they are doing then why not advertise it so openly as the pets niche is a huge billion-dollar market.

Stakes Manufacturing

Stakes Manufacturing, although not among the popular POD companies, and rightly so as it’s just been a couple of years when they first rolled the dice. Although they are new as they started back in 2019, I’m sharing their details as I’ve had and have been dealing them in some capacity.

Stakes Manufacturing POD company does not have its own marketplace and you cannot create an account on their website without first contacting them so you can expect to go through some bureaucratic chain before you hire them as your printer but I’m sure that this will change in the future.

On the upside, since they are new, you can exercise an upper hand when it comes to negotiations and use it as your leverage to negotiate an ideal deal when it comes to the cost. Besides, in just a short span of time, they’ve managed to create some buzz as they’ve been cited by some reknowned publications like The News Herald, Kormit Digital, News 5 ABC, etc. So one can say that they really mean business.

Spri.ng

Formerly TeeSpring that we have already talked about earlier in a different article, the company has decided to morph and rebrand into Spri.ng.

This makes it one o the oldest players in the custom printing and print-on-demand game and that’s evident from the whopping amount of traffic (6.24 million) per month.

Spri.ng has its own marketplace known as TeeSpring Marketplace and as a “creator” you can start your own store without paying anything. Just enter your basic information such as your brand name, email address, password, etc., and you’re good to go.

Teelaunch

Teelaunch is basically a different website than the other POD providers that we’ve talked about here and the reason is that instead of a website, it’s basically an app that integrates your already existing Shopify store with their own platform.

So this means that you need to have your own Shopify store first before using this Teelaunch as they do not have their own marketplace.

What it basically does is provide a gateway to the visitors of Shopify and Etsy stores to place orders through these stores directly to Teelaunch. Teelaunch then prints and fulfills them.

CustomCat

CustomCat is a relatively newer player in the POD domain and receives a lot less traffic than its competitors (122.5K per month), however, they ship products all around the world except, Cuba, Falkland Islands, Iran, North Korea, Somalia, & Sudan. In addition to that, CustomCat provides full door-to-door tracking updates for 32 countries (including the US).

Although the variety of merchandise is limited CustomCat offers great design options where, in addition to adding your own designs, you can also choose from CustomCat’s own design library. Having said that, the major turn-off of CC is that it does not have its own marketplace so you will have to create your own store on some other platform that integrates with CustomCat.

SPOD

SPOD has more than 150 products and works best for non-designers who are inexperienced in using fancy designing software or even simple drawing software such as MS Paint. This POD provider offers up to 50K free designs to choose from so there’s no need to hire any designer or artist. Just choose the product and the design and then focus only on the selling part of the business.

SPOD receives monthly traffic of 123.5K which I think is on the lower side especially when you consider that they’ve been in business for the last 20 years. Nevertheless, you can bank on their experience provided that their monthly traffic does not impress you.

Interestingly, and yet another downside of SPOD is that there is a whole bunch of counties where they do not ship. Just make sure you go through the list before signing up.

JetPrint

JetPrint is a POD app that integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce so you need to first have stores in either of these two platforms before trying your hands on this app.

Since JetPrint is just an app that acts as a gateway for two major e-commerce platforms, it doesn’t have its own marketplace. All you can do with the JetPrint App is get your hands on their 200+ products in different categories, test and apply your designs on them and upload them on your Shopify or Etsy stores and then just wait for the orders to line up.

Just like any other POD service, JetPrint will take care of everything from there. From receiving orders to designing and then finally shipping it.

Although JetPrint does offer an interface to design products online and check them virtually that how they look but if you want to get the feel of the fabric and verify other important minute details, JetPrint will also ship samples at a discounted rate to check the quality of printing.

T-Pop

Based in Europe and receiving just short of 82K monthly traffic T-Pop claims to be an eco-friendly POD provider that also gives the environment the considerable importance that it deserves. All the way from their products, to printing and even the distribution.

For instance, they use eco-friendly printers and only offer products that are environment-friendly. This may affect the range of their product lines but, hey, the mother-earth comes first. Right?

Moreover, T-Pop’s noble attempts to preserve the environment do not stop at the printing or their choice of products. In fact, they also make sure to carry forward this legacy to other aspects of their logistics as well. Such as no usage of plastic in shipment and acquiring carbon-neutral mode of transport to deliver their shipment.

Although T-Pop does provide a portal to test out your own products before selling them but they don’t have an active marketplace them so you will have to integrate your own store with T-Pop.

Gooten

With almost 190K monthly traffic, Gooten offers more than 150 different kinds of different products to apply your designs. Use the Gooten in-built mockup generator to see how your design will look like on their product. One bummer that you will face is that Gooten does not have its own marketplace. So just like other POD providers, you will have to create your own store and integrate it with Gooten.

Gooten has a large collection of products so you have a wide variety to choose from.

Gooten ships all around the world using its network of 70+ global locations which means that once the order is placed, it is processed and shipped from the location closest to the customer allowing for faster delivery and lower shipping costs.

Gelato

Gelato is yet another POD provider that has its offices all around the world with 100+ production centers which mean that your designed product can reach the hands of customers from more than 200 countries within 72 hours.

With 540K people visiting their website every month, Gelato boasts about their reliability when it comes to delivering clients’ orders as they claim that they deliver millions of parcels every year with 99.9% reliability.

Although Gelato does not offer an active marketplace but once you sign up, you’ll have access to an Order Management portal with a detailed view to keep track of each and every order.

In addition to a mockup generator which is quite usual for print-on-demand providers, what sets Gelato apart is that it also integrates with [enter link]Canva[/link], a popular website with exciting designing features, to create your own custom canvases.

LuLu Express

Contrary to the other POD providers we’ve discussed in this article who offer custom print-on-demand facilities for clothing and apparel, LuLu Express’s sole focus is books.

Therefore, if you’re in search of a venue that designs books with custom book covers, processes orders and then fulfills them on your behalf then LuLu Express should be your go-to POD provider.

Having said that, an important point to keep in mind is that LuLu is definitely not a newcomer in this game as it has experience of more than 2 decades under its belt and during this entire period, has been a popular choice among self-publishing authors.

AOP+ Print On Demand

AOP Plus is basically an app that integrates with Shopify and Etsy stores. It’s a family-run business that offers POD services to businesses selling on Shopify or Etsy.

Although there are 200 different products that AOP Plus prints on but they mainly lurk around clothing items. Therefore, it seems like that they’re quite focused when it comes to having the choice of selecting different types of products.

Since AOP Plus is an app, there’s no marketplace to display your designs on or any other fancy options so they’re basically competing on the basis of cost and location.

Zazzle

With 15.5 million monthly visitors, Zazzle is another popular POD provider that targets the “events” niche.

What this means is that if you want to sell merchandise with your design on them, specific to any event then Zazzle could be a great place to start.

In addition to the built-in templates that give you a headstart in the designing process, another great feature that Zazzle provides is its Trending section that gives a good idea of what’s hot and in so that the designer can extract benefit from the rising trends. Moreover, this also helps in kicking off the creative juices and knock-out any artistic block.

Zazzle does have its own active marketplace which guarantees a higher success rate as you have the opportunity of showing off your designs to a large number of FREE and diversified traffic from all around the world.

Besides, you can make money online through Zazzle not only by selling your own custom-designed products but also through royalties earned from your designs when other sellers sell your design.

Just in case you’re not a designer then you can also use Zazzle’s in-house designing services or choose from Zazzle’s own library. However, you will have to pay upfront for their design and services.

Spreadshirt

Spreadshirt offers two options to sell its merchandise using the POD service. Either you can open your own store where you have more freedom to upload your own products in addition to those that you may get from their POD service. This store comes loaded with some dope built-in features such as T-Shirt Designer where the customer can upload his picture (or apply your own designs) on your merchandise to test how it will look like.

Second, if you don’t want to go through the admin-related hassle, just showcase your designs on Spreadshirt’s own marketplace. With the Spreadshirt’s website receiving 3 million visitors per month, imagine the potential earnings that you can generate if you’re lucky enough to come up with a design that resonates with the visitors.

With more than 200 products, just like any other Print-on-demand provider, all you have to do is to paste your design on any one of Spreadshirt’s products and that’s it. Due to Spreadshirt’s factories being strategically located in 5 different locations across Europe and the U.S., your products can be delivered to 150 different locations worldwide.

CafePress

CafePress is also another well-known POD provider that has its own marketplace and more than 250 products to apply your designs on. Additionally, it also but offers to sell your designs in a unique way.

CafePress has a partnership deal with various popular TV shows, movies and bands. All you have to do is to create and tag the design to the relevant property. After about 72 hours, your design will be a part of that movie, show or band’s official fan page within CafePress Entertainment.

With more than 2.74 million visitors per month, CafePress provides a great platform to sell merchandise with your own designs. In fact, given the popularity of the famous entertainment franchises that CafePress partner’s with,

Society 6

Based in California, Society6 has made its name promoting trendy and artsy products. So if you’re interested in having your design imprinted on some hip and cool merchandise instead of some boring and bland one then Society 6 might just be the POD provider you’re looking for.

With 7.12 Million monthly visitors, Society6 is a great avenue to not only Make Money Online by showcasing your designs and having them printed on their products but also to get creative and quench your artistic thirst.

To give even a more exciting spin, Society6 has teamed up with globally known franchises like Disney and Star Wars which means that if you crave the force being with you or can’t get enough of the famous, “Let it go…” song, then you can carry on your passion on Society 6’s merchandises

Final Thoughts

I hope you’ll find this list of the best print-on-demand companies quite helpful and most importantly, will provide you with the basic but necessary information to start your own POD business. Having said that, feel free to let me know if you want to include any other (or even your own) POD company that I left out so that the readers can benefit from the information.