Print on Demand vs Dropshipping
Fortunately, two ecommerce models exist to simplify your launch: print on demand and dropshipping—budget-friendly, space-saving solutions that let you start selling without inventory headaches. Continue reading below to compare the print on demand versus dropshipping methods and decide which approach works best for your growing business.
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What is dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a fulfillment strategy enabling you to start an online store without personally producing, purchasing, warehousing, or shipping products yourself. Instead, retailers partner with dropshipping providers—companies that stock and dispatch a broad range of merchandise. By delegating order processing and brand operations, ecommerce entrepreneurs lower their overhead expenses and eliminate all storage requirements.
Under a dropshipping arrangement, online retailers, or “sellers of record,” choose items offered by a dropshipping partner and prominently display them in their web storefront. When a buyer submits a purchase, the retailer passes it along to the dropshipping partner, which handles fulfillment on the retailer’s behalf. Shopify merchants can use applications in the Shopify App Store to discover and import products from different suppliers. Solutions include DropCommerce for dropshipping within the US market and Syncee for the EU and rest of the world.
What is print on demand?
Print on demand (POD) is a style of dropshipping business model that enables you to sell products with custom designs without purchasing or managing any inventory yourself.
With print on demand, merchants design custom artwork or brand logos, then choose a range of items from a POD provider to feature their designs. Clothing, accessories, drinkware, and prints are common print-on-demand offerings. The merchant adds these products and design variants to their online shop, and when a shopper places an order, the provider prints, packs, and delivers the item directly. Shopify entrepreneurs can connect with services like Printful to launch their POD operations without handling any inventory themselves.
Print on demand vs. dropshipping: similarities
- No physical store or warehouse
- Limited inventory management
- Supplier reliability
- Low startup costs
Both dropshipping and print on demand business ecommerce frameworks transfer inventory oversight and order fulfillment tasks to external third-party vendors. Here are the ways they align:
No physical store or warehouse
An essential aspect shared by both print on demand and dropshipping frameworks is that you don’t need a physical storefront. Third‑party suppliers dispatch items straight to buyers once orders are confirmed, eliminating any requirement for you, the ecommerce entrepreneur, to hold inventory. This streamlined approach is a major reason why people can easily start either type of venture. There are no overhead expenses for renting, equipping, or staffing a shop or storage facility, which significantly lowers the barrier to entry.
Limited inventory management
Because both dropshipping services and print-on-demand providers manufacture, hold, and dispatch orders directly to buyers, online store owners don’t have to allocate effort toward standard inventory control. Nevertheless, you can adopt inventory management best methods to optimize your workflow.
Use real-time inventory management tools to:
- Sync with your suppliers and prevent stockouts
- Forecast demand and plan for increases or decreases
- Keep open lines of communication with suppliers to stay abreast of product trends and potential issues
Supplier reliability
Both print-on-demand and dropshipping operations depend on suppliers not only to supply products but also to handle packaging and delivery. That is why selecting a supplier you trust is crucial to uphold your brand’s standards, ensuring they provide premium-quality items that you confidently endorse to boost customer satisfaction.
Before you commit to a reliable provider, request product samples and carefully inspect the packaging to verify quality firsthand before offering items for sale. It might also be wise to maintain several providers in your network, even for identical items, so that one supplier’s failure doesn’t jeopardize your operations.
Low startup costs
When you outsource sourcing and logistics, these approaches incur lower startup expenses than traditional wholesale operations, freeing up your time and overall budget for activities like marketing, branding, and customer service
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Print on demand vs. dropshipping: differences
- Customization
- Product selection
- Competition
- Branding
- Return support
Although the process of fulfilling orders for both systems is nearly identical, print-on-demand and dropshipping differ in a few key areas:
Customization
Print on demand depends on one-of-a-kind custom designs that bring your brand identity to life on truly tangible products. Certain dropshipping vendors provide branded packaging for merchants adopting custom dropshipping, though you can also dropship items with no personalization. In POD, you craft the design itself, whereas with dropshipping, you aren’t directly tasked with any product development or creation.
Product selection
Dropshipping providers supply a broad range of ready-to-ship items, frequently sorted by category—such as home furnishings or electronic gadgets. Platforms like DropCommerce showcase collections from independent brands, small-scale makers in their catalogs.
POD vendors offer an assortment of ready-to-customize items. Printful, as an example, carries well-known, quality t-shirt labels appreciated by shoppers, such as Gildan or American Apparel, along with plain tote bags, smartphone cases, and more.
Competition
Odds are your dropshipping supplier distributes products to ecommerce stores in various niches. As a result, multiple shops may sell identical or nearly identical items at similar price points.
Therefore, online businesses relying on dropshipping need to prioritize differentiation. This involves curating a unique product mix or building a strong brand identity that captivates customers instead of depending solely on product offerings.
In contrast, print-on-demand applies custom designs to each product, resulting in truly distinctive inventory that is more likely to resonate with a specific audience and carve out its own niche in the market.
Branding
With print-on-demand, brand building takes center stage, as companies can produce clothing and custom merchandise featuring their own logo, catchy taglines, limited‑edition collections, and more for loyal fans. Dropshipping, by comparison, offers limited branding potential. Packaging and fulfillment afford minimal customization, and dropshipped products seldom remain truly unique directly to a seller.
Return support
Most dropshipping vendors maintain return policies covering refunds, exchanges, or returns, particularly in cases of supplier mistakes or damaged items and out-of-stock situations. Dropshipped products come from preexisting catalogs, making replacements fairly straightforward.
Because dropshipping merchants do not manage inventory directly, they serve as liaisons between customers and suppliers, relaying policy information and order statuses when necessary. Confer with your provider regarding returns and refunds, and establish your own detailed customer-facing guidelines accordingly.
In comparison, the bespoke characteristic of print-on-demand items complicates returns. Since each order is produced individually once placed, some POD providers may require customers to cover return shipping costs or may not provide full refunds. Consequently, you as the seller could be responsible for return or exchange potentially significant expenses or need to enforce a strict return policy to mitigate losses.
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