Ultimate Top List of T-Shirt Fulfilment Sites

T-Shirt fulfilment sites offer anyone the chance to buy or create and sell custom t-shirt designs to friends, family or the general public. There only used to be the one, CafePress.com, a behemoth of the t-shirt industry, although it has since expanded into all kinds of promotional merchandise, much of which makes me despair if the truth be told. I took years to hop on to the t-shirt design, partly out of laziness, but mainly due to the expense, inconvenience, mess, endless hours slaving over a silk-screen or screen-printing machine, the mess (I’m repeating this for my partner’s sake, she knows I’d have ink all over the house in a day), plus the now over-inflated rate of GBP means I can’t really compete with all the USA designers, many of whom can be found charging as little as $9.99 out there, I must be the only man in Britain who’s urging the recession on lol.

T-shirt fulfilment sites let you submit your design (within certain specifications), print it, package it and post it, to either you or your customer. Some provide hosted stores, although they’re usually hardly more than a dynamic page and a stock photos, and invariably the profit you’ll gain from these stores is low, due to the high base costs of these companies. But don’t let that put you off, there are some who make a decent wage, although they have usually gained an enormous amount of publicity to get there (or have an unlimited advertising budget!).

These services range from complete t-shirt fulfilment sites, partial service as in printing and delivery but without a store, and other alternatives to consider when you’re setting up as an online t-shirt designer. If you’re not you’ll still find this gargantuan resource of brand new and original t-shirt designs worth a read, there’s nothing better than showing off your individuality through a hot and rare t-shirt design, although be warned, there are a lot of crud ones out there too. Some of the most popular t-shirts at these sites do actually suck, think lowest common denominator and you’ll understand why. Just stick with it and you’re bound to find a gem!

I’ll list them by Alexa.com traffic stats and Google PR to give you an idea of popularity, but don’t be swayed by the figures, some of the best designs are actually available from the least well known t-shirt fulfilment sites like RedBubble.com, let’s just say you get what you pay for! You can glean some interesting details on this topic from T-ShirtTalk.com’s post on Better Business Bureau company service ratings of the top t-shirt fulfilment sites.

Quote from T-Shirt Talk :- Cafepress currently has an unsatisfactory rating but its not because of the number of complaints that gave the company an unsatisfactory rating, it is that Cafepress ” failed to resolve the underlying issues for a pattern of complaints”. Zazzle actually has almost 3x as many complaints but has a satisfactory record because they have addressed the majority of issues brought to the BBB. ChoiceShirts was the only company to have no complaints in the past three years.

Then again BBB doesn’t have too much clout on the world stage, their figures depend on how many aggrieved customers submit their complaint to them, rather than merely the company in question. I know this won’t be spoiling any surprises when I say that Cafe Press have had the most complaints, but the numbers are trifling, and considering the amount of orders they deal with each year, almost trivial.

Cafepress.com

With two business premises in Kentucky and California USA, this company almost primarily concentrates on their home-grown market. They neither attempt to compete on quality, i.e solely provides Direct to Garment (DTG) inkjet printing, as opposed to screen printed (higher quality print process) or flock (felt), or international distribution, the way that say SpreadShirt.com/net has done over the past few years. Spreadshirt are fast catching up in size and popularity, but it will be sometime before Cafe Press wakes up to the fact that most of the world doesn’t want a ‘Stars and Stripes’ or ‘I heart a USA City’ t-shirt design, they must be terrified of all the upstarts out there with, in general, far better designers filling their books. The truth is Cafe Press is so big it’s doing itself damage, it can’t be personable or individualistic in its approach, it can’t respond as swiftly and deftly to customer demand, it works on just two principles. 1. Sell the most product possible at the lowest price margins possible, although their prices have risen over the years, they still offer a bog-standard basic t-shirt with print for $9.99, the minute it goes over ten bucks you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll be in deep doo doo, and they know it. 2. Ship anywhere no matter the cost, (well almost anywhere - minus war torn areas by the looks of it). The customer pays the cost of course, which radically changes the final bill for many of them based in the UK (for instance). I would sell far more of my t-shirts at CafePress.com if only they would open a European print/distribution centre. There are lots of cheapskates in Europe too, besides it would lower their carbon footprint, CP doesn’t have a good environmental record, barring the one organic t-shirt they offer, it doesn’t seemed to have occurred them that the end of the world may put a dent in their profits. That said they have an enormous range of t-shirts, their actually won a Webby in 2007 so they must be doing something right, their prices are about as competitive as you’re going to get on the Net, even with the past hikes, but my personal major complaint is the limit on image print sizes. They do offer a ‘marketplace’ - a search engine and directory that offers some sales if you’re lucky. They use DTG printers, some of the most expensive in the world, but they won’t print beyond the standard “10 x 10″ centred on the t-shirt, this is awful. Current demand steers the market, and it wants larger prints of better quality. They will have to deal with this problem one day as more and more local t-shirt printers re-engage with a new generation of consumers who only design for themselves and friends.

SpreadShirt.net

One of two sites owned by Spreadshirt, Inc., SpreadShirt.com is located in USA and .net in Europe. They offer Flock, Screen Print and Flex printing on a far higher quality range of t-shirts and hoodies, plus prints and a few other items. They do seem to avoid the same pitfalls as CafePress.com - although their vector image submission process is notoriously difficult to master, I still get rejections and I’ve managed to successfully submit designs before. This may explain the popularity of DTG sites amongst the bulk of t-shirt designers our there, although this also lowers the quality of design in many cases, let alone the print. If you’re looking to buy t-shirts this is a great place to hunt for undiscovered talent.

Threadless.com is the king of all t-shirt voting sites, they print by popular demand, they’ve rejected some real beauties in the past and the only way you can ensure that you don’t miss them all is if they sell them at quality screen printed t-shirt fulfilment sites like Spread Shirt. Luckily there is a blog that finds them for you, they source alternative sites to purchase Threadless’ rejects and list them at BestLosers.com - one of the t-shirt reviews blogs I have included in my ultimate list of reviewers. Although expect to pay more for quality, I had ordered a flock version of my American Pi t-shirt on a camouflage t-shirt for a friend’s birthday and they were over the moon about it.

My only real complaints about Spreadshirt as a designer are, a scrawny three t-shirts per designer (unless they sell lots or upgrade), a lack of all-over or belt printing options (this would be fantastic!), and absolutely no way of knowing who bought what from you, where they are, not even an email address, that is stingy. On the plus side the products are fantastic as I’ve mentioned, they offer some real organic options although the range is still limited, but overall they have a far better image in the industry. Quality over quantity I always say.

Zazzle.com

I have no excuses, I should’ve got round to uploading some designs at Zazzle.com - They are the 2nd biggest t-shirt fulfilment site in the world after all! I suppose I had had my fill with t-shirt fulfilment sites and was only going through the motions, you know, make a design, submit it to Threadless or Design By Humans, wait until I’d lost and then upload it to as many other sites as possible and somehow Zazzle was left out of the loop. This site is blog friendly, very Web 2.0, the prices are steeper than Cafe Press, but the process for both designer and buyer is far less tawdry, they keep the millions of flag and heart designs out of view via a tidy links system. In fact CP reminds me more and more of T-Shirt Countdown everyday, neither is an enjoyable experience. I feel embarrassed sending anyone to either, yes I’m a design snob, but most people in fashion (and let’s face facts, like it or not t-shirts are part of the fashion world now) are picky when it comes to a ‘projected style’ be it clothes or the store you buy it from. I was amazed at the ease of uploading an image and choosing a t-shirt for a store they provide for free, a shorter than usual sub-directory address (http://www.zazzle.com/buyteesnet), and with your own unique graphics header (take that Cafe Press!), but the design area is still too small. They tease you with endless zoom and enlargement functions and then you realise you’re cropping the image, I want a full t-shirt design, not a little piece of one.

What’s more they offer some pretty funky little widgets and ready-made codes like the above image and links. You earn a commission on both design and t-shirt design (as SpreadShirt do), and well take a look at the store they offer, it comes with loads of templates, or you can design your own, I am beginning to love this site (for a DTG printer that is). However the warning from BBB makes me doubt it’s all a bed of roses at Zazzle, even though they do fix their problems, unlike Cafe Press, they do seem to have a lot of them. Anyone bought a ropey t-shirt from them? Let’s hear about it! This is most definitely my favourite DTG site so far, now if only they could offer screen printing with the same ease I would be ‘addicteed’! NB - I have just noticed that Zazzle is causing errors in my Firefox 3.0 browser with Macbook Intel, I’d worry if this is a problem with all Firefox browsers who are slowly becoming a respectable sized portion of the net, somehow I guess I am one of a very few experiencing this judging by their popularity.

SpreadShirt.com

One of two sites owned by Spreadshirt, Inc., SpreadShirt.net is the European arm of the company, see below for more details at SpreadShirt.com. It’s ironic that this site is ranked higher seeing as how much attention is paid to the USA branch. Providing Flock, Screen Print and Flex printing on a far higher quality range of t-shirts and hoodies, plus prints and a few other items. Quality!

RedBubble.com

Red Bubble Rocks! I’ve been using them for a while and even though they’re all the way over in Australia they don’t charge mad prices, not even for shipping, they do provide quality tees even if they are DTG, but best of all I love the community here, really supportive and very friendly, although I’ve hardly made any cash from them, I still use them as a free source of market research for my latest designs. My only complaint is the shop urls, if it wasn’t for the really clean design I probably would’ve skipped them, if they provided subdomain stores I think they could climb even higher!

* (Amendment 6th July 08) Peter Styles (great surname for the fashion industry!) contacted me today to let you all know they do provide subdomains as well! The system is still in beta however it seems to working just fine as far as I can see. I’ve included both of my own store links so you can see, I must admit it’s great to have both options available, all the better for submitting your site to directories and so forth. If you’d like to read more about Red Bubble’s subdomain option read Peter’s post here or set up your own subdomain here. If you want to see what I have going on over there visit:-

http://retrogod.redbubble.com

http://www.redbubble.com/people/retrogod

CustomInk.com

Custom Ink crashes Camino browsers for a start, yes they’re not well known, it’s a Mac browser which combines features of both IE and Firefox, and it works like a gem usually. I was intrigued by CI’s upload options including .AI and .EPS files which make me wonder if this site actually offers screen printed t-shirts, I haven’t researched the site before and thought I’ll learn what I can as a newbie for a change, and that would freak most newbs out I’m sure. Oh well will try it in Firefox 3 instead! It’s been ten minutes and the browser is still hanging. Once again there should be more exact specs on image/file size to ensure people aren’t left hanging like this.

Use a Supported Browser to Guarantee a Great Experience

We’re constantly testing our design lab to ensure it works with:

• Firefox 1.5 or higher for Windows or Mac
• Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher for Windows
• Safari 2.0 for Mac (installed with OS X)

The design of the site is far more impressive though, slick and apart from the uploading process rather speedy. (Just looked again - still hanging). I’ve read in their about page that In 2005 and 2006, they were named in Inc. Magazine’s “Inc500″ list of America’s fastest-growing private companies, and were also included in Washingtonian Magazine’s last list of “Great Places to Work” in the DC area. Which is nice. (Still hanging). It’s good to see they offer a money-back guarantee and proper discounts on bulk orders, plus a further 50c reduction on all tees when you sponsor the site. Well the image never uploaded, none of my EPS and only one AI design would, however it seems they have a much larger print area than I expected, it could be almost the whole front area of the t-shirt which is very impressive! I will have to research this site further, I am beginning to understand its high popularity on the net Apart from the upload issues there’s no ecommerce facility for their designers, this really is aiming at the ‘family and friends’ market which makes me think someone’s going to have a disappointing Christmas (or two). I’d actually prefer this to using Cafe Press (even if the dribs and drabs of CP’s traffic at their marketplace offers some extra sales.) What’s more I’m not too impressed with the t-shirt styles seeing as they want you to buy a minimum of six at a time, yes there’s the catch, it’s halfway between Cafe Press and Print Mojo isn’t it? Essentially they want to get hobbyists and small associations to pay the bills. A bowling team for instance or a school reunion, I can’t see why they don’t just offer individual t-shirts and double their market? I’d be very interested in anyone’s personal experience of this site, I’ll let you find out more yourself about Custom Ink, very nearly a cracker of a site. Shame the lack of screen-printed tees, no long tees or baby doll styles, and a rather daft upload process, plus the minimum six tees is a sale breaker for me.

ShirtCity.com

Two things, don’t make me signup just to see what my design would look like on one of your t-shirts, that’s the wrong order to incentivise anyone to do anything. Secondly, and this is aimed at almost all of the above listed sites, why on earth four different sites all share the same Google Page Rank? If I was less of a cynic I could perhaps put it down to the limitations of the market, not everyone is interested in t-shirts, true, but four sites with the same PR? Come on, there must be some serious nepotism going on here, are they all in cahoots with each other? This feels like a wildlife documentary, we’re actually watching all the hyenas about to pounce on the old and raggedy king of the jungle, ah well, it just makes a mockery of Google PR for me, that’s all. I won’t be testing this site or this will be another all-night post, but if you’ve had experience of SC, please feel free to add your comments. I will say this, they offer a European and USA based site which is a good start, with bases in both Atlanta Georgia USA and Neu-Ulm (What’s with Germany? It’s always been kind of expensive to produce anything there? High standard of living, strong Euro?

Two different fulfilment companies in USA and Germany, (my spidey senses are tingling), something must be up. Luckily their t-shirts don’t look too bad overall, in fact I’d say they are in direct competition with Printfection, or rather vice versa. They are a pretty major player for the market so not one to be ignored, but somehow or other I am having trouble telling these CP clones apart. You have to give them credit for Scribtee which is their own Threadless clone script encouraging users to upload or vote for their submissions. If they want to go in that direction I’d create a full-fledged domain instead of a link like this nasty line of code, http://www.shirtcity.com/shop/index.php?sc4_start=en_idcom&set_language=en. If it becomes really profitable put it on the home page of Shirt City and be done with it. I have a feeling they couldn’t put that much trust in their designers, hence the half-hearted attempt to diversify, still I appreciate the fact they have even tried. If one site should be doing this it’s Cafe Press. now there’s voting power! The UK prices seem a little steep, with postage I’d be paying the most part of twenty squid for a pretty average looking tee with what in general seems to come with rather tired slogan and humorous designs, except I’ve seen them all before and I’m not laughing.

Printfection.com

Printfection takes a slightly different approach to CafePress.com but the similarities are marked. The first thing that hits you when you visit their site is the $2 t-shirt promotion they’re offering right now, they say until stocks last which makes me wonder if they have a warehouse full need shifting, if not then this a pretty savvy marketing technique to draw in designers and consumers alike. I’m uploading an design to them as I write this (look ma, multitasking and male), but I somehow expect a hefty shipping excess to dampen my spirits. If I have this right Printfection are aiming for the inbetweeners in the t-shirt market, positioning themselves between Cafe Press and the other sites mentioned so far, nearly at the bottom for quality, but not quite. The only way they can counteract the snobbery of t-shirt aficionados is to offer a $2 teaser and see how the wind blows. This might work in the short term but Cafe Press still have the advantage with millions of t-shirts and visitors each year, they can probably afford to wait and see what happens next with this site. Seemingly good quality shirts and a better range of colours than CP, even a supportive forum and a good track record won’t be enough to bring down their mightiest competitors.

I do wonder what will happen when oil (today is passing the USD$150 per barrel mark) is so expensive they won’t be able to afford to mail out from America to the world, this applies to so many online businesses it’s untrue. I’m sure the crisis will take a bite out of Ebay too, no matter what the exchange rate, if oil becomes anymore expensive we’ll be making jewellery out of it. The best way Printfection can gain advantage in the ‘on-demand’ DTG t-shirt printing industry, is if they created some more operations centres in Europe, Asia and so on. Otherwise it comes down to bulk mailing, the real kind that is not the online spam version, I’ve worked in stock rooms and purchasing in my time, mainly for companies I didn’t give a damn about (you wouldn’t like me if you employed me), and I know how companies deliberately backlog their outgoing orders so they can ship in bulk, it’s cheaper, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cafe Press owned their own container ship by now. The worst thing about this site is its awful design, it looks like CP ten years ago and needs a serious Web 2.0 update, incorporate forum feeds into the whole site and make it come alive, it’s really rather sketchy right now. Cafe Press have had a few redesigns in their past and at first glance you could be forgiven for thinking their site might sell classy tees, until you actually look at them. Then, as with Printfection, you are faced with endless square designs squashed into a regulation box centred on the t-shirt, yuck. What about something over the shoulder, or even a double size print? Technology needs to catch up and become cheaper, PF’s DTG is also supposed to be incredibly expensive, although they refuse to say which machine in their forum (which rather riles me), so I won’t give them the benefit of the doubt and guess that Cafe Press with all its millions of dollars of profits over the years actually offers better. I could be wrong, but if I am why doesn’t PF shout it to the rooftops, ‘hey everyone, look at my fancy dtg printer?’. Oh and their image upload form just crashed on me, perhaps it would be wise if they offered some specifications on image format, size and resolution before they invite passers-by to upload there?

ComBoutique.com

Com Boutique created so many problems for me I can’t be bothered with reviewing this site, if half the pages weren’t French it might be quite a good service, but I was horrified at the tiny print design area on offer, and in all honesty if I’m having to read French pages in the UK section of the site I’d rather take a walk on the beach.

ArtsNow.com

Probably the most popular Cafepress clone on the net. A bit cutesy.

Pringoo.com

One of the more popular Cafepress clones on the net. A little bit too much for me, mousemats and mugs galore, and a sparse and rather local high street look to the site.

ArtApart.com

I was about to review E-shirt.com when I noticed a tiny button in the footer that read ‘Powered by ArtApart.com’ and so we’ll skip the little brother site for a moment and stick with the source. So what hits me first is that in comparison with the ghastly looking E-shirt site, the layout at AA is inoffensive, not inspiring, but adequate, (though I’d dump the walpaper pronto). The upload process was fast and quick, they have strict guidelines on content so nothing you couldn’t show your granny by the looks of it. However the next problem I encounter is a severe lack of choice when it comes to coloured tees, and no control over print size, and finally not even a preview image of different coloured t-shirts as available on so many other sites. The range of t-shirts have rather watery colours, and I can’t tell what the quality of their prints would be like. This seems to be a very table-laden design and could do with some CSS. Maybe worth further investigation. E-Shirt is the t-shirt fulfilment arm of the company, I can barely see the screen in front of me, I have been blinded by a sea of mustard yellow, lilac and purple, I feel sick, give me a moment to recover.

PrintMojo.com

Print Mojo takes a slightly different tack, this time it’s all about the designer, and about your best option if you truly want to start up your own independent t-shirt store and sell your designs without paying anyone else for the privilege, well I say that, but in truth that’s what everyone in the industry says. The truth for me is that besides the costs of having a minimum 25 t-shirts for each design in stock, the set-up fees, and shipping costs, you also have to sell your tees from your own site. Sure people will tell you just buy a shopping cart script and use Paypal for the card processing, but if you’re going to do that you may as well sell as Ebay. The truth is most of us know that if we come across a product we like and the store doesn’t have SSL or an invalid certificate, we usually run a mile. It means the processing is probably open for any hacker to see, unless it’s using Paypal as advised. Paypal makes sites look unprofessional, I can’t remember the last decent store visited that used it. Cafe Press stopped accepting Paypal payments years ago, and no t-shirt store that wants to be taken seriously will consider it.

With just a stock of 20 to 30 designs, a fully secured shopping cart site, a great designer template and logo to make you stand out, you’re talking thousands of dollars. Then you have to consider marketing, advertising, SEO services, by the end of your first year’s trading you could find yourself in a lot of debt. Self belief can only carry you part of the way towards success, the rest is pure risk. If you’re ready to take the plunge then PM, based in Chico, California, and run by Triple J Screen Printing and Embroidery has been serving their local customers for over 20 years, they truly do offer a very high quality product, and absolutely refuse to do anything other than screen-printing and embroidery, good for them! If you’re going to start out as an independent label, you need to rely on a high quality base product, and from the reviews you’ll find on the net, this is your best bet.

The real people behind this site are Circle R Designs who also run such prominent t-shirt industry sites as T-ShirtCountdown.com, T-ShirtForums.com and T-ShirtLinks.com t-shirt directory. If there’s one company that has done its research, its Print Mojo. They take things seriously here, they offer private label printing and fulfilment, relabelling, ecommerce, payment processing, warehousing and an all-in-one service. There is yet again surprisingly little, in fact no mention of organic or fair trade t-shirts, considering the reputation of California for protecting the environment I’d have thought they’d do more. It’s a disappointment that PM doesn’t seem to offer a proper hosting service, you’ll still be left with a paltry subdirectory address just like it’s cheaper and less professional counterpart Cafe Press.

I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to integrate Cafe Press into my t-shirt store at RetroGod.com - I used to use a Joomla cms system with all sorts of plug-ins that promised to seamlessly meld my products with my store.I eventually dumped Joomla and used a simple script to do the job. Basically trying to do anything other than redirect a domain to your store (wherever it may be hosted) is a nightmare. Youd think Print Mojo would get their API guys onto this pronto. Same thing goes for Cafe Press, they harp on about all the available API integration their site offers but they don’t offer a free script to do it. One guy managed to, (obviously a whizz at programming) and he created Click Shirt (which is just using a Cafe Press API). Shame he couldn’t program a way of printing images on a larger scale whilst he was at it :

ShirtMagic.com

I’m gutted! This could have been the perfect site for me, they actually let you load vectors up and edit them live for screen-printing (okay I’m guessing as I never got that far). It seems it hasn’t a clue how to handle image uploads of any file type from Apple Macs. Considering how many decent designers out there couldn’t imagine living without their Mac, this seems utter madness. Why would I design on my old PC when I have my MacBook to design my tees? I wouldn’t and I doubt a lot of others will either. I’ve heard on the grapevine that this site is actually based in China, I don’t know if it’s true, but a Chinese t-shirt designer on a famous t-shirt forum is convinced he can spot someone writing “Chinglish” a mile off. Who knows, I am not sure how this affects things, and I wouldn’t want to presume. All I know is that it’s a long way to China.

Skreened.com

This one is a beauty, if only they could do the same with screen-print designs I think it would do very very well. Skreened is a tease in truth, the name implies they’re offering an easier time for vector designers than Spread Shirt offers. If someone out there has a serious screen-print business who can develop (or pay a programmer to write) a foolproof upload script or free software (please make it Mac compatible), even a Firefox plugin that ensures every designer knows exactly what the problem with their design is, I guarantee them they will make a fortune. If I had the money I’d do it myself! Usually it comes down to three problems, range of colours (easily fixed), line thickness (easy to program some assistance there), and overlap/layering, essentially that’s what the script would need to fix. If Skreened or any other t-shirt fulfilment store showing this much attention to DTG could do the same for screen prints, the world of t-shirt design would be changed over night. Okay, I’ve signed up with Skreened, I couldn’t help it, it’s looks too good to be true. The sign up process, the upload process, and everything else I can find on the site worth clicking has been a breeze. This is how a t-shirt fulfilment company should treat their designers, the easier they make it, the more designers join, the more products that have to sell. Perhaps the prices are little high here, but I’m only focusing on organic tees (which is a nice change) so it’s to be expected. I’m a little disappointed by the range of t-shirt colours and styles, I’m sure that could easily be remedied and probably depends upon demand, a few camouflage or metallic ones would be nice? Still they do offer a longer than usual print size (shame they can’t offer up the whole front). Here’s a piece of useful advice, Skreened have neglected to tell us that you’ll need a white background for any transparent PNG files, I know sounds crazy but I’ve seen the same thing at lesser sites, although I’d have expected more from Skreened. Apart from that I can’t see any other trouble with this service, the t-shirts are great, there’s a nice but still a tad limited range of organic tees, they are all American Apparel which means quality. Again we’ve only got a subdirectory store here, but it’s still a very clean address - check mine out at www.skreened.com/tshirts - yes I can’t believe someone hadn’t nabbed that one yet! Skreened.com started way back in September 2006, launched in 2007 and then re-launched in 2008 with a far better site by the looks of it (let’s hope they stick around this time). Daniel Fox and a friend Mike, had the idea of offering ethical and organic custom t-shirt fulfilment services developed Skreened for like-minded people. Skreened is based in Columbus, Ohio USA and state they can also handle bulk orders, so well worth a try if you’re starting out, or prefer to work with DTG printers. Of course I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Skreened will live up to their name and actually screen print tees

Check out Speak to the Hand at Skreened.com

They also offer a handy little export .csv link where you can download your catalogue and if you’re really clever, upload it to an SQL database and pull up the results in a store or other script. A great way to host your own Skreened shop for free (it’s a shame I’m too dumb to work that one out). the also offer an rss feed link so your visitors can subscribe to your latest updates. I’d like to see some blog widgets in the future as well. Between Skreened and Zazzle I’m starting to think I’m selling my tees at the wrong DTG sites! One last point this site donates a percentage of their profits to charity to I’ll forgive them for the lack of black t-shirts (for now).

Bountee.com

Bountee only seems to accept SVG vector images which is very confusing, I can’t understand why they’d want vector images when they only offer DTG printing? I suppose it means you can resize the images and maintain a higher quality, but why not go the whole hog and just screen print them? At first I thoght this meant they were limiting their market to designers proficient with Adobe Illustrator when I found a link at the bottom of the FAQ that mentions a free SVG editor called InkScape - so maybe worth a try. Anyway, great looking site and a quick signup, some very nice designs here to which makes me feel more comfortable about joining in the fun.

My only problem is this site hardly provides for the independent designer, they sell your work and pay you, you keep the copyright, they have a nice Threadless clone section to vote on other works (where someone with a mean streak could really do some damage), but you don’t get a public profile, there’s no address for people to find your work, you just have to hope someone will stumble by it, which gets a no vote from me. However if they’d fix this problem, I’d have to say overall the best DTG t-shirt fulfilment site (bar Zazzle) I’ve reviewed so far.

TShirtMonster.ca

This looks like a great t-shirt fulfilment site, I had no problems on the submission side. However as a potential customer I noticed that the thumbnails were grainy and that there monster view version doesn’t work in Firefox 3.0 - bit of a shame that, looked promising. For everyone else, (especially Californians), I’m sure it’s a really useful resource. Especially as they offer a Threadless clone option, although the top prize is only $1000 and residual payments so make sure you are willing to give them exclusivity!

Piki-Art.com

Piki-Art offers a surprisingly high quality service, except again for the limitations of their print design area, although they’re still more generous than the average in length. It didn’t take too long to set up a store and upload a design to a range of t-shirts. The coding on this site is slicker than most, although it’s obvious they have very little traffic. This feels a little underfunded for a t-shirt fulfilment service, the templates end up looking a tiny bit clunky, something you’d expect out of the box, although with perseverance you can improve it. I doubt I will be using my store here very much, at least they offer a subdomain for your shop - mine is at Tees.Piki-Art.com If you do want to sign up you’ll need to visit PikiStore.com - which may explain why they have so little traffic, even the designers are lost.

Spice.co.uk

Spice are UK-based by the looks of it, one glance at a prominent list of merchandise alternatives like mousemats, mugs and linen bags and I’m off. Try this site if you dare but be warned with a basic t-shirt costing £10 without a design or shipping, means you’ve just lost the American and budget markets altogether. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on them, if you’re a user and you don’t work for them, tell us what you think. Sooooo Cafe Press a decade ago, I can’t even think about this one anymore. Besides their traffic is lousy again, just check that Alexa Box.

Some Alternatives:

https://taglessthreads.com - Great if you need to maintain your brand on the cheap. Offers reduced fee printing and shipping for a monthly fee. They offer screen-printing and DTG. It’s a shame they don’t offer belt printing or some form of all-over print, now that would give their members an advantage!

http://www.choiceshirts.com - custom t-shirts and reseller program.

http://www.tshirtcandy.com - custom tees.

http://www.nekkidtees.com - it’s just a Spreadshop API.

http://www.districtlines.com LOOKS GREAT - but offers few details on their full service, it seems most use it for merely ecommerce.

http://www.portmerch.com for bands - Cannot get any details on their service, you have to be a band or record company.

http://www.streetshirts.co.uk only offers custom tees but looks great.

http://www.threadless.com - not a fulfilment site - unless you win :0

http://www.designbyhumans.com - see above

http://www.pistolclothing.com.au Custom shirts - too expensive!!!

T-Shirts.com - Great Domain Name… Umm… Yep.

http://www.designashirt.com

http://www.customizedworld.com

CustomizedGirl.com - Custom tees and community gallery.

http://www.takeouttees.com

Unfulfilled:

http://www.rawtalentinc.com - it’s a fulfilment site, yes, but it’s had some very bad reviews, printing and shipping errors for a start. Read This.

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