I am just starting out with my art business so I do NOT want to invest a lot of money in something that I’m not sure will sell! That’s why I’m getting started with a model called Print-on-Demand (POD). I will show you how to use Printify with Etsy to sell art you’ve already created. With POD, products are only printed when they are purchased. No need to worry about inventory, shipping or production! 

Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you decide to make a purchase using my link, I receive a commission. That’s just one of the ways that I’m achieving financial independence and it doesn’t cost you anything!

Why Printify is the Best Choice for Print-on-Demand

There are many print-on-demand options out there. Printify stands out as a top choice because of their vast product selection, competitive pricing and seamless integrations with platforms like Etsy. 

Printify makes it easy to start a profitable print-on-demand business with no upfront costs. Whether you’re an artist like me looking to make money from your existing designs or an entrepreneur building a brand, Printify provides the tools, flexibility, and scalability to succeed.

Why Choose Printify?

• 900+ customizable products
  
• Multiple print providers for better pricing & quality
  
• Seamless integration with Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, and more
  
• No inventory or upfront costs
  
• Automated fulfillment and hands-free business model

Get Started with Printify

Ready to launch your own print-on-demand business? Follow along with me as I set up my Printify account, integrate with my Etsy store, and launch my first product.

Step 1: Sign Up for a Printify Account

1. Go to Printify’s website
2. Click on “Get Started for Free” and create an account using your email, Google, or Facebook.
3. Complete your profile by entering your business details (you can update these later).

Initial Printify dashboard

After setting up your account, you’ll come to your Printify dashboard. Your dashboard will show you two promoted steps to get started:

If you choose 1, you’ll be taken to the product editor interface. For me, the default option was a t-shirt. That wasn’t what I wanted to design (even if they are really popular!) so I used the back arrow to close out of it and return to the dashboard.

It’s also easier to set up your store and THEN design your product.

Step 2: Connect Printify to Your Store

Select your store name from the top of the left navigation menu on your dashboard. Mine says “Drawn Delicious” since that’s MY store’s name. Yours will have your store name next to the shop icon.

Click on either your store name or “Manage my stores” to set up your e-commerce channel.  

Now you can connect your store to an e-commerce platform where customers can place orders. 

Comparison of Printify integrations:

Etsy store

It’s time to connect my Etsy shop to my Printify account.

Click on “Connect to Etsy”. If you’re signed into Etsy, like me, you’ll get a popover window from Etsy asking if you want to connect the Printify application to your Etsy account. Click “Grant access” to set up the connection.

My Etsy account connected to Printify! 

My Etsy is connected!

Printify Pop-Up Store

If you don’t already have a e-commerce platform like Etsy or Shopify, you can start selling directly with a Printify pop-up store. Printify pop-up stores give you product pages that you can share with your friends and clients. When they go to your Printify pop-up store, they can buy your products directly from Printify.

Now it’s time to create your first product!

Step 3: Choose Your Product

Browse the options from the catalog in the left navigation if you’re like me and want to design something other than a t-shirt. There’s so many product options you’re sure to find something that’s a good fit for your art.

I decided to check out a few other bestsellers like stretched canvas, journals and greeting cards that are a better fit for my art. Printify gives you a lot of information about the product and the provider including:

Step 4: Customize Your Product

Select the “Start Designing” button to go to the product editor. The area in white shows the active design area. The area in gray separated by a dotted line on the top and bottom shows the bleed. You want your design to extend, aka bleed, over the edges so the product doesn’t show a blank line at the edges. (Or you could intentionally leave the background white and not worry about the bleed at all).

Use the “Upload” button at the top left of the side menu to add your images to the editor. You can select files from your device, Dropbox or your Google Drive. Files need to be in JPG, PNG or SVG format. 

Printify will automatically place your uploaded image in the center of the artboard. For something like a greeting card that folds down the middle, this isn’t ideal. So I’m going to reposition my giraffe drawing so it’s on the front cover of the card. You can tell which image is selected based on the light green outline surrounding the image.

Change the background color

You can change the background color from white to any RGB color from the panel on the right side of the screen. There are several preset colors to choose from or you can type in a specific 6-character hex color code.

Now that I’ve selected this pale green color, you can see my giraffe has a white background color.
That’s because I drew the giraffe by hand on a piece of white paper then scanned in my drawing. We’ll have more design options if the image has a transparent background. If you don’t have access to software like Canva or Adobe Photoshop that will let you remove the background, the background remover in Printify is so helpful!

Make your image background transparent

Select your image then the background remover icon from the top menu. The background remover icon is the one that looks like a person on a gray background.

Use the eraser tool to manually paint away any area you want to be transparent. Choose the “Quick remove” button to automatically erase your background.

Now you can see the background is gone from my giraffe!

Resize your image

I’m going to resize the giraffe so it takes up more of the space. You can either click and drag the handles on the outline of your image or change the scale or dimensions of your image in the layers panel. Careful not to go over 100% or your image will look pixelated! The print will look fuzzy rather than clear and crisp if you scale the image bigger than the original size.

You can add multiple images to your product. You can manage all of the layers in your design from the panel on the right where we updated the background color. You can drag and drop the layers to rearrange which one is on top by clicking and holding the icon that looks like a domino (six vertical dots).

Set up a repeat pattern

You can even turn your images into repeat patterns with Printify! Switch on the “Create pattern” toggle in the Layers panel.

You can also adjust the spacing between each repeat as well as the rotation. The image behind the giraffe is a drawing I did of an acacia tree in the brick horizontal repeat (aka half-drop).

Repeat layouts:

Preview your design

When you’re happy with how your design looks, you can preview how it will look on your product by clicking “Preview” at the top right.

I decided to remove the green background after seeing that it also printed on the inside of my card. I wanted to keep these as blank cards but you can add text and images to the inside of your cards with the Printify editor.

Now that I’m happy with how my card looks, I’m going to the next step by clicking “Save product” at the bottom right.

Step 5: Manage Your Listing

You’ll get the option to either order a sample or publish. Let’s go straight to publish!

Don’t worry though, I can still update my product by choosing it from the “My products” section of my dashboard. This section gives me info about my products including:

• The product type
• Inventory status at the print provider
• Shipping method
• Status of my product

From here, I can publish the design to my store. Printify helps you write your description using its AI tool. You can make edits so it fits better with your goals. Sometimes it’s easier to have starter text than a blank screen!

When you’re ready with all of your edits, hit “Publish” at the bottom right.

And I’ve created my first Printify product!

Lessons Learned

I ran into a snag by not setting up my Etsy shop first. I had not listed anything on my shop so it was not yet live. Learn from my mistake and go through the process of fully creating your Etsy shop BEFORE connecting to Printify. You can create a dummy listing that you can later deactivate just to open the shop. Etsy is now charging $29 as a shop set-up fee. Use my referral link to get 40 free listings when you open your store. Otherwise each listing costs 20 cents.

Printify has an excellent automatic background remover that will work for most situations. However it would be easier to use a stand-alone image editor for fine-tune control. My giraffe had a white body that got removed at the same time as the background. Manually erasing the background was the only way to keep the body white.