Seeking Recs for Good Quality Drop Ship Printing Option

Hi Community!

I’m hoping to get some recommendations from the community here for my situation.

My goal is to offer print sales on my website.

My challenge is I travel full time making new work at this time so I can’t handle printing or shipping or packaging easily myself.

I’d like to find a quality solution where I know I can trust the product quality while it being handled drop ship direct to my customer.

I know many options are out there. Are any of you using one you really like and are happy with?

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Hey Shayne, welcome to NPN! The reason you’re hearing crickets is because there are no good options, at least that I’m aware of. The only thing that comes close is https://fineartamerica.com/, I did some test prints with them some time back and they were actually pretty decent, but of course you lose control over the whole process and your margins will be thin.

I also travel full time and have pretty much decided to not bother with trying to sell prints anymore. It’s too much of a hassle when you live this way, imho.

I use Fine Art America, uploading a limited selection of images to their website. They do offer an option to embed their storefront on your site, but this comes with the obvious caveat that it’s going to be severely limited design-wise. And just so there’s no confusion regarding what David said about margins, you can set custom pricing to ensure you’re making what you want out of each sale. The bonus, I suppose, to FAA is that you can generate some random sales from folks who stumble across your work on their site or perhaps through a search engine query. I’ve even sold some prints through their home designer portal.

There are some other solutions that may allow you to plug in a fulfillment option from an established printer on your site. PhotoShelter is a notable one. I use them, and connect to WHCC as my printing lab. I’m pretty sure they also integrate with Bay Photo and a few others. In this case, the big drawback is that PhotoShelter takes a substantial cut of each sale, on top of the annual fee you pay to use their software. Unlike FAA, you will have to go in and “approve” each sale, which can be good in instances when a customer may not quite know what they’re doing (e.g., ordering a weird crop on a photo that doesn’t work for the size or finish they chose). OTOH, if something goes wrong with an order, you can’t go straight to the lab to fix or tweak it… you have to go through PhotoShelter to make changes.