Once you've created your designs, uploaded your POD products and the Sales start coming, well that's when your real job begins! Management and Coordination of your Etsy shop......products don't arrive on time, wrong products show up or never show up, colors don't look like your picture, blah blah blah.......Customer resolution.
It's not Etsy's responsibility, it's yours. You were the one who chose to work with a POD (printify or printful) and I cannot imagine that Etsy is understanding in this matter at all, because it does reflect on them.
I challenge you to go read some reviews on Etsy of big name POD sellers. Buyers are COMPLAINING. Mostly about shipping delays or receiving the wrong product.
.....and the worse part is that it's totally out of the seller's control!
So there you are working with Printify, who remember is a middle man. Printify gives you a choice of several printers to order through. So let's say you choose 2 printers to work with. It's Christmas rush and printer 1 ran out of Belle Canvas shirts, so the order goes to printer 2, but they too have run out of the product. At this point Printify bumps it off to another printer........get the picture? Time is just moving along and your customer is screaming "this shirt is a gift, you said 10 days, it's been 3 weeks". It seems the biggest complaint about Printful, who is there own printing service, are shipping delays - holiday or not.
I'm sorry I have enough stress to deal with in my life already.
I'm interested in POD, so I took the dive and did some basic research. For now I've opened a zazzle store until I get a handle on this entire industry.
Look, Etsy gets 354+ million views per month, Zazzle gets 14 million - there is no comparison. But what I do like is that Zazzle does their own printing in-house and Zazzle takes responsibility, not the seller. That seems huge to me as a seller. It's a very easy platform to work with and they do offer affiliate commissions.
If you're going to market your products on Pinterest and bring in a buyer, you might as well get an affiliate commission as well.
I'll update here as it goes!
