Written by Paul Worrall
At ARTdiscount we ran a print arm for years called Print Discount, alongside a seperate site, posterprints.co.uk, built around a large format poster printer our printing partner Granthams had just invested in. I watched that side of the business go from a small add-on to a genuinly meaningful revenue stream over several years, and then watched the whole print-on-demand landscape change completely once platforms like Printful, Printify and Redbubble made it possible for anyone to sell prints without touching a printer at all. Both routes still exist today, and the honest answer to “which one should I use” depends entirely on what you’re actually trying to build.
I’ve spent 16 years in the UK art supplies industry and now run Discount Art Supplies, used by over 36,000 UK artists every week. This is the practical breakdown I wish someone had given me plainly when print-on-demand first started taking off — not a sales pitch for any one platform, just what each route actually costs, requires and delivers.
Print-on-Demand vs Giclee Printing — The Core Decision
Everything else in this guide flows from one decision: do you want zero-effort, lower-margin sales, or higher-effort, higher-margin control?
Print-on-demand (POD) means a platform like Printful or Printify prints and ships your work only when someone orders it. You upload your artwork once, set your price, and the platform handles printing, packing and postage. You never hold stock, never touch a printer, and never deal with a customer’s shipping query directly in most setups. In exchange, you take a smaller margin per sale, and you have less control over paper quality, colour accuracy and finishing than printing it yourself.
Giclee printing yourself — either on a home fine art printer or through a professional bureau — means higher quality, higher margin per sale, and full control over paper and finish. The cost is your time, upfront investment in equipment or per-print bureau fees, and the logistics of holding stock, packing and shipping yourself (unless the bureau offers fulfilment).
Neither is objectively better. A lot of successful print sellers genuinly use both — POD for casual, lower-stakes items like phone cases or t-shirts, and giclee for the actual signed, numbered fine art prints where quality and margin both matter more.
Route 1: Print-on-Demand Platforms
If you want to test whether your work sells as prints at all before investing in equipment, POD is the sensible starting point. The main players each suit slightly different needs.
Printful and Printify both integrate directly with your own Shopify or Etsy store, letting you sell prints (and a wide range of other products — mugs, clothing, phone cases) under your own branding without ever holding stock. Our Printful vs Printify comparison covers the detailed differences, but broadly Printful tends to have better UK print quality and faster fulfilment, while Printify offers more supplier choice and often lower base costs.
Redbubble and Society6 work differently — they’re marketplaces in their own right rather than integrations for your existing store. You upload your work, and customers discover it directly on the platform rather than through your own branded site. Lower effort to set up, but you’re competing directly against every other artist on the platform rather than building your own audience. Our Redbubble vs Society6 guide breaks down which suits which kind of seller.
The honest trade-off across all POD platforms: margins are noticeably thinner than printing and selling yourself, because the platform is doing the printing, packing and shipping work and taking a cut for it. For high-volume, lower-price items, that’s a completely reasonable trade. For a serious fine art print you want to sell at a premium price, it usually isn’t — the finished quality rarely matches genuine giclee output on proper fine art paper.
Route 2: Printing Giclee Yourself
If you’ve already got a following, or you’re specifically selling limited edition fine art prints rather than casual merchandise, printing yourself is where the real margin lives. This splits into two further decisions.
Home printing: A dedicated fine art printer (Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-310, Epson SureColor P700 and similar) paired with genuine fine art paper gives you full control and the best margin per print, but requires upfront investment and ongoing attention — ink, paper stock, colour calibration. Our guide to the best printers for art prints and fine art paper guide cover both sides of this in detail. As a rough rule, home printing starts making financial sense once you’re printing regularly rather than occasionally — below around 10 prints a month, the numbers often favour a bureau instead.
Using a bureau: A professional print bureau handles the printing for you on proper archival paper, at a per-print cost, without you needing to own or maintain equipment. This suits artists who sell prints occasionally rather than constantly, or who want consistent professional-grade output without a hardware investment. Our guide to UK giclée printing companies compares the major bureaus in detail.
The genuine advantage of both routes over POD is finishing quality and margin — a properly printed giclee on Hahnemühle or Canson paper, sold as a signed, numbered limited edition, commands a price POD merchandise simply can’t match, because the buyer is paying for archival quality and scarcity, not just an image on paper.
Where to Actually Sell
Whichever printing route you choose, you still need somewhere to sell. This is a genuinly separate decision from printing method, and the two don’t have to match — you can print giclee yourself and still sell through Etsy, or use POD fulfilment behind your own Shopify store.
Etsy gives you immediate access to buyers actively searching for art and prints, with far less setup effort than building your own store — but you’re one of thousands of sellers competing on the same platform, and Etsy takes a listing and transaction fee on every sale.
Shopify gives you full control over branding, pricing and customer relationship, at the cost of needing to drive your own traffic rather than relying on marketplace search. Our Etsy vs Shopify guide covers this decision properly — the honest summary is that Etsy suits artists starting out who want sales with minimal setup, while Shopify suits artists who already have an audience (through Instagram, a newsletter, or an existing following) they can direct to their own site.
Pricing Your Prints Honestly
A mistake I see constantly: pricing prints based purely on cost-plus-a-bit, without accounting for the actual value of what’s being sold. A few honest principles:
Limited editions (numbered, signed, capped print runs) should be priced meaningfully higher than open editions — scarcity is a genuine part of what a collector is paying for, and underpricing a limited edition undermines the entire premise of calling it limited.
Factor in your actual time, not just materials. Printing, packing and shipping a giclee print properly takes real time per order, and that time has a cost even if it doesn’t show up on an invoice the way paper and ink do.
Match your finish to your price point. A budget resin-coated print on PermaJet Photo Satin shouldn’t be priced the same as a Hahnemühle Photo Rag giclee — and buyers who know the category can usually tell the difference, so don’t price a lower-quality print as if it’s premium.
A Few Things Worth Knowing Before You Start
Copyright and reproduction rights are your responsibility to get right before you sell anything — if you’re reproducing someone else’s work, or work you created under a commission with unclear rights, resolve that before printing, not after a sale.
Consider a simple certificate of authenticity for limited editions — a numbered slip confirming edition size, print date and your signature adds genuine perceived value for relatively little effort, and it’s standard practice among artists who sell prints seriously.
Start smaller than you think you need to. Whether that’s a POD test run before investing in a printer, or a handful of prints through a bureau before buying your own equipment — validating that your specific work actually sells as prints, at the price point you want, is worth doing before any serious investment.
