Your design or an artist's, at one price formula
Spreadshirt does two jobs that most of its rivals keep apart. It is a marketplace, where independent designers sell their designs on shirts, hoodies, mugs and bags, and it is a customise tool, where you put your own text or photo on the same products. Both run through one tool and one price formula.
That formula has three parts: the product, a printing fee for each print area you use, and a design price if you pick a community design. The design price goes to the designer. Your own text, your own uploads and designs marked free add nothing. On 28 October a designer coffee mug was $19.99 on spreadshirt.com, with a "20% off everything" code on the banner, which puts it in the middle of the five marketplaces we priced for our comparison.
It scores 7.6 under how we rate, the highest of the six, and it is our best overall pick.
A return that covers what you designed yourself
This is the reason it ranks first, and it is unusual enough to read twice.
Every marketplace here makes things to order, so most of them will fix a bad print and stop there. Zazzle does not cover your own typo unless you paid for its Worry-Free option at checkout. Redbubble replaces a faulty item and does not take back one you simply do not like.
Spreadshirt takes it back. Its "Fair Return Policy" lets you return a product within 30 days of receipt in Europe and the UK, or 90 days in the US, "If it doesn't fit or you don't like it". That includes a shirt with your own name on it. What you get depends on who designed it:
- an exchange for a new product, or a voucher, on anything;
- a refund of the purchase price "as long as you didn't customize the product yourself".
So a personalised gift that misses comes back as credit rather than cash. That is still more than most of the category offers.
Spreadshirt pays the return postage on orders of €40 or $40 and more. Below that, the help page does not say. It asks you to contact the service team before posting anything, because many cases are settled without the parcel going back. The guarantee runs on top of your statutory rights, which the page states.
The one trap is the number. The US site says 90 days. The European and UK help pages, the same article word for word, say 30.
Which Spreadshirt to order from
Order from your own region's site, because where the parcel starts decides whether customs is involved.
European and UK orders ship from Germany. For the UK, Spreadshirt says that duties may apply above £135 and that "We will gladly reimburse you for the duties incurred" on sight of the invoice. US mugs are printed in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, or Henderson, Nevada.
The US site is blunt about the other direction: orders shipped outside the US "are subject to customs or duty fees" which "cannot be refunded, as they are not charged by us". A European buyer on spreadshirt.com is paying for a transatlantic parcel and a customs bill they did not need.
On the UK site, standard delivery to the Czech Republic was quoted at £2.20 below £21.90 and £4.00 above. We placed no orders and publish no delivery times.
Who should buy it
Buy from Spreadshirt for T-shirts, hoodies and mugs, with your own text or photo or with a designer's artwork, especially in Europe, where it prints inside the EU and takes things back after you change your mind.
Pick Zazzle instead for personalised cards, invitations and stationery, which Spreadshirt barely does. Pick CafePress if you are in the US and want cash back rather than a voucher on something you personalised.
Return terms, print locations, the price formula and the customs position on this page were read from the Spreadshirt help centre on . We placed no orders.
