Review: Gelato

This article will discuss my experiences using Gelato. I used this service on two different online stores—my small Dutch webshop (now gone) and my larger international webshop—to provide automatic fulfilment of merchandise (or “physical goods” in general).

This article is not sponsored, there are no affiliate links, I have no bias, nothing of the sort. I reluctantly created online stores because I needed some way to earn money as an artist and creative person.

Additionally, I don’t like being beholden to a single platform. (What if that platform suddenly raises all their prices? Or goes out of business? I’d lose my entire shop at once!) I tried ~8 different POD platforms behind the scenes, which means I’ll be drawing a lot of comparisons.

For more information, check out my longest (and first) review about Printful

As such, I believe my thoughts on this platform will be the most brutally honest out of any reviews you can find.

As always, I’ll try to keep it brief and practical! However, actually using multiple POD (print-on-demand) platforms on multiple large webshops that I custom-built myself … is bound to give me a lot of nitty-gritty in-depth experience with every part of it. And I don’t want to leave anything out.

What is Gelato?

Gelato is often mentioned as the 3rd largest print-on-demand platform in the world. It has a huge number of printers all over the world, which means almost any product can be printed locally and shipped quickly (and more cheaply). Its product catalog is more focused on a few types of products, though, which makes it feel smaller and more “niche” than it is.

Especially for my purposes, located in Europe, this was one of the best possible merchandise providers. No other platform can ship this easily to the Netherlands (and neighbors). No other platform has such low and predictable shipping fees for my area.

Its name is a bit unfortunate, if you ask me. If you search for specific products, questions, support, anything on the internet … it is confused and shows results about, you know, ice cream. Because Gelato is Italian for ice cream. That silly reason was enough for me to sometimes get frustrated as I just couldn’t get to the simple information I needed through a search engine.

That aside, it was the 3rd POD platform I tried—because I initially just went down the list of most common ones—and became my 2nd most used over time.

How does it work?

Visit the website, make an account, and connect to your storefront (Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy, they integrate with them all). Gelato does not offer its own storefront, so you’ll need to create and maintain that part yourself. It is purely a printer: when it receives orders, it automatically creates and ships your custom products, and that’s all.

You don’t even need to enter any credit card information or verify anything to get started. That’s not recommended, though. Orders will only be put into production after you have paid for them, and you want your tax information in order to prevent paying needless taxes before that happens (explained later).

The general workflow for creating a product is as follows:

• Go to your specific store/integration, then press “add product”.
• As usual, upload your images/add your text/design stuff with their interface. You can simply upload your premade design (using your own software/workflow), or use the tools they give you to design on the fly (add text boxes, add placeholder art, etcetera).
• Add all the details (pricing, variants, mockups, title and description, etcetera)
• Once done, it automatically sends it to your storefront and lists it there. (You can improve/change the listen afterwards if you want.)

As opposed to many other platforms, Gelato is more focused on the store instead of the product. It wants you to design products for a specific store, which means you need to do all the steps at once.

But, though a bit hidden, Gelato does offer the same functionality! Once the initial design of a product is done, you can visit its settings and “save” it as a design/template. This allows you to duplicate the same basic product, then change it or send it to different stores. It’s a bit clunkier than it needs to be, but still useful.

The general workflow for selling a product is as follows.

• Your storefront handles all the customer-facing things (the shop, the cart, the checkout)
• Once somebody orders stuff … Gelato handles the rest.
  • It gives you a short window in which you can still cancel/change the order.
  • Then it automatically goes into production and ships the final product(s) to the customer.
  • When that happens, it charges you for the costs. If you don’t have enough money to pay, the order is kept on hold until you do.

The crucial thing here is that this is a two-step process. It charges you immediately for the order. Some time later, you get the money that your customer paid from your storefront. As such, you need to make sure you have some reserves ready to pay for a sudden influx of orders (or delayed payment of the money owed to you). If not, no harm done, it just means all orders placed will not move forward yet—not until you then manually pay them and “continue” them.

Designing & Listing

I already gave the general workflow (and its gotchas/differences from other platforms) above. In my other reviews, I split “Designing” and “Listing” into two separate sections, but I couldn’t really do so here as the two are so intertwined on Gelato.

Is that good? Is that bad?

I personally dislike mixing and intertwining things. Just make every step of a process its own, standalone, modular step for maximum flexibility and freedom. Easier to debug. Easier to jump around and fix mistakes, or fill in whatever information you do have at hand in the moment.

At the same time … publishing something with Gelato was faster than anywhere else, precisely because everything happens at once and in one place. There was a weird sort of “fun factor” to publishing a new product, because you could go from “initial design/idea” to “professional product displayed in store” with such ease.

Thus, below I’ll simply list specific advantages and disadvantages I’ve discovered for this entire process of “create product and list in store”.

Advantages

• It was one of the fastest at creating products and getting them into my store. It also allows you to choose whether the product is immediately published, or kept private—which, surprisingly, many order POD platforms do not support. You’re stuck insta-publishing products, even before completely finished.
• Their mockups are solid. Just the right amount. Good variety. They support webp format too, which saves a ton of space and bandwidth.
• Their descriptions have rich formatting. This means I can format them exactly as my store needs to (including bold, italics, a bullet list, etc), and it will be uploaded exactly as intended to WordPress.
• Their basic info/details support multiple languages! Which means I can auto-add that info and know it will fit my Dutch webshop, for example.
• I can directly set Categories and Tags in their interface. That’s nice for the same reason: I can set things once in Gelato and don’t need to do more edits once the product is already listed in my store.
• Their product designer provides all the necessary options … and way more. They have more buttons in the interface, more customizability, more possible actions, and so forth than most of their competitors. It seems their focus is on this part of the process/system.
• Their price and shipping fee display/calculator are second to none. Very quick, very easy to use, I can check the exact shipping to different countries with ease. (Other platforms, for example, don’t even display ANY price next to a product … but require you to, say, download a data file somewhere that lists ALL prices and shipping fees in one huge spreadsheet.)
• Using a single design for multiple variants is quite easy. Just upload something once, tick all the boxes, and it automatically resizes and repositions the design on all variants (even those with different resolution/aspect ratio) in a sensible way. But …
• … by default, you can’t individually edit designs per variant. This means that, sometimes, a design of mine looked great on an iPhone 15 (for example) … but was cut off on an iPhone 16. And I couldn’t fix that, because moving the image on one variant, moved it in the same way on ALL of them. Then I discovered that you can, but you need to “unlink” the variants by pressing the chains on them in the interface. Nice feature, but hard to figure out completely on your own.

Disadvantages

• Many types of mockups are restricted only to users using a paid plan. I despise showing those mockups anyway, but locking them out of your reach, as it’s a shady marketing tactic and permanent visual noise.
• Their product catalog is quite minimal. Fewer types of products. Fewer variants per product. What they DO offer is quite solid, but I regularly missed a product or two that would have allowed a brand of mine to exclusively use Gelato. At time of writing, I wasn’t able to “exclusively” use Gelato for any single brand yet.
  • Yes, they offer A LOT of products. But they’re not very different. Having several very slightly different types of hats is not the same as offering entirely new products. (Many platforms use this same marketing trick, though. They state the quantity of products in their catalog, while forgetting to mention that 3/4 of that is just slightly different shirts and posters :p)
  • Perhaps this is fine for many people who specialize in one thing. I know many online stores focus exclusively on clothes, ignoring anything else in the catalog anyway. For me, though, I need more diversity.
• Those products are often more expensive than at other platforms. I only gave Gelato a shot when I realized their shipping fee was lower than most platforms, because they print more locally in Europe, which basically negated the difference and made pricing roughly the same as elsewhere. Still on the high side, but nothing too bad.
• I encountered some bugs when using their interface. For example, not being able to set Categories on many products, whatever I tried.
• They’re not very transparent about certain things. Their product pages give the crucial information, yes, but not much more. For example, in the European Union, you need to give the “GPSR Information” for each product. But … I can’t give that unless Gelato gives me the correct details for it! And for many products, they just don’t.

The biggest missing information, or “odd wrinkle in the process”, has to do with the requirements of a design. Any design interface worth its salt should clearly communicate the exact dimensions, resolution, file type, etcetera that is required for that specific design. I mean, that’s the main thing you need to know!

Gelato does give some of that information, but in a very unintuitive and incomplete way.

It’s not, you know, in the editor itself as you work on the thing. Or clearly shown on the product page. It’s also not generally available somewhere. Instead,

• You have to be logged in,
• and through your dashboard go to a product page,
• then you can press the arrow (next to “create a design with this”),
• and pick the “print template” option!

If you figure that out—which took me a while—you get a PDF which tells you the size. Which is sometimes wrong or without units :p

I’ve been designing long enough to figure stuff out anyway, but I imagine this is just needlessly hard for most people to use.

I ended up completely ignoring this after the first few products. It was “faster” to just start creating the product, upload designs as I went along, and check how they were received by the system. Basically, I learned the correct dimensions and resolution “on the fly” by actually creating the product. Not ideal.

Pricing & Payment

Shipping Fees

The final step of publishing a Gelato product to your store, is setting the price. You can use many different pricing techniques, and this article isn’t about them, so I’ll merely say that I heavily prefer offering free shipping on my stores. As such, I bake the shipping fee into the product price.

This is a very common strategy, which means Gelato has tools to support this. When setting your pricing, you can tick the checkbox to “include shipping fee” and get accurate margin and profit calculations for whatever price you try.

A major advantage of Gelato is that it shows the pricing others chose. This way, you know if your price is average, or too high, or too low. It’s only available for products that have enough data—i.e. not brand new, and sold often enough—but that seems to include the majority of them. That simple feature gave me a lot of insight into POD merchandise pricing and made me adjust my strategies slightly.

It provides a few simple tools for bulk pricing, such as “set X% profit margin on all variants”. This is basic stuff, available in most places, but still nice to have.

It also offers multiple shipping methods for most items, usually allowing you to choose between “economy/budget” (slower but cheaper) and “express/fast” (faster but way more expensive). You might call this an advantage over other POD platforms that don’t give the option, as they just default to “economy shipping” at all times.

In reality, it’s not that much of an advantage. Unless you have a really rich and loyal fan base, budget shipping is your only viable option. Express shipping is reserved only for custom, personalized, one-of-a-kind orders that need to be delivered as soon as possible. Let me put it like this: I almost didn’t add this paragraph AT ALL in the review because I have completely ignored all shipping methods on all platforms as anything but the cheapest shipping fee meant a ludicrous retail price. (And for what? Usually only a single day shaved off of the delivery time.)

Payment

As stated earlier, you’re free to decide your own price. Gelato will just invoice their costs for making the product; they don’t care how you get your profit or where it comes from. As such, it’s up to you to price your products high enough to cover shipping, taxes, any other costs for running your webstore, and the slight risk of damages or returns.

In my case, I found that a profit margin of 20%-30% on “Gelato price + shipping fee” gave me some sustainable margins without creating ridiculous prices for products. (Remember that this allows free shipping, but this price is excluding VAT.)

Gelato allows connecting a credit card or PayPal. I chose the latter, to be able to use the same bank account for all POD platforms I tried.

You can create products and even add them to your store without entering any financial information. BUT, as stated, those orders will be put on hold when the system realizes it can’t invoice the costs. You cannot get anything printed or shipped without paying first.

Gelato allows configuring some of this (how long it waits before starting fulfillment on an order, how often it sends invoices, etcetera). But its options here are far more barebones than those of other services.

I find this to be true for almost all “Settings” and “Configuration” at Gelato. It’s hard to quantize this, though, which is why I didn’t add it as a clear disadvantage. How many settings are enough? Are more settings better (more choice) or worse (overwhelming/more chance for errors)? I prefer all the settings, all the configuration! But others don’t and might call Gelato focused and streamlined.

Taxes

The prices shown in the Gelato catalog are excluding VAT/taxes. This is the right thing to do, if you ask me. (Many other platforms show them including taxes, which just isn’t useful to most people, especially because taxes depend on the shipping destination of an order.)

Just as I’d recommend anyone starting an online store to register as a business to get the tax benefits!

It was quite easy to submit my business’ tax ID to Gelato and get it verified. When Gelato invoices me now (for the cost of producing a product), it does not add taxes on top too.

On my webshop, I present all prices without tax as well. At checkout, depending on your address, the correct tax is added on top. Some might dislike it or say it “comes as a surprise/hidden fee at the end”. Still, I think this is the best method in any case.

• This “extra fee” at the end is clearly communicated and known while shopping.
• Businesses know the real cost all the time, as they can reclaim the tax paid if it’s a business expense.
• Customers know exactly where their money goes, and taxes are clearly separated from production/shipping cost (as they are NOT the same), which means you gave full transparency.

Anything Else?

Pfew, I covered every part of the process and gave you my most important pros and cons. Below is just a final list of remarks that didn’t fit anywhere else.

Gotchas & Other Policies

Because Gelato has so many different printers scattered around Europe, you get no “guarantees” about where something is produced. It’s just “as close to the destination as possible”. This is fine, and much better than some other platforms that produce stuff in America to ship it to the Netherlands. It’s just something to be mindful of, and it’s why there isn’t a clear answer to “from where will my product ship?”

I find their website to be very slow sometimes, but that’s probably more down to my terrible internet connection. It just feels like there is a slight delay to almost everything I do, which can get a bit off-putting at times. The website isn’t ugly or outdated, perse, but it also doesn’t feel very modern and slick (yet).

They regularly lower prices or introduce new products. I haven’t seen them very active outside of that, though, with special sales, discounts, special events, etcetera. Perhaps this is an incorrect assumption, but it feels like Gelato’s more of a slow beast that’s slowly progressing and updating, which is true for many European enterprises. They generally prefer being solid and robust over moving fast and trying new stuff :p

Their blog and support articles are really good, though. Many times, when I searched for general tips/answers on print-on-demand or support for a different platform … I ended up on their support articles anyway. They are extensive, they are plenty, and they are usually well-written.

Platforms shouldn’t underestimate the worth of, you know, providing all the support and help needed to customers. Encountering their helpful articles time and time again as I researched how to do all this, is what actually put me over the edge and made me give Gelato a try. Before then, the website didn’t look that appealing to me, and the prices seemed too high to be viable.

Of their integrations, I have only tested WooCommerce (and API) of course. Their plugin for it is “okay”. It has a few settings and knobs to turn, and it works as it should after installation. (Many other platforms don’t have any configuration in their “plugin” for WooCommerce. It’s really not an integration then, but more a feeble connection that you can establish.)

The biggest disadvantage of the plugin is that it uses an older WooCommerce API. I had to enable Legacy mode and compatibility mode for it to work, and for the other platforms to stay functional too. That’s just messy. It’s bound to be error-prone and create issues down the line. I almost considered getting off of Gelato entirely for that, but I’m glad I didn’t overreact. At time of writing, enabling these legacy modes has not had any significant impact.

What about their paid memberships?

They have multiple paid memberships which are very similar to each other, to the inexperienced eye. By paying them a monthly fee (of about 20 dollars), you get the usual benefits.

• Lower prices on most products, lower shipping fees
• Exclusive products or design choices
• Exclusive deals, sales, other actions
• Better/more personalized support

I’ll (succinctly) repeat what I said in the Printful review. When you’re just starting out, when you’re barely getting orders, don’t bother. The fact you can sell things at a slightly lower price doesn’t matter, and you will not outearn the costs of the membership. If you’re already successful and established, products flying over the Gelato shelves, then yes, these are really good deals. Less costs for you, more profit, more design options for a relatively low fee.

I just wish they’d make it a single membership plan for clarity. I don’t like seeing multiple “special offers” and “alternative prices” everywhere I go in their interface.

And having a pop-up almost every time I switch to a new window telling me I should really get a membership, is also almost annoying enough to quit using Gelato altogether. I don’t understand the reasoning here. Showing me the same ad for a more expensive membership plan fifty times a day, as I am trying to use your platform productively, is not going to do anything positive.

And what if we care about things other than money?

Ah yes! The most important part that every other review leaves out!

How sustainable is Gelato? How ecologically sound? Does it use best practices in terms of labor, local production, etcetera?

Gelato, surprisingly, is one of the better ones. They don’t really advertise themselves as such. They aren’t an eco-focused platform from start to finish, wearing it like a medal, such as TeeMill.

But they do the right thing where it counts: local printing. The fact that any product of mine can be printed in or near the Netherlands, means so much carbon emissions (and other shipping overheads) are saved every single time. The same is true for all other European countries. This is far more valuable than using slightly more sustainable material in T-shirt.

That’s useful too, of course. And when you look purely at materials and how they’re sourced/used, then Gelato isn’t the best. You have to search their products with a fine-combed brush to find things where they put a clear effort into sustainability and biodegradable materials. I mean, they have this really nice page with big words about how sustainable they are. But I need specific facts and numbers, the exact reasons why a large number of their products is ecologically sound, and they can’t give it.

Their biggest advantage is their “organic” line, which is quite recent and only available in Europe. Many of their clothing and bags have a special (more expensive/less widely available) “Organic” version. That’s nice! I don’t want to sound whiney or pessimistic, so let me reiterate that this is nice, keep going! If the price comes down a little bit, those products would be viable options for my webshops.

Because they’re mostly based in Europe, I can trust that working conditions and product quality are guaranteed. (Or at least, more so than it would be if products were manufactured in China or Mexico.)

Conclusion

What do I think of Gelato? If you’re based in Europe (but not the UK), I think this is your clear best option. There are some hiccups in their design process, such as needing to do the whole thing (product>design>listing>publish) at once, but it’s mostly fast and functions as it should. Their product catalog isn’t that diverse, but also not the worst I’ve seen. Their prices are on the high side, but that’s compensated by better shipping arrangements.

My biggest gripe was their complete lack of communication about guidelines/requirements needed for designs. It turns designing an (expensive) product into a game of trial-and-error for no clear reason.

Sample orders placed by people around me (at my request, for products we needed anyway, such as a Calendar) were handled swiftly and without error. Updates were sent to my store along the way, the customers were informed, and it was printed + delivered exactly as it should.

If they changed their look to be more modern, more colorful, it would help a lot. Because behind the scenes, they’re providing a solid platform that offers most of the products you need, at doable prices, and handles everything for you. I also wouldn’t mind them splitting the process of creating a product to resemble that of Printful more: you create a template (or “blueprint”/“saved design”) first, and only add the other details when sending a specific instance of that template to a specific store.

I made more mistakes with my listings at Gelato than anywhere else—because of that unified, all-at-once process focused on just publishing something fast—requiring me to go back later and painfull edit the product again after publication.

I will definitely keep using Gelato for my Dutch/European webshop. For my larger, international one? I am hesitant. I haven’t used it yet, at time of writing, because some other parts of the world are too badly connected to have any sensible pricing. (I mean, 25 euros shipping to Japan? While it’s 3 euros for the Netherlands? On a product that’s already more expensive than all its competitors?)

Once I have even more experience or integrations, maybe handling some mistakes or disputed orders, I’ll update the article.

Those were all my thoughts,

Tiamo Pastoor