The print-on-demand industry is thriving and is one of the fastest-expanding segments of online commerce today.
Hundreds of thousands of active stores now rely on print-on-demand to sell customized products worldwide. The market is worth close to $13 billion and growing at a 26% compound annual growth rate.
That growth is being driven by a clear shift in consumer expectations. Buyers want products that feel personal, arrive quickly, and are produced with less waste. Print-on-demand meets all three.
Within that market, two platforms have pioneered the category: Printify and Printful.
Together, they support hundreds of thousands of merchants globally, from individuals running side projects to established brands using merchandise to engage customers at scale.
In November 2024, the two companies merged to form FYUL, one of the world’s leading print-on-demand companies.
Bringing the businesses together meant unifying teams and operating models that had evolved independently over time. The priority was continuity: keeping platforms stable for merchants while consolidating how the business operated behind the scenes.
Payments were central to that effort.
Printify entered the merger with a payments foundation already built on Primer. Extending that foundation across the combined business was the clear choice. It gave FYUL the control and flexibility needed to operate globally, manage performance across brands, and use payments as a lever for growth.
“The merger raised the bar for everything, including payments,” says Vitor Silva, Head of Engineering, Commerce & Production at FYUL. “With Primer, we already had infrastructure we trusted, and confidence it could scale with the business and support our broader objectives.”
For Mārtiņš Veidemanis, who joined from Printful and now runs the payments product for FYUL, the value was immediately obvious.
“At Printful, payments were handled through direct processor integrations,” says Mārtiņš. “Seeing how Printify used Primer made the benefits of a central payments layer clear. It gave us more flexibility, more control, and confidence that payments wouldn’t become a constraint as we scaled.”
Building a payments foundation that could scale
Printify selected Primer several years before the merger, as the business expanded internationally and supported a growing merchant base across markets.
Payments needed to keep pace: supporting new payment methods, adapting to local requirements, and handling increasing volumes without slowing the product down.
Relying on direct integrations would have pushed more payments logic into the core platform. Every new market, method, or change would require engineering effort and ongoing maintenance.
“As you expand into more markets, payment methods come with real build and maintenance costs,” Vitor explains. “That complexity compounds quickly when everything lives inside your core product. We wanted to move faster, improve resilience, and keep operational effort under control.”
Primer offered a cleaner model.
Moving fast without breaking things
Printify knew early on that the decision had been the right one.
The initial integration was straightforward, supported by close collaboration between Printify’s engineers and Primer’s technical and success teams. That set the tone for how payments would operate as the business grew.
As Printify grew, so did the pace of change. New markets launched. Requirements shifted. Volumes climbed. Payments had to keep up without becoming a bottleneck.
With Primer, the team could add payment methods, connect additional tooling such as fraud providers, and adjust workflow logic without repeatedly diverting engineers from core product work.
“As we expanded, change became constant,” Vitor says. “Primer gave us the leverage to move faster, building new workflows and adding capabilities as we needed them, without increasing engineering effort or standing up a separate team to manage payments.”
That agility showed up in performance. Even as volumes grew, authorization rates remained consistently strong, improving by several basis points year over year and capturing more successful transactions at scale.
“When payments do fail, Fallbacks let us recover revenue and ensure customers can still complete their transactions,” says Vitor.
Printify has also benefited from the single, reliable view of payment performance Primer provides. Rather than jumping between provider dashboards and reconciling conflicting data, the team could see what was happening across the entire payment flow and act immediately when something broke.
“What’s powerful is having both high-level visibility and deep drill-down,” Vitor says. “When something looks off, we can quickly understand why.”
“And having everything in one place matters,” Mārtiņš adds. “Without Primer, you’d be jumping between dashboards and stitching the story together yourself.”
That shared visibility changed how payments were managed. Printify could align around the same data, make routing decisions together, and understand the impact of changes across the entire payment flow.
And it never came at the expense of stability.
“At our scale, reliability isn’t optional,” Vitor says. “During peak periods, when volumes are highest, Primer continued to perform consistently. That’s exactly what we expect from core infrastructure.”
Integrating at speed, without disruption
In the months since working more closely with Primer, Mārtiņš has seen those benefits firsthand, coming into the setup from the Printful side.
The integration that followed the merger with Printify was complex. Systems were converging at speed, and payments had to work without slowing anything else down.
In that context, efficiency and predictability mattered.
“Working with Primer was new for me,” Mārtiņš says. “But the support stood out. We were integrating a lot of systems at once, and Primer felt like an extension of our internal team.”
The work followed a structured, collaborative approach. Issues were surfaced early, resolved quickly, and handled without adding friction to an already complex process.
Crucially, all of this happened behind the scenes.
One business, built for scale
With the merger complete, FYUL’s focus is now on consistency, scale, and optimization.
For the combined Printify and Printful business, the goal is clear: operate a single, trusted payments solution that supports growth across two customer platforms without adding unnecessary complexity. That means fewer fragmented systems, predictable performance during peak periods, and the ability to make changes without disrupting merchants or customers.
“We want one payment foundation we can rely on across the business,” says Mārtiņš. “Lower operational overhead, less complexity, and stable performance as we scale.”
From Vitor’s perspective, it’s about continuing to support the company’s strategic direction without payments becoming a constraint.
“Merchants shouldn’t have to worry about payments,” Vitor says. “They should be able to focus on their business. Our job is to make sure payments just work, and with Primer, we have the capabilities to deliver on that goal.”
