How Printful uses Pusher to increase user engagement, revenue, and team efficiency

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How Printful uses Pusher to build an engaging app, increase revenue, and make their team more efficient.

Introduction

Printful lets you design printed products such as bags, shirts, and posters, and also provides a platform to integrate with your online store for easy, on-demand, online printing, fulfillment, and shipping.

Printful also uses Pusher to power tools throughout its stack from the home page down to internal tools for the team.

“We chose Pusher because we need to scale. We don’t want to have to manage that infrastructure. It is much easier and cheaper to take Pusher and implement it. Technically, it was really easy.”

Here are some cool use cases from Printful:

File Upload Management

Printful uses Pusher to update users on the progress of uploading image files to a library in realtime. In the library, users can manage all of their files and make orders of new printed items with their designs on them.

With their drag and drop support, users can upload as many as 50 files at once, and see the status of the job update in realtime.

Printful 2 -- Drag and drop upload

Live Orders as ‘Social Proof’

Printful also uses Pusher to show live orders coming in from around the world on their home page. They ran an A/B test against the same page without it, and found that having this feature has increased their conversion rate and revenue. Their reasoning for why it has this effect? “We see it as social proof for Printful.”

Printful 3 -- Live orders

Internal Task Management

With a few use cases throughout their app and marketing, Printful also found a way to use Pusher to make their team more efficient internally:

As they explained the problem and solution: “On our team, we process the files as they come in. They have a list, and everyone sees the same list. They work on one item at a time. We have to ensure that two people do not start working on the same task at the same time. So when a team member opens a task, the other team members are notified that the task is taken. This way they are not stepping on each other’s toes.”

Printful 4 -- internal management

Generating Files

Printful’s team converts PNGs into a proprietary file type on their service, and they use Pusher to display the progress of this conversion.

Printful 1 -- file upload

Printful has built an engaging platform from the beginning of the customer journey all the way to the fulfillment of customer orders in order to deliver a great user experience. We’re excited to see what realtime features that Printful builds next!