Spreadshirt is quickly becoming a popular custom t-shirt site. Unlike CafePress, Spreadshirt allows you a lot more freedom on where you can print on a t-shirt, as well as allowing printing on the sleeves of the shirts. However, one of the disadvantages of Spreadshirt is that there is no formal marketplace like CafePress’s marketplace, therefore if you have a shop set up on Spreadshirt, you’re largely responsible for bringing traffic to your shop.

On Spreadshirt, you can upload your own designs to print on shirts, or you can use one of their stock images that have been uploaded by other people. If you want to load designs onto the site for others to use, you can, though images are screened before being made available to make sure they’re “cool” enough. You can set your own commission on any designs you upload.

Spreadshirt also offers premium shop services. You can even upgrade to a version of a shop where you can have custom invoices and logos, as well as zero advertising from Spreadshirt in your shop, for $10 a month. But like I said before, the site does little promotion for these shops, so it’s up to the shop owners to promote their own shops.

One of the things that is really neat about designing custom work on Spreadshirt is that if you choose to use one of the stock images from the site, you can add text and edit it in the t-shirt interface making your shirt truly unique. Features like this really outpace CafePress’ options, but promotion will probably make this site a bit more difficult to use for the new t-shirt shop owners.

So for design options I believe that Spreadshirt is better than CafePress, but ease of use goes to CafePress over Spreadshirt.