The Printify team was on a mission to accomplish two things. They wanted to: 1) Provide access to a large range of high-quality images that merchants could use for t-shirts, mugs, hats, and more. Prior to their integration with Shutterstock, the only source of images and designs merchants had access to were their own. 2) Offer intuitive image editing tools to encourage creativity, especially for those with little to no design experience. Printify knew that artwork was a significant driver of sales for these merchants, so the ability to quickly search and customize imagery could dramatically boost business performance. But how could Printify’s engineering team give their merchants access to inspiring content and image editing tools with few backend resources?

The Printify team quickly discovered that Shutterstock UI didn’t limit them at all from a UX perspective and they were able to maintain consistency, even with little time to implement. “When we started to think about how we could design the feature for our merchants, Shutterstock UI was instrumental because there weren’t any limitations,” said Francois. “We were about to think about the user experience from a merchant’s perspective only, which was a huge benefit, in addition to the sheer speed of getting up and running. The flexibility was impressive.”

Editing features include cropping, filters, borders, color, and more. The Editor also provides lossless scaling for images. Within Editor, Printify also implemented the Background Removal tool that Shutterstock made available via the API after feedback from the Printify team. The tool lets merchants isolate objects from the background of an image and easily place it on another canvas or in another design.  This advanced feature helps merchants customize beautiful new products in just a few easy steps.