How Printify integrated with Shutterstock in just two days—giving their merchants direct access to 370+ million images

Summary

Printify, a leading print-on-demand network connecting merchants with print providers, now offers their customers direct access to millions of Shutterstock images and editing tools. The best part? The Printify engineering team used Shutterstock UI—an intuitive tool for developers—to integrate in just two days and meet a tight deadline. Now, merchants can quickly search beautiful images right from within Printify and create stunning products that increase engagement and boost sales. Here’s the full story.

The Challenge: Printify merchants needed access to more images and designs in order to engage customers

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?

“We wanted to provide our customers with inspiration and tools to easily create and edit their designs, regardless of their design skillset,” said Francois Xavier Cardi, Product Manager at Printify.

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The Solution: Integrating with Shutterstock in just two days using Shutterstock UI

“After talking with Shutterstock, it was clear that we would be able to easily implement this integration and quickly provide this value to our customers," said Francois Xavier Cardi, Product Manager at Printify. With a tight internal deadline, it was critical that Printify integrate with Shutterstock quickly. To expedite the process, Printify leveraged Shutterstock UI, a developer tool that offers ready-to-use code snippets that cover the majority of user workflow scenarios and accelerate the image search experience. Shutterstock UI gave Printify's developers a jumpstart on the project, saving them hours of development work. Bonus: Shutterstock has now launched UI 2.0, making the tool even more flexible and easier for Developers to use.

“Our team had a very tight deadline to meet and limited resources, and it was clear that Shutterstock UI was an impressive tool that could really speed up the integration process,”said Francois.

An integration without any UX and UI limitations

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.”

Empowering merchants with intuitive image editing features

Using Shutterstock UI, the Printify team was also able to quickly integrate, which included Shutterstock Editor, an intuitive editing tool that would allow merchants to easily edit images and designs.

“The Shutterstock Editor is a great benefit to our merchants,” said Francois. “It’s something they’ve been requesting since day one.”

With Shutterstock Editor, merchants can now search and select an image, and then edit—all without leaving Printify

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.

Result: An artistic boost for all Printify merchants, and time saved for the Printify team

The final integration offered Printify merchants instant access to Shutterstock’s 370+ million image library, plus the Shutterstock Editor. “I want to emphasize how quickly we were able to build and integrate with Shutterstock because of Shutterstock UI,” said Andrii Lazebnyi, the Front End Product Engineer at Printify. “I was so surprised how easy it was and we never expected the integration would be so quick. There were no major issues or blockers. We didn’t need to ask for help. Everything was easy to understand and the documentation was great.”