Setting up a print on demand store has never been so easy

For my shop, I'm going to use Printful as a white-label print-on-demand service. There are number similar services that you can integrate with the shop that you can find on Shopify App Store. I’ve chosen Printful because they have a big selection of products to print on — different tees, accessories and things like posters and mugs. I also like the quality of their products. For example, they use American Apparel tees to print on and few other outstanding brands. Another great feature is free package sticker they put on shipped items. It is crucial because when a customer places an order is placed and paid they do the printing and ship an order directly from their warehouse. Printful also has an option to include additional printed materials into the package, but you need to send those beforehand.

Create your designs

Next step is to create your designs using design templates that are available on Printful website. Typically you would several categories of products you want to print on, then go to each product’s page on Printful website and download a design template. Be sure to download templates for various sizes — I’m going to print posters, and there are two templates for square and portrait variants.

Templates come in two types — PSD and PNG. I’d highly recommend using Adobe Photoshop to create your designs, but that comes with an additional cost. You also need actual designs that you will be placing on templates, but I’d assume you already hired a designer or purchased pre-made designs elsewhere.

Mockup generator

Another great option to create both print files and product images for your store is Printful Mockup Generator. Using it is as simple as going to mockup generator page and selecting a product that you want to generate everything for. After you’ve chosen a product, you need to upload your design as a PNG image with transparent background. You can also add text right in the mockup generator, but it’s quite limited so I’d recommend doing that when creating the design. As a result, you will get a mockup of your choice for every color you want and a print file. Repeat it for every product that you want to print.

An important note — while Printful mockups are ok to start with you need to make your product photos to make your store look professional. Printful will send you sample orders with a 20% discount, but you’ll get only six samples a month at the beginning (two sample orders/month, max three items/order). When you’ve generated a minimum revenue of $300 in the previous month, you receive three sample orders/month, max four items/order. I’d recommend picturing your products in the natural environment and on models, if applicable.

Install Printful app

Adding Printful to your Shopify store is as simple as going to the Shopify app store’s Printful page and clicking ‘Get.’ After selecting a store to add the app to you will have to enter your email. Make sure to confirm it since Printful won’t allow you to log in to their service until you do.

Adding the Printful app to your store doesn’t mean that you can’t use other companies to make and ship your orders. In that case, you will need to take into account shipping rates of each company when creating your shipping rate matrix. You’ll also need to calculate how you would cover orders that will ship from multiple locations because it will bump up your shipping costs or cut into your profit margin.

App Settings

I haven’t touched payments yet, but it’s important to mention that you need to make sure you have set up auto-capture of payments. Printful only imports orders for which you have captured the payment, that means that customer’s credit card was charged for authorized amount. Most merchants set their stores to capture credit card payments automatically. This allows the store to automatically charge customers' cards before the authorization period ends, which saves time when processing orders. Another option would be to capture payments manually, but make sure to do that within authorization which is seven days for Shopify payments. You can read more about that here in shopify documentation

Another important setting is adding valid payment method or money to your Printful wallet. Without that, your orders won’t go into production automatically. I would suggest depositing money to avoid transaction errors and to speed up order processing time. You can always withdraw money from your Printful wallet, it is instant for PayPal but takes 3-5 days business days for a card transfer. Go to "Settings" -> "Billing" on Printful website to set this up. Note that I had to reset my Printful password using the email I signed up with because I had no idea what my password was — I haven’t been prompted for it, and I haven’t got an email with the generated password.

Make sure to add branding sticker in Printful settings while you are there. It has no additional cost, you need to upload the correct design file, and every order from Printful will include your branded sticker.

Adding products

This is the fun part! Adding Printful products is much easier than I expected. All you need to do is create a product on Shopify as usual, add a title, description, and price to it. Then you need to add product variants, for example, if you are printing on T-shirts, you’d want to add sizes as variants. I haven’t figured out how to combine different colors for products in addition to sizes; you probably need an app for that.

After product and its variants are saved, and images uploaded, click ‘more actions’ at the top and select ‘Edit on Printful.’ It will open Printful’s website, and you’ll be able to choose various options for each variant, such as on what product you want to print on, product color and size. Once this is done all orders for this product will automatically go to Printful. They will print ordered items and send them to your customer along with tracking information.

Next steps

Adding products and connecting them to Printful will take some time. I’ll also need to set up Shopify Payments and shipping rates, which I’ll cover in a future post. But this setup is just the beginning. There’s still a ton of work to do even for a simple shop. I need to set up various pages in the shop — at least about page, terms of service and the one describing shipping rates. Then I’ll have to work on shop’s design because default theme is far from perfect.