Hi, it’s Michael from Printful! In this video,
we’ll go through connecting your Printful account to Shopify, adding products,
configuring shipping, enabling live shipping rates, and setting up product personalization.
What is Shopify?
Before we start, let’s quickly go over what is Shopify and why
it’s a good choice to create your online business.
Shopify is an ecommerce platform that helps you sell products to customers
around the world. You can quickly build a custom online store to sell,
manage, and market your products. Shopify makes it easy for you to start selling online
and collect payments for your orders using a payment gateway like PayPal or Stripe.
With a Shopify store, you can access their App Store to find tools for just about anything in
ecommerce. You can automatically connect and push products to your social media accounts,
set up email campaigns, and much more to help increase your sales.
When you link your Shopify store to your Printful account, you can create products
on Printful and have them automatically synced with your Shopify store. When you make a sale,
we’ll make the product and ship it out to your customer. So let’s get into it.
Sign up to Printful
Before connecting Shopify to Printful, you’ll need to create accounts on both.
So, if you’re not a Printful user yet, go to our website and create your free account.
Go to the Printful page, click Sign up, and fill in your info.
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to see your Printful Dashboard.
Here, you can easily follow all the onboarding steps you’ll need to finish
in order to start selling with Printful—confirm your email, create your first product,
connect your store, add products to your store, set up billing, and order samples.
If you need help setting up your Printful account be sure to check out our How to Get Started with
Printful step-by-step video tutorial. I’ll leave a link in the description for you.
In this video tutorial, we’ll be going over the specific steps to
set up and connect your Shopify store to Printful.
Now that you have your Printful account,
you need to create a Shopify store, if you don’t have one already.
Connecting to Shopify
To register on Shopify, choose one of their payment plans or start out with a free trial.
There are three plans in different price ranges available for Shopify.
The defining differences in these plans are the number of staff accounts and locations, shipping
discounts, credit card rates, and different marketing extras that come with the pricer plans.
We’ll leave a link to these plan descriptions below, so check out
which plan works for you the best.
Once you’ve set up your accounts, log into your Shopify dashboard. Select the Apps tab and click
Customize Your Store . Search for Printful and when you’ve found us, click Add app.
Click Install app, log into your Printful account,
and that is it, your Shopify store is connected to Printful.
Adding products
Let’s add a product to your newly created store.
From the Printful Dashboard, select Stores, choose your Shopify store, and click Add product.
This will open up a new window, where you can create your unique products
and add them to your store. We’ll add a shirt for this example,
so let's choose Men’s clothing, All shirts, and the model you want.
Now customize your shirt however you like—add text, clipart, a design you made yourself,
or use a photo from the vast library of premium stock images, vector designs, and patterns.
Let’s add text and customize the color,
choose the perfect font, you can even transform the arc and rotation,
as well as add an outline or a shadow. Use our collection of clipart and customizable
Quick Designs to design products for free. If the clipart elements are solid colors,
like this Wild West figure here, you can customize the color and layer them to find the right look.
Let’s zoom in to make sure everything is set up how we want it.
We can turn on the grid to make sure the design is centered.
Afterward, use the position tools to align and center the design.
There we go, I like what we have.
Once that’s done, select all the colors and sizes you want to offer the t-shirt in. And
now hit Proceed to media. Choose from a large variety of mockup styles. You can
select different mockups for different product colors. To have additional mockups, check the box
next to Add additional mockup styles and choose 1 additional product color and its mockup photos.
Choose the mockup format—JPG or PNG. The biggest difference between JPG and PNG
files is that PNG will use up more bytes and might cause your page to load a bit slower,
but it also has a transparent background, JPG doesn’t. I’ll pick PNG this time.
You can include a production or product fit video in your product listing too.
This is what it’ll look like when your customer is shopping on your store. Just make sure your
Shopify store theme can display product videos. Here’s what it looks like on a product page.
Now press Proceed to the details. Choose the description language
and change the product title. For this example we’ll name it “Printful T-Shirt”.
Then, edit the product description. As you can see, we already have the basic product
info provided here. But you can definitely personalize the description of your products
to improve your product’s SEO and have a better chance of being found through
Google Search results. Do not skip this step as it’ll help you stand out from your competition.
In this window you can choose to add the size guide to your product description,
choose size guide’s measurement system,
and add tags. For this example, we’ll leave it as is.
You can choose the product visibility—to make it visible in your shop right away,
check this box. If you leave it unchecked, you can activate the product through your
Shopify product settings. Once you click on the product to edit, you’ll see a section called
product status. Change it to active, then save, and now it’ll be visible on your store.
Pick the correct collection for your
product and check the Display my product with free shipping box if you want to hide your
product's shipping cost on your storefront so you can offer free shipping. If you choose to
offer free shipping, adjust the retail price to cover the cost of shipping.
Next up, proceed to pricing. Here you can edit the retail price by setting your profit.
For example, we see Printful’s fulfillment price for this t-shirt in this column,
and let’s say we want our profit to be a bit more for each shirt,
so we set it here. See how the retail price is automatically adjusted?
Don’t forget, if you want to offer free shipping increase your retail price to account for the
shipping cost. I’ll leave a link in the description to our Shipping page
so you can review the costs and adjust your profit margins accordingly.
Click Submit to store. Now the product is added to your catalog. And here it is,
the t-shirt we just created is now available for purchase.
Before we move on, here’s a quick tip. You can save your product to
product templates by clicking Save product template. This will save
the product in your Printful account under Product templates in your Dashboard menu.
This is a great way to save your product if you decide to also sell on a marketplace
with millions of customers, or download mockups for promotional materials. Instead
of having to recreate your products, you can choose from the ones you save here.
In the Shopify dashboard we can go to the Products section,
and select our newly created t-shirt to make adjustments to it.
For example, add a product type to make it easier for buyers to find your product in your store.
If you already have products in your Shopify store and would like them to be fulfilled by Printful,
go to Dashboard > Settings > Orders > check under the section Sync as you
go > Import existing products and choose the setting that’s suitable for your situation.
This option will import the products from your Shopify store to Printful. From there you can
sync them by clicking Choose product here or mark them as ignored if it’s not a product we fulfill.
For example, this skateboard. Printful doesn’t print skateboards on demand,
I make these myself so I’ll mark it as ignored.
Setting up shipping
Printful automatically creates shipping profiles for your Printful products on Shopify,
so shipping rates will already be set when you create a new product. You can find Printful’s
rates by going to our Shipping page, a link to this page is in the description below.
In this table, you’ll find shipping costs for each product category.
You can access shipping options on Shopify’s end by clicking Settings and Shipping and delivery.
Here you can see your shipping profiles. Note that if you make changes to Printful shipping profiles
they will revert back to default. You can create new custom profiles
and assign them to your products.
It’s up to you, just consider Printful's shipping prices and how they affect your profit.
If you have any issues with the setup on Shopify’s side, get in touch with their customer service.
Enabling live rates
Another way to deal with shipping is to enable Printful’s live rates.
Live rates are carrier-calculated real-time rates, meaning that your customers might
see different shipping prices based on when they order and where their shipment's going.
If you’re a Shopify advanced plan user, you can enable live rates. Do that through
the Printful app on Shopify by selecting Apps, Printful app, Products, Settings,
and then Shipping.
Here, click the box to enable Printful’s live rates on your Shopify store and
then hit Save. You can also use this feature with other Shopify plans, but to enable it
you’ll have to contact Shopify and request they add live rates for an extra $20 per month.
Note that Printful’s live shipping rates
won’t conflict with any manual rates you set for non-Printful products.
Adding product personalization
Let’s look at how you can add the Printful Product Personalization
Tool for your new products on your Shopify store.
Note that product personalization can only be
added as an option when creating new products, not existing ones.
From the Printful Dashboard, select Stores,
choose your Shopify store, and click Add product.
Product personalization is available for DTG and embroidery products,
jewelry, keychains, and wall art. We’ll add a men’s shirt for this example,
so choose Men’s clothing, All T-shirts and
the model you want. Set the color, sizes,
and all the other elements that will be a part of a design template customers won’t be able to edit.
You can make it as elaborate as you like by including your custom designs or Printful’s sample
designs. You can also leave the template blank and include only the customizable element. In our
example, the template is text-based—“World’s greatest”, created with the Clipart tool.
Let’s click Add text. Then, add a placeholder for each element you
want to have customizable. The placeholder will appear on the product you’ll push to your store.
In our example, it’s the text “uncle”.
Make sure it’s properly aligned and contained within the safe print area. Once it’s placed,
tick Allow text personalization in the left corner to make the “uncle” text box customizable.
Adjust the text area for personalization so it can fit any longer words your customers might
want to use for this design! Images can be used for personalization as
well. Your customers can customize the design by uploading their own images.
The print area and placement of the image added by your customer will be the same as its placeholder
image. It's your responsibility to inform your customers about the requirements for image upload,
such as file format, size, and acceptable content. We'll leave a link to it in the description below.
Once you’re happy with everything, push the product to your Shopify store as usual.
Tweak the product name and description to make it more inviting and let your
customers know they can personalize this product. Once you’re finished,
the product will appear on your storefront with a new Personalize design button.
Now let’s try out this feature on your customers’ end. After clicking Personalize design, a pop-up
will appear with a basic version of Printful’s Mockup Generator where the customer will be able
to add the element(s) you’ve made customizable. In our case, it's the “uncle” text box. Let’s type
“power napper”. You can see the importance of choosing the right size for the text area.
“Power napper” is longer than “uncle” so it has been resized to fit the text area.
Note that customers can also customize the color of the text. Once your customers are
happy with the design, they’ll complete the order as usual and make their purchase.
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The last thing to do is to make sure your billing information on Printful is all set. We have
a video to guide you through the process. Watch it to learn how
payment processing works with Pritnful. The link is in the description below.
Don’t forget to go through our Shopify FAQ
and subscribe to our Youtube channel for more useful content.
And that’s it! I hope you found this video helpful!
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