Printful: Dropshipping for custom printed products

Printful is a service that helps you easily sell custom print products online with very minimal effort. All it takes is uploading a design and syncing your Ecwid store catalog with Printful. No inventory, no shipping, no upfront costs. All orders are automatically printed and dropshipped in your store's branding.

You decide your profit. You buy the ready-made Printful products at a wholesale price but sell to your customers at whichever price you want. The higher the price, the bigger your profit margin becomes.

In case you wish to test the look of your products, you can order samples of your products at 20% off and free shipping worldwide. Printful also offers design and photography services to get your store up and running.

Connecting Printful to Ecwid

To connect your Ecwid store with Printful, you need to install the Printful app from the Ecwid App Market. Please note that the Printful app is free to sign up, but you will have to pay for each new order.

With Prinful you can sell clothing, wall art, mugs, pillows, phone cases, and many more. See the full list of items.

To connect Printful to Ecwid:

1. In your Ecwid admin, install the Printful app. Printful will embed a page into your online store admin panel where you can control the app:

After you sign in to this app, it will import products from your store. You can sync existing products in order for them to be tracked by Printful to fulfill new orders in your store. If there are products you don't wish to fulfill through Printful, you can mark them as ‘ignored’.

2. Add products from the Printful catalog:

3. Choose a product category and a product (e.g. Men's Clothing/T-Shirt/Short Sleeve Cotton T-Shirt):

4. Configure the design of this product:

• select colors and sizes

• upload your graphics, resize and drag-n-drop your image so it takes the right place on the T-shirt:

6. Choose main mockup image:

7. Edit description: create a product title and edit the description field if necessary:

8. Choose the markup price and Printful will auto-configure your product prices and calculate the expected profit:

9. Click Submit to store to list it in your Ecwid storefront as a regular store catalog product:

That's it! Repeat steps for every product.

Setting up Printful

You can manage how orders are processed in your store settings in Printful app interface. Go to the Printful App → Settings → Orders:

If automatic fulfillment is turned on and all of the products in an order are synced, the order will be fulfilled automatically. If some products aren't synced, the order will be saved as a draft so you can sync products on the fly.

Managing shipping and taxes

Shipping

There are two ways Printful calculates the shipping rates: Flat rates and Live rates

Flat Rates

On the Shipping speeds and pricing page, you can find Printful Flat rate shipping prices for all product types. Flat rates are the default pricing for the shipping and the shipping method used depends on the availability and price offered by a carrier. Printful ships using a variety of carriers and methods that you can also find in the Shipping methods section.

Live Rates

Printful also has Live shipping rates. They are calculated by the exact weight and the destination of the order and the shipping method/rate is selected by your customer on the checkout page of your store.

You can enable Printful's live shipping rates by checking this box in Printful → Settings → Shipping:

and specify which shipping methods you want to use for your store:

By default, all shipping methods are selected. Unchecking the box disables that carrier type for live rate orders but note that if you leave Flat Rate enabled, any order where Flat rate is selected as the shipping method can still ship with any of Printful carriers and methods. To totally disable a specific shipping method disable both the Flat rate and the method itself.

Taxes

When you’ve started selling, don’t forget to calculate taxes (https://www.ecwid.com/blog/taxes-101-for-ecommerce-business-owners.html). If you use drop-shipping services, where your products are stored in a third-party warehouse and shipped out when people order, then you could have a nexus in more than one state — check with a tax professional or look on state government websites to find out. You can create tax rates in the Settings → Taxes section of your Ecwid admin.

Additional features

Printful lets you customize the Packing Slip, set the Return Address, add Pack-in (flyer, sticker, business card or button.)

Connecting existing Printful catalog to Ecwid

To upload your existing Printful catalog to Ecwid:

1. Log in to your Printful account at https://www.printful.com/ and go to Stores → Choose platform.
   
   
2. Find Ecwid and click Connect. You will be taken to your Ecwid control panel to add the Printful app. Choose Connect existing account.
3. In the Printful app, click Add Product button. In the appeared product catalog pop-up, open Import from Store tab:
   
   

4. Select products that you wish to add to your Ecwid store:

   

After that, products from your Printful catalog should appear in your Ecwid online store.

Synchronizing orders between Ecwid and Printful

If you've got a new order that contains a Printful product, the order must have the Paid payment status and the Awaiting Processing fulfillment status in order to be synced with Printful.

If you don't have a card/PayPal connected with your Printful account and your Printful wallet is empty, orders won't go to fulfillment. Instead, they will end up as Failed. Then it is possible to manually Confirm the order in the Failed status.

To add a payment method, go to your Printful → Settings → Billing → Billing Methods, click Add billing method, and set up the preferred billing method:

If you do not see the Paid order in your Printful account, you need to make any change in the order details in the My Sales → Orders section of your Ecwid admin. You can use the Order Editor option for that. This way your Printful account will be triggered to check the specific order and sync it with Printful if needed.

Orders are usually synced every 15 minutes, but it can take up to an hour for the order to come through to Printful.

FAQ

Which Ecwid plan do I need to integrate with Printful?

You can integrate Ecwid with Printful on any Ecwid plan, use Printful's product push generator and enable live shipping rates. Automatic stock updates are only available for Business and Unlimited plan users.

If you start using Printful on the Free or Venture plan and then upgrade to the Business or Unlimited plan, please note that after the upgrade all products that are created with Printful's product push generator will automatically have product variations. On the Free and Venture plan, you get products with options. If you want to replace your previously created products with options with variations, you can delete products from your Ecwid catalog, recreate them in Printful, and then sync with your Ecwid store. This way you will get all products in your Ecwid catalog with variations.

What if I sell my products in a different currency?

No worries. Printful automatically detects your store's currency and converts the retail price to match it. You can also adjust the conversion rate in your Ecwid Control Panel → Settings → General → Regional Settings.

If the product is leaving the United States, Printful is required by law to list the pricing on the package. This means the packing slip will show the price of the product in USD. To do this, Printful will convert your currency to USD based on the exchange rate from public-facing APIs.

If an order is sent within the United States, no pricing will be shown on the packing slip.

How to contact Printful?

You can send an email to Printful to this address: support@printful.com Or open a chat with Printful from your Ecwid control panel: go to Apps → My apps → open Printful → click on the chat icon in the right bottom corner of the page. Here you can start a chat with the Printful support.

Why can't I see my Ecwid products on Printful?

If you already have an Ecwid account with existing products, you can still connect it to Printful. However, your products will only show up in Printful if they have variations (product variants). The Product Variations feature is available on Business and higher-tier plans. Upgrade to get this feature

All products that are created with Printful's product push generator will automatically have product variations (variants).

As for lower Ecwid plans — you'll need to define the size and/or color in product options.

How to remove products from Printful?

To remove products from your Printful catalog, you should remove them from your Ecwid control panel: go to Catalog → Products → tick products you want to remove → click Mass Update → Delete Selected. After that, products will be removed both from your Ecwid and Printful catalogs.