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Printify Review: Print on Demand for Your WooCommerce Store
If I told you that you could sell your own designs on WooCommerce without needing to worry about nitty-gritty details like product fulfillment, would that intrigue you?
I’m talking about designing your own t-shirts, pillows, sweatshirts, and more, then selling them via WooCommerce and having a print on demand service automatically do the fulfillment.
That’s what Printify has been doing for Shopify. And they recently released a dedicated WooCommerce integration to bring that same functionality to WordPress.
In my Printify review, I’ll give you a look at how Printy helps you add print on demand functionality to WooCommerce.
Without giving away too much, I’ll say that I was genuinely impressed by how polished Printify’s product is. I actually spent many years running a t-shirt blog, so I’m familiar with the industry. And I think Printify offers a neat opportunity for designers to easily start selling with their own store.
Let’s go more in-depth with Printify, though…
Printify Review: What Does It Do?
Printify is a print on demand platform that handles product creation and fulfillment. They aren’t a print on demand service themselves. Rather, they connect you to a variety of other print on demand services, which gives you access to a huge variety of products.
In fact, you currently have access to 150+ unique products, including clothing, home decor, and lots more.
In a nutshell, the process works like this:
- Create a design on Printify by uploading your design to Printify’s design creation tool.
- Preview and tweak your design on a real-time mockup
- Set pricing and product variations
- Publish your design to WooCommerce with one click
- Accept orders via your WooCommerce store like normal
- Printify fulfills orders via your chosen print on demand provider. They’ll even use your own branding to make things more personalized
- ….profit!
The implementation is really well done, so I encourage you to read the next section where I go hands-on and show you how everything works.
Hands-on With Printify – Getting Set Up
To see how Printify actually performs, I’ve got my test site set up with WooCommerce already installed and configured.
Next step – installing and setting up Printify!
To get Printify connected to your WooCommerce store, you need to run through a few steps, which they’ve outlined in their WooCommerce integration guide.
Once you get Printify connected, you can manage your products in the Printify interface, which I’ll show you in the next section.
Turning On The REST API
First, you need to make sure to enable the REST API in WooCommerce by going to WooCommerce → Settings → API. Mine was turned on already for some reason, but Printify says that the default is for the REST API to start as disabled:
Then, you need to go to your Printify account, which is free to create.
Creating a Printify Account and Syncing With WooCommerce
I’m not going to show the initial account creation process because it’s pretty simple. Mainly, you just need to enter information for your business and address.
Once you enter that information, though, Printify will ask you to select a product and choose a print provider:
I’ll cover this interface in more detail in the next section because it’s how you’ll actually create the products that you want to sell.
But for now, you can head to the Manage Stores option to connect your Printify account to your WooCommerce store:
From there, you click Connect and choose your channel:
Once you select WooCommerce, you’ll need to enter the URL to your WooCommerce store:
Then, you’ll be redirected to give Printify access to your WooCommerce store:
And now there’s only one thing left to do!
Enable Printify Shipping Calculations
The actual Printify plugin is what lets you generate proper shipping calculations for your WooCommerce store.
To finish the integration, head to WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping → Printify Shipping.
Make sure to check both boxes:
And that’s all you need to do to sync Printify with your WooCommerce store. The whole process only took me a few minutes, and that was with me taking screenshots and writing directions.
Creating Products to Sell On Your WooCommerce Store With Printify
As I mentioned, you’ll create the actual products that you want to sell in the Printify interface.
To find a product to put your design on, you can either view:
- All products
- Products from specific print providers
- Products from specific brands
To customize a product, all you need to do is click on your desired product.
Then, you can choose a provider, select color options, and start designing:
If you’ve ever used a print on demand service, the app should feel pretty familiar.
For example, here’s me creating a WPLift shirt!
Once you’re happy with your design, you click Save and Continue.
Then, Printify will show you all of the variants for your shirt (assuming you chose multiple variants):
On the next page, you can enter the description details for your product. Printify even pre-fills the details based on the product type that you selected:
Moving on, you can set pricing on the next page. This interface is super neat because it tells you exactly how much your shirts will cost, and how much you’ll profit.
You can adjust as needed to hit your desired profit margins:
Then, you just need to select which store you want to publish your product to:
And once you click that button, the product is live on your WooCommerce store, including size and color variations, pricing, images…everything:
Wow – that’s super cool. Seriously – I was impressed with how slick this integration is. No lag time, no glitches. I had a live product on WooCommerce just a few minutes after uploading my image and positioning it on the shirt.
How Does Ordering Work?
Because Printify is the middle-man between orders on your WooCommerce store and the actual fulfillment, you might be wondering how the ordering process actually works.
Whenever someone orders on WooCommerce, that order shows up in the Orders tab in Printify. Because I’m working on a test site, I couldn’t personally check this functionality with a live order. But given how well the rest of the integration worked, I’m going to assume it works as described:
Once an order is approved, it goes out for fulfillment.
You can handle approvals in a few different ways. The default is to automatically approve orders after a one-hour delay.
But if you dig into your store’s settings, you can change the interval or make order approval require manual action:
What About Returned Products and Refunds?
One area that worried me about Printify was how it handles refunds and issues with products. Because your customers don’t necessarily know they’re ordering from a print on demand service, you might be worried what happens if there’s an issue with the order.
You should read their FAQ for more details – but it basically seems like Printify will cover the expenses for lost or damaged products, but you’re responsible for other issues.
How Much Does Printify Cost?
The Printify plugin is free. Creating a Printify account is also 100% free. There’s no fixed cost for using Printify.
Instead, you only pay the production costs for the actual items that you sell, from which Printify takes a cut.
As I showed you, these costs are laid out when you create a product, so you can always make sure you price your products to make money.
I love this approach because there’s literally zero risks. The only time you pay is if you sell a product. And you always know exactly how much you’ll pay for each product.
Final Thoughts on Printify
Though Printify’s WooCommerce integration is new, they’ve been around on Shopify for a while. You can tell – because the product feels polished already, despite being new to WordPress.
The interface is well-designed and the product mockup creator makes it easy to upload your own designs.
Additionally, I love the variety of products and print providers. And I appreciated how easy they made the integration with WooCommerce. Not only is it simple to set up, but it’s also awesome how you can publish products to your WooCommerce store with a single click.
All in all, Printify provides a unique twist on product fulfillment and selling with WooCommerce.
If you’ve been interested in setting up a WooCommerce store to sell your own designs, you should definitely give it a look. As I mentioned, you won’t pay anything until you start selling products.