This is the age-old question of selling online: where should you source your products? You have options like dropshipping, buying wholesale, and inventing a product and having the manufacturer make it. And, of course, the tried-and-true print-on-demand purchasing option. The print-on-demand (POD) process involves placing designs on items such as t-shirts, bags, and stickers, then using a POD provider to accept purchases from your e-commerce store, print them on the items, package them, and ship them out to clients. It's design products and dropshipping because you don't need to carry inventory or pay warehouse fees. In this article, we'll cover how to start a print-on-demand store , Printful and WooCommerce , where one is a POD provider and the other is an e-commerce platform.
Combining Printful and WooCommerce a complete POD product sales system; this side of the Printful operation allows to design items and activate the POD dropshipping aspect, while WooCommerce acts as your online presence, allowing customers to visit your website and make purchases.
To make things even sweeter, Printful has an app with the WooCommerce platform, which means you don't need to hire a professional web developer to use the API.
Read on to learn all about creating POD stores using Printful and WooCommerce. We'll discuss the basics of each system and jump right into detailed tutorials on running a business.
The basics of Printful and WooCommerce
To start the process, you'd better understand the ins and outs of Printful and WooCommerce before using the tools.
WooCommerce
woocommerce web page
As briefly mentioned, WooCommerce is the platform you use to make your online store. It works as a WordPress plugin where you can create a website using WordPress (a content management system commonly used to build all types of websites) and install plugins to add e-commerce features such as product gallery, shopping cart and checkout modules.
WooCommerce installation costs nothing, but there are additional premium extensions if you need additional marketing, shipping or subscription features.
Instead of building a website design from scratch, you can make product pages for WooCommerce, configure shopping carts, and choose a template. After that, WordPress provides all the web design tools you need to present a beautiful homepage along with tons of other pages such as your terms and conditions, size guide, and blog.
WooCommerce also supports many of the top payment processors so customers can visit your website, make purchases, and wire money to your merchant bank account. Not only that, but you have full control over your WooCommerce/WordPress site with options to add custom domains, choose your own hosting provider, and customize to your intent using CSS and HTML.
Finally, for print-on-demand stores, there is a Printful integration for WooCommerce (more details below) to build a full-fledged POD operation.
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Printful
printful web pages
Printful is not affiliated with WooCommerce. It is an independent third-party printing and fulfillment company that provides a simple app for you to store its services with WooCommerce.
Printful has several warehouses and distribution centers around the world, most notably those in the United States, Canada, and Europe. You can sign up for a free account with Printful and choose from a variety of products such as:
T-shirt
sweater
Hats and Beanies
leggings
Vest
Water bottle
coffee cup
throw pillow
poster
flag
towel
apron
towel
pet products
stationary
Mobile Phone Cases
Jewelry/Jewelry
sock
keychain
there are more...
The list goes on, and Printful does an amazing job adding more items to its inventory based on what merchants want to sell each year.
However, Printful is more than just a place to upload your designs. Online designers offer product mockups to display in your store, custom areas for text, clip art, and the option to print on multiple areas of the product such as t-shirt sleeves or the back of a pillow.
After that, you can set up everything from product descriptions to pricing and desired warehouse to the type of details displayed on the packing slip. With WooCommerce integration, all orders automatically go to Printful for fulfillment. They pick, pack and ship items to your customers. The best part? It's available on demand, so you don't need to store email list any inventory or spend money on wholesale purchases.
Finally, Printful does not charge any monthly subscription fees for its main services and software. Instead, you pay only the cost of each item as it is sold in the store. However, there's a Printful Pro plan for $49 per month; most stores won't need it, but you do receive impressive features like a promotion maker, keyword search tool, and background removal tool.
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How to Create a POD Store with Printful and WooCommerce
So there you have it. WooCommerce is how you handle website design and most ecommerce elements like marketing, sales, and accounting. Printful is a hub that connects to WooCommerce, takes orders from your store, prints them on products, and ships the products to your customers. It's that simple.
Sounds great, right? But how do you go about building a store with Printful and WooCommerce?
Read the sections below to find out.
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Set up your WooCommerce store
There are several requirements for making a WooCommerce store:
WordPress.
a domain name.
A hosting plan.
A WooCommerce theme.
Other potential plugins, extensions and page design tools.
The best thing to do is to find a reliable hosting company first, as most reputable hosts offer one-click WordPress installations, as well as WooCommerce installations. This way, you can skip a few steps and not have to install WordPress and WooCommerce yourself.
We recommend starting your search by checking out our list of the best places to find WooCommerce hosting .
WooCommerce hosting is not much different from standard web hosting, except that it caters to those who use WordPress as their content management system. So, you'll receive a quick button to install WordPress on your server and create your WordPress login credentials (this is how you log into the backend of your website). More specifically, many hosting companies offer WooCommerce hosting by installing WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin for you.
In the linked article above, you'll find a list of our recommended hosts that offer some sort of WooCommerce-focused hosting plan.
Our favorites include:
SiteGround
WP Engine
DreamHost
Kinsta
Hostinger
When looking for WooCommerce hosting, the idea is to find hosting with top-notch security, support for scaling your business, and reasonable pricing. After all, ecommerce store traffic is bound to change — especially during the holidays — so your host needs to provide a server that can handle the influx of traffic.
And, of course, you want to make sure that your WooCommerce host actually offers some kind of tool for instant installation of WooCommerce and WordPress, ideally, both already installed.
Therefore, we recommend checking out all these hosts, their websites, and what they offer. Take a close look at the pricing and remember that low price doesn't mean good. You are more interested in a WooCommerce host with significant uptime guarantees, security measures and fast speeds, especially during heavy traffic.
Once you've registered your hosting, you can go ahead and install WordPress on your server and add the WooCommerce plugin to WordPress. As mentioned in the previous paragraphs, the ideal is to let your host handle all of this for you.
In addition to that, you have to set up your entire online store, mostly in the WooCommerce plugin. However, you also have to add a WooCommerce theme, link to the payment processor, and handle everything like shipping, taxes, and product creation.
Read our online store guides for WooCommerce , Divi and Siteground to learn how this process works.
Divi is a well-known WordPress theme with WooCommerce support and multipurpose features to make an online store in almost any style. You can also check out our guide to the best WooCommerce themes , considering there are literally thousands of themes to choose from, many of which may be better suited for your branding or logistics.
SiteGround is another recommended WooCommerce host for a link guide to creating an online store using them for hosting. The good news is that DreamHost enables WordPress and WooCommerce in your WordPress dashboard, saving you this step entirely.
From a step-by-step perspective, here's what to expect when making an online store with WooCommerce:
Get your domain and hosting first so you can access and view your website online. More WooCommerce hosts from Google like DreamHost offer a domain name for free, or you can buy one from their website.
Create your online store's design using the following themes Divi. Again, with so many themes on the WooCommerce marketplace, you should take the time to complete this step. Some theme developers make templates for specific industries (like tech, jewelry, or toy stores), while others are more focused on multipurpose themes where you can design anything you want (Divi is an example of such a theme .
Consider using a drag and drop builder. The page builder minimizes coding requirements when building a WordPress site because it provides a visual design interface with draggable modules. With a setup like this, you don't need to be or hire a developer to make changes to your website. Some options for page builders include Divi Builder, Elementor, WPBakery, and Beaver Builder. WordPress also offers its own built-in page builder called Gutenberg.
Add basic online store elements such as a product gallery on the homepage, your logo, and a separate store page. This is all done in WordPress. For example, you can usually add a logo in the WordPress customizer. Many themes also have their own design area where you can add design pages, activate product galleries, and merge categories.
Link to payment processor. WooCommerce has a payments section where you can link processors like Stripe, Square, or PayPal. These processors protect you from fraud, process actual payments, and collect money to be deposited into your merchant bank account.
There are still many areas of making an online store that need to be covered with WooCommerce, but these are the necessities. We recommend adding additional pages for terms and conditions, return policy and privacy policy. It's also not a bad idea to configure settings for shipping, blogging, and email marketing.
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How to connect Printful to WooCommerce
With your WooCommerce site either fully set up, or at least nearly complete, you can choose products from Printful.
As your print-on-demand provider, you need to create an account with Printful to upload designs to products, create mockups, and determine pricing. After that, you'll sync your product pages with WooCommerce so they're all ready to sell through your website.
So, go to the Printful website and click the start selling button. This will guide you through a series of questions and account creation tasks to ensure all your personal information is in place.