Selling Merch
Integrate with Printful for on-demand order fulfillment.
Last updated
Integrate with Printful for on-demand order fulfillment.
Last updated
Print-on-demand allows you to sell merchandise without having to keep any physical stock. This makes setting up a merch shop super quick and simple. Mavenseed offers this integration for free; all you need is an account with Printful, and an account with Stripe to process card transactions.
The Merch feature and Mavenseed is in beta and currently invite-only. Join the waitlist to be invited.
Generally speaking, you'll first connect your Printful Store to your Mavenseed site. Once connected, any products you add to your Printful Store, will show up on your Mavenseed site shortly after.
Connect to Printful
Add Products to your Printful Store from the Printful Catalog
Products will then show in your Mavenseed site
From within your admin, select the Merchandise menu item. Click the button that says "Connect to Printful."
On the following screen you'll be prompted to log in to Printful if you aren't already. Once logged in you can choose your Printful Store if already have one setup, or you can create a new one.
After connecting to Printful, you'll be brought back to the Merchandise tab within your Mavenseed site admin. From here you'll be prompted to Create a Product, or Sync Existing Products (if you happen to have a Printful store prior to signing up for Mavenseed).
You can disconnect from Printful at any time by heading to your Account, selecting the Sites tab, then navigating to the Gateways option under Manage.
Keep in mind your products will remain within Mavenseed, and should be set to draft as they'll not work with Printful disconnected.
There are two ways to add Printful products to your Mavenseed site:
add them on Printful, which will then push the product to your Mavenseed site
use the Sync Existing Products feature in Mavenseed, which will pull the existing Printful products to your site. (This is typically only done when first connecting your site)
Start by accessing your Printful store on Printful, then adding a product. Set all of the necessary variants that you wish to offer (things like sizes, and colors), upload your files, then finally set your retail prices.
Before Saving your Printful Product, be sure to select Free Shipping if you would like to offer free shipping. Otherwise, standard shipping rates will be applied depending on the Product Variant being purchased, and the shipping location.
After Saving your Printful Product, it will show up in your Mavenseed Merch tab shortly after.
Heads up! Preview images will take a couple of minutes to be synced as it takes Printful a couple of minutes to generate the different previews for each of your chosen variants.
If you have any previously created Printful Products on your Printful store, you can easily sync those with your Mavenseed site. Just visit the Printful tab within the Merch page in your admin. From here you can see a list of what Printful Products are synced, with the option to Sync them to your Mavenseed site.
Heads up! We currently only allow one item to be synced at a time.
Updating Products
Product and Variant pricing and details should be updated within Printful. With each update, those changes are pushed to your Mavenseed site. There are a couple of things to keep in mind with regard to what we update when you update a product in Printful.
Product Title - If you change the product title on Printful, it won't update the title of your Merchandise in the app. This allows you to specify your own Merchandise title, without fear of having it overwritten.
Product Image - As with the Product Title, if the Product is updated in Printful, we won't update the main Merchandise image on your site, allowing you to set your own custom image.
Variant Pricing & Title - Any changes to the Title or Price under a Product Variant on Printful will sync to those same variants on your site, provided the Product and Variants already exist.
Health Maintenance
Under each Merchandise product in your Mavenseed site you'll find the Printful tab. This tab gives you a quick picture of the overall health of your integration, and will warn you if any issues arise that might cause problems with your customers ordering products.
At quick glance, you can see what type of information is being pushed to Mavenseed from your Printful Store, and if there were any issues generating the mockup previews from Printful.
If you do run across an issue reported here, and you're unable to resync the product, please let us know at support@mavenseed.com.
You can easily update the Mockup Preview images by utilizing the tools on Printful, together with the Sync Mockup Media feature on Mavenseed.
1. Locate the product that you want to update on your Printful Store dashboard, and click "Edit."
2. Select "Bulk edit".
3. Select "Change Print File", and when the following screen opens, select "Proceed to mockups."
Once you've progressed through the screens and click "Submit", Printful will generate new mockup images for your product. The only thing left to do is re-sync them with Mavenseed.
4. Fetch Mockup Images
Locate the product in your Mavenseed site, and click on the "Edit" button. Next, find the Printful tab, and look towards the bottom of the screen for a button that says Fetch Mockup Images (this may appear differently depending on when the screen was last updated).
Click "Fetch Mockup Images." Mavenseed will pull down the new images from the product on Printful. This process can take a few minutes depending on how many variants you have, but you can refresh the page to see the progress.
5. Updating Featured Image (optional)
Printful generates one Mockup Preview image for each variant. When a Printful Product is added to your Mavenseed Site, we sync these images with each variant (again, one for each variant). We'll also grab the first variant image, and we'll set that as the Featured Image on your Merchandise.
The featured image is what will show as the main display image on the Merchandise when viewed as a customer.
This image is editable if you'd prefer to display a different image when the page is loaded, but each variant will display its own image.
When you re-sync the mockup media from Printful, we won't override this featured image in case you have one set.
So after re-syncing media, you can click on the Variants tab wihtin your product in Mavenseed. Then right click and open one of the images in a new window, save the image, and then use that to set your new featured image.
But if you already have one set that you don't want changed, no further action is necessary on your part.
By default all orders are processed by Stripe. If you have the PayPal Plugin activated, then your customers will be given two options for checking out. The flow is a little different for each, summarized below.
Orders processed through Stripe are done with Stripe Checkout. Prior to opening Stripe Checkout, customers are prompted to enter their Shipping Address. Using the Shipping Address and any Product Variants in the customers cart, we get the Shipping Rates from Printful.
Typically there's only a single rate. If this is the case then the rate is automatically selected in Stripe Checkout. If there are multiple rates, then the customer will be able to select the appropriate rate.
Sales tax and any taxes on Shipping are calculated in real time by Stripe.
Since PayPal does not support Sales Tax or shipping, we handle the calculations on our end, provided you have linked your TaxJar account for calculating Sales Tax.
Customers are still prompted for their Shipping Address, but we also prompt for their Billing Address so that we can calculate the necessary taxes.
Once a customer purchase a merchandise item, the order is automatically sent to Printful. By default the orders will be in draft, but you can adjust these settings under Settings/Integrations.
It's helpful to be able to test your orders, then once you feel confident, you can update the setting to automatically process the order without your intervention.
Each time the status of the Order is updated on Printful, we'll update the order within Mavenseed. You can check the status of any order by viewing the order within your admin.
Once the order has shipped, we'll email your customer with the tracking information. They'll also be able to see this in their account, and you will be able to see this while viewing the order in admin.
We strongly recommend creating a Return Policy and linking it at the bottom of your store. Adding this is simple, and creates a sense of security for customers when they are buying something from you, especially when they can't try it on prior to purchasing.
Creating this policy is pretty easy with Mavenseed.
Save the template below
Create a page on your site
Add a link to the policy at the bottom of your store
The policy closely matches Printfuls return policy, so feel free to use it for your own needs. The template uploaded contains one text widget, formatted nicely with headings and text. Don't forget to replace you@youremail.com with your own email address!
Why am I getting charged sales tax on Printful?
You will need to obtain a resellers permit so that you can purchase those products from Printful with the intent on reselling.
How can I order a bunch of merch like for an event?
You can easily create a manual order within Printful. Orders that are created manually on Printful are not sent to your Mavenseed site.
What happens to my products if I disconnect from Printful?
Any products synced to your Mavenseed site will remain untouched, but we do advise putting them into draft mode so that they're no longer visible.
There is the option to set up a Merchandise product that is in no way connected to Printful. For example, if you wanted to sell some stickers, this would be a great option for that.
1. From the Merchandise screen, select "New Custom Merch" from the button dropdown.
2. Set a title, and short description, then click "Create and Continue."
3. Next, set it up as a product for sale.
4. Specify a custom shipping amount for this merchandise.
When a customer adds this to their cart, we'll charge the shipping price that you set. If this item is combined with Printful Merchandise, then we'll add this to the Printful shipping total.
5. Lastly, setup a few variants for this custom product.
This feature is powerful in that you can create your own collection of variants using attributes such as Color, Size, and Name (optiona). For example, say you wanted to sell some Trail Stickers. Each trail has it's own name. Additionally, each Trail will be available in different colors, as well as different sizes.
We would organize it like so:
create a variant with the Name of Holy Cross (trail name)
add a size of 1"
set the color to Orange
In future updates we'll introduce a way to create variants in bulk, because if you're offering 10 trail names in 2 sizes with 5 colors, then you would create 100 variants (10 trails in 5 colors, with 3 sizes).
Setting the Color Code will show customers the color of the product that you are offering.
There is an optional setting to enable variant selection by title.
By default, customers can select from size and color. If you enable this option, customers will be able to select from Name, Size, and Color. This fits our use case well with selling Trail Stickers in different sizes, and in different colors.
This setting is per product and wont affect other merchandise products.
