Print on demand: Printful and Printify
Sell T-shirts, mugs, posters and the rest of a print-on-demand catalog without holding stock. Connect your own Printful store or Printify shop, import the products you designed there, and every paid order for them is sent to the service to be made and shipped to your buyer. When the service ships, the carrier and tracking number land on the order in Aglyn, and your buyer gets the same shipping email as for any parcel you ship yourself.
Print on demand comes with every plan that includes selling, at no extra cost. You pay Printful or Printify directly for what they make and ship, at their own prices; Aglyn adds nothing to them.
Before you start
- An account with the service. Create your products in Printful or Printify first, with their designs, variants (colors and sizes) and retail prices.
- A token you make there. Aglyn connects with a token from your own
account, so no password is shared:
- Printful: sign in to the Printful Developer Portal and create a private token for your store that may view and manage its orders, products and webhooks.
- Printify: open your account's Connections page and generate a personal access token that may read shops and products and read and write orders and webhooks.
- The same currency. The service's prices must be in the currency your store sells in. Aglyn never converts prices, so a product priced in another currency is not imported.
- A payment method at the service. Printful and Printify charge your account for each order they make.
Connect
- Open Products → Integrations and find the Print on demand card.
- Select Connect, choose Printful or Printify, and paste your token.
- If the token reaches more than one store or shop, choose which one to connect.
The token is checked with the service before it is saved, and it is stored encrypted. You can connect one Printful store and one Printify shop to each site.
Two settings sit under each connection:
- Send paid orders for production automatically — on by default. Turn it off to have each paid order wait at the service as a draft until you confirm it from the order.
- Use the service's retail prices when products update — off by default, so your store keeps the prices you set in Aglyn.
Import products
Select Import products on a connection to see the products in your Printful store or Printify shop. Choose the ones to sell and select Import. Each product comes in with:
- its variants, as options such as Color and Size;
- the retail price you set at the service, for each variant;
- its photos, copied into your site's media library;
- its description and, from Printify, its tags.
New products arrive as drafts unless you turn on List new products in the store now. Edit them like any other product: change the name, description, photos or prices in Aglyn and your changes are kept.
Imported products update every day from the service: new variants are added, variants the service no longer offers are removed, a variant the service cannot make right now shows as sold out, and each variant's cost is refreshed. To bring the service's name, description and photos in again, choose the product in Import products with Update names, descriptions and photos turned on, or use Update from the product's menu under Imported products.
Each imported product counts toward your plan's product allowance like any other. Stop filling through the service in the product's menu keeps the product in your store but stops sending its orders to the service.
Costs and margins
The product editor shows, for an imported product, what the service charges you for each variant next to its retail price there. Each order's Print on demand section shows what the service charged for that order — items, shipping and tax — next to what your buyer paid for those items, and the difference, before your own shipping charge and payment fees.
Orders
When an order is paid, its lines for imported products are sent to the service right away. An order with products from both services is sent to each, and lines for your own products stay with you to ship as usual: a shipping label you buy for the order leaves off the items a service is making.
The order's Print on demand section shows where it stands at the service:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Sending | Being sent, or waiting to be tried again after the service did not answer. |
| Draft at the service | Waiting for you to confirm it, or a test order. |
| Sent | Confirmed; the service has not started yet. |
| On hold | The service is holding it, usually for a payment or file problem. Fix it at the service. |
| In production | The service is making it. |
| Partly shipped / Shipped | Parcels are on their way. |
| Canceled | Canceled at the service, or never sent. |
| Not sent | The service refused it, or every try failed. The reason is shown. |
From the order you can Confirm for production (a draft), Send again (an order that was not sent), Check for updates, or Cancel at the service. Orders sent to services under the card lists every order sent, newest first.
If the service does not answer, the order is tried again by a job that runs every 15 minutes, waiting longer between tries — up to six hours — for six tries in all. If it still is not sent, or the service refuses it (an address it cannot ship to, a payment problem), the order shows Not sent with the service's reason, and the site's admins and editors are notified.
Test orders
An order paid with a Stripe test card is sent as a draft and never confirmed, so you can check the whole flow without anything being made or charged. Delete the draft at the service when you are done.
Canceling and refunding
Canceling an order in Aglyn, or refunding it in full, cancels it at the service too, as long as the service has not started making it. Once it is in production the service will not cancel it from Aglyn; you are notified, and can ask the service directly. A partial refund does not change what the service makes.
Shipments and tracking
When the service ships a parcel, its carrier, tracking number and tracking link are added to the order as a shipment, for the items it carried — exactly as when you record a shipment yourself, so the order's status and your buyer's shipping email follow the same rules.
Aglyn asks the service to notify it of each shipment as it happens. If the service already sends its notifications somewhere else (Printful keeps one address per store), the connection shows Checked every 15 min and Aglyn asks the service about open orders instead, so a parcel still reaches the order.
Disconnect
Choose Disconnect from the connection's menu. New orders are no longer sent to the service, and orders already sent stop being followed in Aglyn. Your imported products stay in your store; fill their orders yourself, or connect the service again to resume.
What is sent to the service
For each paid order with imported products: your buyer's name, shipping address, phone number and email address, the order number, and each line's variant, quantity and the price your buyer paid. Your token authenticates each call. No card or payment details are sent. Reading your products sends nothing about your customers.
The service is one you chose and connected with your own account; the data is sent to it on your instruction so it can make and ship your orders.