Regardless of what e-commerce platform you sell on, you should receive an email notification following a sale.
First of all, congrats on getting a sale using a Printful integration!
That means you picked a good niche to target & designed a product that someone liked enough to purchase, which is no small feat - well done!
I've had enough people reach out to me asking what to do following their first sale, so I thought it'd make sense to do a writeup on it.
Fortunately, there's very little to no manual intervention required.
This is what makes selling print on demand products online a truly passive income model - otherwise, it'd be much harder to scale.
What To Do Following A Printful Sale
Following a sale, the website where the sale took place will alert you via email that someone purchased a product from you.
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Within ~30-45 minutes following the sale, Printful will automatically download the order & alert you via email that it successfully received the order.
This is why we setup a permanent sync between Printful & your e-commerce accounts - it will performs checks throughout the day for new orders.
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If there's any action required from you, you'll receive an email notification from Printful explaining exactly what that is.
Most likely, it will be that you need to add a payment method so that Printful can bill you for the time, material & shipping to produce & fulfill the order.
Production wont begin until they're paid, so you should take care of this ASAP - you don't want to leave your customer waiting.
Click here to add a billing method to your Printful account.
Once you're getting sales on a regular basis, I'd highly recommend setting up Printful wallet to bill in increments of $50+ so that Printful doesn't charge your credit card multiple times a day (which can trigger fraud alerts).
Click here to set up your Printful wallet.
Aside from that, you can sit back and relax - Printful will take care of the rest!
If you'd like to track the order, you can click that button at the bottom of the "Order successfully submitted" email, or track it down on the Orders page.
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Your orders will typically shift between the following states:
- Waiting for Fulfillment
- Being Fulfilled
- Canceled
- Fulfilled
- On Hold
Putting a Hold on Orders
You can also put orders on hold if needed:
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Sometimes I see duplicate orders come in from the same customer within a short window of time - often I'll put a hold on one of the orders and reach out to confirm with them that it was intentional.
Change of Address
Doing customer service is one of the (inevitable) non-passive attributes about this business model, but there's no avoiding it.
Some customers will request a change of address or an expedited shipping time... and even worse, some customers want to cancel their orders AFTER Printful begins production (meaning, it can't be canceled/refunded).
I chalk it up as being a part of doing the print on demand business model.
You can change the address on any order with ease:
- Click the "Change order" button
- If your order had a request for personalization, you would do that on this step. Otherwise, click "Continue to shipping"
- You can change the shipping address here (it will dynamically re-calculate the shipping costs if you make changes)
- You have the option of changing the shipping method here. Check out my blog post on how to leverage Printful's dynamic shipping to get more reviews
- Click the "Update order" button to save your changes.
As long as you have money in your Printful wallet, they will produce & ship your orders for you, with no manual intervention required!
What's not to love? :)
