Printful & Squarespace: The Easiest Way To Start Your Print-On-Demand Business (2023 Complete Guide)
Woohoo! You've finally decided to act on the idea of starting your print-on-demand business, which is a thrilling choice considering the fact that the market evaluation of the Print-on-demand business is a bit over $USD 5 million and is forecasted to increase by 24.6% by 2031. In other words, the business is booming, and getting buyers isn't a problem
However, choosing the right platform to host your print-on-demand service, which will also integrate smoothly into your ecommerce site, must be considered. Fortunately, we've done all the work for you and compiled everything you need to know about Printful & Squarespace, how to integrate Squarespace and Printful, and other valuable tips.
This post is for you if
You have the idea of starting your POD business, but you don't know the perfect POD and ecommerce site to start with.
For Squarespace store owners looking to integrate Printful into your site.
Understanding Printful & Squarespace
Printful
Printful is a print-on-demand service and software that allows you to create designs/customization on items, e.g., custom t-shirts, put them up for sale, and then do all the dirty work of printing and fulfilling orders. In other words, you can design customized items, and Printful will be responsible for creating or customizing those item for delivery. They make it easy for you to sell products without a physical store. That's not all; Printful has various branding options so that you can put brand labels on your items.
On the other hand, print-on-demand is a model where businesses only produce items once an order has been made. That is, a product won't be created until a customer orders. This model saves a lot of production costs and reduces risks. You won't have to deal with the headache of trying to sell existing products before their value diminishes.
Benefits of Printful To Your Ecommerce Store
Low Capital: Having the passion to start an ecommerce site is excellent, but it also requires money to get these products available. With Printful, you can finally say goodbye to spending capital on products people won't love and only spend when an order is available. Also, it is a great way to start your ecommerce business with little capital.
Experiment with Designs: You can experiment with various product designs and see which performs better in the market without wasting capital. Printful allows you to create various designs and upload them to the store. If a particular design doesn't perform as well as you've envisaged, you can easily delete it and create another.
Easy Customer Customization: For customized products, shoppers can customize how they want their orders, maybe by customizing text on the item, adding images, or making some color tweaks. This feature is exclusively available on Printful, and it helps you give your customers a sense of freedom without trying too hard.
Easy Integration: Printful integrates seamlessly with many stores, including Squarespace, making selling customized products on your storefront easy. Printful has the highest number of integration options compared to other POD platforms.
International Selling: You are not limited to selling in the US alone; you can sell to over 170 countries without hassle. Thanks to Printful having a good number of fulfillment centers. So, wherever your customers are ordering from, they can be assured that Printful will fulfill orders quickly.
There are no monthly fees or upfront costs. You read that right! Printful doesn't charge for setting up an account or uploading products. The little fee they deduct comes from manufacturing and order fulfillment. In other words, you only need to invest once your customized products sell. However, you may need to pay sales tax if your state requires it, but you can get a tax exemption in the state you live in.
High-quality products: Printful has maintained an excellent reputation for always using high-quality products and stunning designs. Your customers won't have to complain about the quality because Printful is intentional about the materials used for production.
Squarespace
Squarespace is a website builder with award-winning designs that allows you to build your website or set up your ecommerce store and start selling without hassle. With millions of users and strong SEO capacities, you can create any website on Squarespace and rank on search engines.
Beyond its excellent website-building capacity, Squarespace is also known for its ecommerce features, which a lot of users have embraced because of its in-built solid ecommerce business functionality and how easy it is to upgrade to any of the ecommerce plans (if you are already a Squarespace website owner)
For your POD business plan, you'll need a good ecommerce store where people can make orders and create accounts, and a highly recommended site is the Squarespace store. Fortunately, Squarespace integration with Printful is seamless, so you have nothing to worry about. Squarespace is the perfect website for your POD business if you need a professional online presence.
Benefits of Squarespace For Ecommerce Business
All-in-one Website: Squarespace is a perfect choice for ecommerce businesses because it gives you every feature you need in one place. You can create blogs, provide services, sell products, create customer accounts, etc., at a low annual/monthly fee. With a Squarespace account, you can also up your email marketing, create a members area, and integrate with other platforms you'll need for your business or website.
Excellent Inventory management and analytical tools: Managing your products and tracking your online store performance has never been easier. You can add robust descriptions and limited stock left on your products, view remaining products, manage orders, and fulfill them from your Squarespace dashboard. Also, it comes with a mobile app that allows you to view your online store on the go. For analytics, you can track your order, cart abandonment, traffic sources, search queries, best-performing products, etc.
Ease of Use: If you are new to ecommerce, you need a platform that doesn't require a high learning curve, and Squarespace is the perfect fit. Squarespace site makes adding products, viewing catalogs, making adjustments, sharing on social media, and integrating with other apps easy. If there are any hitches, you have thousands of resources on Squarespace explaining how to deal with the problem.
Aesthetic templates: Squarespace has the best website templates amongst other website builders, focusing on modern design. You don't have to worry about designing your ecommerce store from scratch; just choose one of the award-winning design templates on Squarespace, and you are good to go. In addition, you can use Squarespace without being tech-savvy. There are a lot of prompts that will tell you what to do per time.
Perfect for small and large stores: If you are just starting, the Squarespace commerce platform is the right choice because of its affordable plans. There are two major plans, the Commerce Basic and the Commerce Advanced. The basic plan is perfect for new or small stores. Another thing worth considering is the ability to sell other products alongside your print product at low shipping costs.
Why Integrate Printful With Squarespace
If you still need solid reasons to connect the Squarespace site with the POD company Printful, I am here to help. The first thing to consider is that you will need a store to display your Printful products for more orders, and a great way is through an ecommerce store. Also, if you are considering selling other products apart from your POD products, you need a commerce storefront. Remember that Squarespace also has powerful analytics that will give you insight into how your store is performing and measures to take to improve your sales.
Benefits of using Printful and Squarespace together
Streamlined Product Creation and Management
Creating your products on Printful and displaying them on your Squarespace store is super easy. The products are automatically displayed on your storefront once you integrate your Printful account with your Squarespace store. So, anytime you create a new product on Printful, it is automatically displayed on your Squarespace store once you submit the product, relieving you of unnecessary stress. In addition, inventory tracking and order fulfillment are easy to track on both Squarespace and Printful.
Outsourced Printing, Shipping, and Order Fulfillment
You don't have to worry about how to customize designs, ship to your customers' countries, and ensure the order reaches them intact. Printful does that for you. You only need to track customer orders on your Squarespace store and ensure you get the necessary traffic. Printful also ensures that Customers receive their orders fast and intact, and if you are skeptical about Printful outsourcing to other companies, they don't. They have all the facilities to print and customize your products.
Save Cost and Time
Printful doesn't charge unless you get an order, and the charges for manufacturing and fulfillment are fair. Also, you get the chance to get discounts on your products. Therefore, using Printful is a great way to save costs. Unlike other ecommerce platforms, Squarespace charges 0% transaction fees, allowing you to save more money.
Real-world examples of successful businesses using Printful and Squarespace
Many businesses have skyrocketed their revenue and gained customers' trust using Printful and Squarespace. In fact, most users that use Printful for their Print-on-demand services and integrate with a Squarespace store never look back. Here are some real-life examples of people using Printful and Squarespace.
WASHED MEDIA
Washed Media is a content company that releases stories that people between the ages of 24 and 35 can relate to. Whatever your millennial questions are, there is a show that can creatively answer them on Washed Media. Coupled with this, they offer various customized products such as mugs, shirts, custom stickers, etc. WilldeFries has this to say
We have had a great experience with Printful since we began selling- we've been happy with the service.
Prideletics
Prideletics combines pride and athletics merch to speak to the audience and offer sports and fitness products for the LGBTQA+ community. They've successfully integrated Printful and Squarespace, which drives many sales.
How To Integrate Printful With Squarespace
Create a Printful and Squarespace Account
Squarespace
Head over to Squarespace and create a new account. You will get a 14-day trial before being prompted to choose a Squarespace plan. You can use the free trial to become comfortable using the platform and set up your online store. Once the free trial elapses, you must pay for a plan. I strongly suggest the Basic Commerce Plan if you are just starting. It is perfect for small stores and has all the necessary ecommerce features.
Printful
After setting up your Squarespace store, the next thing is to set up your print account. Head over to the official site, click the Let's Go button, and you'll be greeted with an option to sign up with Google, Facebook, or email. After that, Printful will ask some necessary onboarding questions, provide answers to them, and you'll be automatically taken to the dashboard where you can perform various tasks such as
creating your first product
Managing your product catalog
connecting your store
manging statistics and so much more
Once you do that, the next thing is to connect your Squarespace store.
Connect Squarespace with Printful
The first thing is to head over to the Printful Dashboard. Once that is opened, Select Stores, and Printful will give you various store platforms to choose from. Since we are connecting with your Squarespace online store, go ahead and choose the Squarespace platform and then click on the Connect button.
Next, a page will instruct you to give Printful permission to access your store. Select Allow at the end of the page. Printful will prompt you to log in to your Squarespace account if you already have one. If you're using the same email for Printful and Squarespace, Printful will save you the stress of signing in with your email.
Again, Printful will ask to reconfirm the connection. Click the Connect Store to email button, and once that is done, you've successfully connected your Squarespace and Printful site.
Explore The Printful Dashboard
The dashboard is straightforward to figure out. However, it comes with many features beyond adding and designing products. You can view your product catalog, number of orders, statistics of each product, etc. Therefore, try to get accustomed to the dashboard and discover its capabilities.
Create Your First Product
Now that you've connected your Printful and Squarespace accounts, the next thing is to create your first product on Printful. Don't worry; it is straightforward. On the Printful Interface, click the Add Product button.
There are over 340+ customizable POD items on the product catalog, so you can start selling thousands of items in your store. If there is a specific product you are lo you can use the search bar to find your desired products. Once satisfied with the item, click on it to start the customization process.
Next, head over to the product designer on your dashboard to continue designing the product. There are a plethora of design options to choose from. You can add
texts
change fonts
choose colors
add clip arts
upload images
add layers and effects, and so many more.
Once you finish the design, Printful will take other steps to complete your product listing. Some of these steps are adding product details or descriptions, setting your price, adding mock-ups to your product, and much more.
After fulfilling the steps, click on the Submit to Store at the bottom of the product designer, and your product will be automatically listed on your Squarespace ecommerce store. To ensure everything appears excellent, log in to your Squarespace dashboard to confirm.
You can view your Squarespace commerce store directly from Printful. Head to your dashboard and click on Stores. Next, click on view stop next to your store details. After that, click on View on Squarespace in the top left corner. Once you click the link, it will take you to the inventory section of your Squarespace commerce store.
To ensure that your product appears well when customers are ordering, click on the three dots beside the product listing on your Squarespace inventory and select Preview.
Once you confirm all the information, you're good to go, and it is well-displayed! You've successfully created your first product and can create more products using the same step.
You must set up a payment processor to accept payments on your Squarespace website. Squarespace currently supports Stripe and PayPal, and remember to set up the tax rates as well.
How To Manage Products and Orders on Printful
Create Product Listings on Squarespace Using Pritnful
You can create as many products as you want on Printful and automatically display them on your Squarespace store. This is perfect if you are more invested in creating POD products. So, rather than creating products directly on Squarespace, do that on Printful and upload them to your Squarespace store.
Understand Product Descriptions, Variants, and Pricing
To ensure that your product sells faster, you must be able to write a powerful, short, and compelling description that contains the necessary keywords you want your product to rank for. Therefore, having a basic understanding of SEO and keywords can go a long way. Also, product variants mean the same product coming in the same color, size, or shape. One way to make your product sell faster is to create various variants for the product.
Pricing your product is very important so that you can make a profit. You must take into consideration Printful standard shipping rates and production costs. Also, consider taxes and platform fees per order. After adding up all these expenses, you can consider other factors and add your profit margin.
Always Sync Your Products between Printful and Squarespace
When you create new products or make changes on Printful, there are times these changes won't reflect on your storefront, and that alone can cause mixed orders, which Printful won't fulfill. To avoid that, always resync products to your store. To do that, head to Stores on your Printful dashboard and click on Resync data.
If you are making adjustments to your product, first find out whether the changes are reflected on Squarespace. If not, the best thing is to recreate the product to avoid order unfulfillment.
Manage orders, fulfillment, and shipping through Printful.
After a customer orders your product on your storefront, Printful receives the order and creates and customizes the designs. Also, they automatically fulfill orders for your customers. Printful allows you to track your customers' orders, and your customers can also sign up for a tracking email to get details about their orders. It is super easy to manage and view fulfilled orders on Printful.
Wrapping Up!
Printful is your go-to platform to start a POD business without hassle. It comes with more than three hundred customization products and gives you the autonomy to design freely and track orders. Besides, you won't have to spend a dime until you get an order. What makes it perfect is its seamless integration with Squarespace. Apart from the beautiful themes for your store, Squarespace comes with sophisticated ecommerce functionalities that will make selling easy. So, if you want to start your POD business today, Squarespace and Printful is the perfect choice!
