A common request from our customers is to sell merchandise through the Printfection platform. This article covers that use case and talks about the details of what we do and do not support when it comes to selling swag.
To start: Who's going to buy the merchandise?
The first thing to consider is, are you planning to charge for your swag?
Many times a Swag Store is just a place to distribute company swag — many companies decide to offer employees and customers swag for free.
It makes sense to first determine how you plan to distribute your swag.
1. Giving Swag to Employees, Customers, and Users for Free
This is exactly what Printfection's platform is built for. And you can manage almost all of your swag activities directly within Printfection. Our campaigns are targeted directly at helping you give and distribute merchandise to your customers, users, and fans.
Our inventory system is built to work interactively between all campaign types.
2. Charging Employees, Customers, and Users for Swag
If you want to charge all recipients for the swag they're getting you'll have to leverage a system alongside Printfection. We have a number of customers that use Shopify to sell their merchandise and then import those orders from Shopify into our system for fulfillment and delivery.
Why don't you support selling swag directly inside Printfection?
It's true that Printfection itself does not offer any built-in Store selling capabilities.
The primary reason for this is that selling adds a lot of complexity and overhead to swag management. A few factors include: tax collection on behalf of the customer, 3rd-party payments and refunds, store theme management, as well as custom files, images, and template management.
Getting orders into Printfection
There are tons of awesome platforms online to help sell merchandise, such as Shopify and Big Commerce.
Our solution is to let you export orders from those systems and import them into Printfection through our Collection campaign. That way your merchandise is still managed, fulfilled, and delivered through one system.
If you're interested in seeing a step-by-step walkthrough of using Shopify with Printfection you can view our Importing Orders from Shopify walkthrough article.
Are there any limitations to this process?
As with any 3rd-party external process there are a few limitations to consider:
- In-Stock Inventory
Because you're using a 3rd party selling platform it won't be aware of the item inventory you have. Therefore, if you sell something that's actually out-of-stock you'll need to order more before the order can be fulfilled. - Export Frequency
You will have to determine how often you want to export orders from your selling platform. Once a week normally works well, but this will add additional time to order turn-around for the end-user. - Lots of Orders
If you have hundreds of orders being placed per week, those orders will have to be exported into multiple groups. Our platform at this time can't handle hundreds of orders being imported at once.