How to Use Zapier and Printful to Automate Your Ecommerce Business

Running an ecommerce business requires you to wear a lot of hats. That means you can’t waste precious time on tedious tasks like completing data entry, notifying your team about orders, and creating receipts. If you want to focus your energy on the creative side of your business, turn to automation.

With Printful, your order fulfillment and shipping is taken care of. But there’s even more you can do. Zapier is an automation tool that helps anyone connect apps without any technical know-how. And now that Printful integrates with Zapier, you can automate your Printful workflows as well.

What can Zapier’s Printful integration do?

You can use Zapier to connect your Printful account with 1,400+ apps that will automate your ecommerce workflow. This means you’ll have more time for the fun part of your job—creating awesome designs and getting them to your customers.

Zapier is free for basic features and comes with a 14-day trial of its premium tier. Premium plans start as low as $20 per month.

Using Printful as a workflow trigger

You can use Printful as a workflow trigger. When something happens in Printful, that event will cause something else to happen in another app. For example, whenever an order is canceled in Printful, you can automatically send a follow-up email to the person who canceled.

With Zapier, you can trigger workflows whenever any of the following events happen in Printful:

• A new order is created
• An order is fulfilled (all items shipped successfully)
• An order is canceled

You can use Zapier’s built-in Filter tool to create trigger events that are more specific.

For example, maybe you only want a trigger to work when a new order that costs more than $50 is created in Printful. Or maybe you only want to know when orders to Australia are fulfilled. Zapier gives you complete control over your workflow so you can drill down into whatever data you’d like to see.

Once you select the trigger from Printful, you’ll be able to choose your action app and automatically send your Printful data to that app every time the trigger event happens in Printful. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it system.

Using Printful as a workflow action

Of course, you might also want to take action in Printful based on trigger events in other apps. For example, you might want to create an order in Printful whenever you add a row to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. With Zapier, you can create a new draft order in Printful whenever a trigger fires in the app of your choosing.

That means Zapier will automatically create Printful orders instead of you having to manually do it yourself.

How to set up your Printful and Zapier integration

To make use of the Printful and Zapier integration, you’ll need to have both a Printful account and a Zapier account. Once you set up both, you have a couple of options.

Use pre-made Zaps

The easiest way to get started is to try some pre-made Printful and Zapier workflows, which Zapier calls Zaps. All you’ll need to do is click Try it next to the Zap you want to use and authenticate your Printful account and the accounts of any other apps you’re using in the workflow—Zapier will take care of the rest.

Here are a few pre-made Zaps you can start using today:

• Connect Printful to Slack so you can automatically notify your team about new, canceled, or fulfilled orders.

• Automatically send an email confirmation for each new Printful order. Greet your customers with a personalized message or share useful information about their order.

Our video team has also made a tutorial on how to create automated shipping confirmation emails with Zapier and Gmail:

• Connect Prinftul to your accounting app to automatically create sales receipts or invoices.

• Automatically create a draft order in Printful whenever you receive an order via another platform, like Volusion.

Build custom Zaps

If you can’t find what you’re looking for in pre-made options, consider building a custom Zap with Printful and Zapier. Here’s how you do it:

Step 1

Within the editor environment, click Edit trigger and select the app that will trigger your workflow. For example, if you want to send a direct message on Slack whenever you get a new order in Printful, select Printful as your trigger app.

Step 2

Then select the trigger you want for your workflow; in this case, New Order.

Step 3

If you haven’t already connected Printful to your Zapier account, you’ll be asked to do so (and given instructions on how).

Step 4

You can then specify the trigger; for example, you might only want to have a trigger on pending orders.

Step 5

Once you’ve done that, Zapier will test your connection and find some sample data from your account that it will use to help populate the rest of your workflow.

Step 6

Then you can select the action; in this example, sending a direct message in Slack. Select Action and then choose Slack as your action app in the same way you chose Printful as your trigger app. Choose your action (in this case, Send direct message), and then connect your Slack account.

Step 7

You can customize the message you send through Slack, using data from the Printful order that triggered the workflow. For example, you might want to include information like recipient name, item ordered, cost, or any of dozens of other data points. Click the + next to any given field to insert data from the previous step.

Step 8

Once you’ve finished your action, test the Zap, turn it on, and that’s that.

Automate your ecommerce workflow with Zapier

As your ecommerce business grows, the number and complexity of your day-to-day tasks can become overwhelming. Luckily, there’s a way you can take some weight off your shoulders without having to hire your first employee: automation.

Together, Printful and Zapier can save you countless hours of manual work. That’s time you can put back into growing your business, whether it’s introducing new products or marketing them to your target audience.