Connect Printify with WooCommerce – Full guide: WooCommerce and Printify Series Part 1

This tutorial hows you how to connect Printify with WooCommerce on your live WordPress and WooCommerce website, and how to publish your first product from Printify* directly to your WooCommerce site. It forms part of a wider series of articles on integration between print on demand (‘POD’) platforms and their integration with WordPress and WooCommerce.

About this Print-on-Demand and WooCommerce Integration Series

The Print-on-Demand and WooCommerce Integration series takes you all the way from signing up to your chosen print on demand (‘POD’) providers, creating your first product inside your POD account, establishing a connection between your POD provider with your WooCommerce website, publishing your product into WooCommerce and making necessary changes to WooCommerce settings. There are a range of print-on-demand providers who support WordPress WooCommerce integration. This particular series of articles shows you how to integrate your WordPress and WooCommerce website with the print on demand platform Printify*.

Prerequisites for this tutorial

To integrate Printify with WooCommerce, this tutorial requires that you have a Printify* account, and a WordPress site live online with the WooCommerce plugin installed, (rather than running WordPress locally on your machine using Local by Flywheel, or similar).

Once you have signed up to Printify* and created your first product within Printify* for integration with your WooCommerce WordPress site, and hit publish on that product. Your product will then be incorporated into your WordPress site as a WooCommerce product.

1. Creating your new store on Printify

Having created a new Printify account, when you first view your dashboard, you will not have any store connections added yet. You will see instead a default (Printify) Store name on the top right of the dashboard, called ‘My new store’ – see Figure 1. You can add a completely new store or edit an existing store (like your existing default ‘My new store’) on the Printify* site.

1.1 Ways to create a new store name

In this section, are three different methods (Methods 1-3) are shown to find the ‘add store’ settings. Later, when you have multiple Stores set up in Printify, you will be able to toggle between several stores you have set up, and edit them as necessary via Method 1 and Method 2.

Method 1: From the Main Dashboard page – Edit ‘My new store’ or Add a new Store

Once logged into your Printify* account, you see the main Dashboard page for a new account (Figure 1). Since you have not created a Store yet, Printify has already created a placeholder Store called ‘My new store’.

You can either modify the name of the default Store called ‘My new store’ or add another completely new store. Click on ‘My new store’ and you will see a drop down menu to choose to modify the To add a new store from that main login page, choose ‘Add new store’ in the top right of that dashboard page, to the left of the round green account icon (see Figure 1).

Method 2: From the Main Dashboard page – Edit the ‘My Stores’ List via the green Account icon

You can go to the ‘My Stores’ list as in Figure 2 by clicking on the green account icon (depicting a green head and shoulders) on the top right of the main Printify* Dashboard page and in the drop down list, and choose ‘My Stores’

Method 3: From a draft Product page

If you have already made a product within Printify* but have no Store yet, you will be prompted at the bottom of the product options to create a new store, as in Figure 3

1.2 Name Your New Store (within Printify)

You can call your new Printify Store whatever name you like, but we recommended that you call it something which enables you to differentiate it from your other stores on your Printify account e.g. ‘yourstore.com woocommerce‘ both denotes the URL you will connect Printify* to (here, a ‘.com‘, and the connection type you will have (WooCommerce). You might have another shop with something similar, but with ‘yourstore Etsy‘ to identify a connection to a particular Etsy store.

The example store name used in Figure 4 is named using just a shop URL (a .com with a name which is redacted in Figure 4) which the Printify* store will be connected to, namely the equivalent of ‘yourstore.com‘:

2. Connecting your newly created Printify store to your online WooCommerce site

There are two parts to this: first request of the connection with the WooCommerce website from the Printify* side, then the second part is accepting the connection fro the WooCommerce side, and enabling API calls from within the WooCommerce website.

2.1 Connect Printify with WooCommerce Site from the Printify* side

When you press ‘Connect’ (rectangular ‘Connect’ green button shown in Figure 4, above) it gives you a range of connection options. These options are shown in Figure 5, including WooCommerce. Press the WooCommerce button as labelled in Figure 5:

Clicking the WooCommerce button in Figure 5 takes you to Figure 6 below. In Figure 6 you are prompted to add the website URL of the WooCommerce site being connected to the new Printify* Store:

Fill out the Connect form with your full WooCommerce site URL. For example, if your WooCommerce site is e.g. https://yourstore.com or https://www.yourstore.com, put that full URL in the box in Figure 6 above and then press connect (green rectangular button). At that point, you will see the prompt from Printify* in Figure 7 to authorize connection between your Printify Store and your WooCommerce website:

Press the purple ‘Approve’ button in Figure 7. When you click ‘Approve’,Printify* goes back to a normal Dashboard view. From the Printify side, you have now completed all the Store connection steps you require. The next section walks you through the connections and permissions from your WooCommerce website.

2.2 Set up WooCommerce site to accept the Printify* connection

In order to set up WordPress and WooCommerce settings to accept imports from Printify, from your WordPress backend dashboard, go to WooCommerce” → Settings. Go to the Advanced tab and click on Legacy API. Check the box next to Enable the legacy REST API (shown in Figure 8), then click the Save changes button. ^[1] https://help.printify.com/hc/en-us/articles/4483637152401-How-can-I-integrate-my-WooCommerce-store-with-Printify-

When you log back into Printify* again, it will be apparent that your WooCommerce site “yourstore.com” is now connected to Printify, as the shop name you have created, together with the URL it is connected to will now appear on the right hand side of the Printify* dashboard, just to the left of your green account icon. This is labelled below in Figure 9 as ‘URL connected to’ (yourstore.com, which is your WooCommerce store URL), and ‘Store name’ which is whatever name you have chosen to name your Store connection as, within Printify – in Figure 9 the Store name is also ‘yourstore.com‘.

Tip 1: Enabling the connection at the Printify (Connect Store) and WooCommerce (Legacy API) ends alone, is sufficient to connect and publish products. You do not need a WordPress plugin simply to connect and publish a product from Printify.

3. Checking Printify WooCommerce connection

Once you have completed the connection steps in Section 2, Printify* and your WooCommerce website are connected in full. This connection can be checked and tested using the steps in this Section 3, including publishing a Printify* product to your WooCommerce site.

3.1 Connections Appear on Printify Dashboard

Once you have made a connection between Printify* and WooCommerce and enabled this connection at both ends (the steps in Section 2), you should see the Store connection appear in a similar form in the top right hand side of your Dashboard on Printify, just to the left of the green account icon. Note that for the example in Figure 9 the name you gave to your Store, together with the URL (in this case your WooCommerce site) your Printify* Store is connected to, are both labelled with red and green arrows respectively).

Note that you can create up to five Stores this way within a free Printify* account (you can have more Store connections on an account with Printify Premium, but you do not need to sign up to for the purposes of this tutorial, nor to get started with Printify* Print on Demand). In the example in Figure 10 below, there are three Store connections, i.e. (1) the main ‘yourstore.com‘ website with WooCommerce, (2) a WooCommerce on a test site and (3) an Etsy store. Each of these three stores have their own URL. You can switch between these stores by pressing on the relevant store in the list shown in Figure 10.

3.2 Publishing a product from Printify* to your WooCommerce site

Once you connect Printify with WooCommerce via the steps above, the best way to test the Printify-WooCommerce integration is to publish a product from Printify* and check that it appears in your WooCommerce site.

3.2.1 Choose a Product within the Printify platform

You can choose a new product to put your design on by a) browsing by product type e.g. ‘Men’s Clothing’, or b) selecting by print provider on the Printify platform (click ‘See print providers’), as in Figure 11:

Once you have chosen a product, you can start arranging a design on it, as described in the next section.

3.2.2 Press ‘Start designing’ for a Printify* Product

Once you choose a product (in the example in Figure 12, a Gildan 5000 t-shirt printed by T-shirt and Sons), press the green rectangular ‘Start designing’ button

Pressing ‘Start designing’ will take you to a product design page shown in Figure 13. Figure 13 illustrates designing that product by placing and resizing images on the product.

This tutorial is not intended cover the product design process in any great detail, we just want to show you a completed design to illustrate the process of saving the product and publishing it from Printify* into your WooCommerce website.

3.2.3 Save the Product you have designed

Once you press ‘Save Product’, shown in Figure 13, you get to a product page with various sections: Mockups, Descriptions and Pricing, shown by Figure 14 – Figure 17:

Mockups section on the Product Page

Description section on the Product page

Pricing section on the Product page

Your draft Printify* product will of course show some variability from the screenshots Figure 14 – Figure 17 depending on the product, colors and sizes you have chosen.

3.2.4 Publishing product from Printify to WooCommerce – Settings

The draft product (a t-shirt) in Printify shown in Section 3.2.3 is ready to be published from Printify* to WooCommerce. The publishing settings and options are displayed further down on the same page as the draft product settings shown in Figure 14 – Figure 17.

This next section takes you through the publishing options you have, and how they will be displayed in WooCommerce both at the backend and front end of the WooCommerce website.

3.2.4.1 Publishing from Printify to WooCommerce but Hiding Product

When you are about to publish a Printify* product to WooCommerce, you have various options in terms of Publishing settings and options, shown in Figure 18. If you click the ‘Hide in store’ green box shown in Figure 18, this will transfer the product over to the WooCommerce store as a draft product. That draft product will appear in the backend of WooCommerce, but will not be published to the website frontend due to its draft status.

Note, although you see the draft product in the backend of WooCommerce, if you press ‘publish’ from within WooCommerce, you will not see the product appear on the front end of your website. Therefore once you are ready for your product to appear on the WooCommerce front end, you should republish the product from Printify. You do this by unticking the Product visibility ‘Hide in store’ check box and press ‘Publish’ again (Figure 18) in Printify* – this synchs the changes (including the product visibility change) with the WooCommerce store. When you change any settings, including ‘Hide in store’, you will get the following prompt in Figure 19:

Tip 2: If you chose ‘hide in store’, even if you subsequently choose to ‘publish’ the item within your Woocommerce/Wordpress, it will still show in your Woocommerce store as out of stock/unavailable. Therefore to show a product on WooCommerce front end, you have to untick ‘Hide in Store’ and then republish within the Printify site.

Note: the steps above should be sufficient to publish your product from Printify and have it appear on your WooCommerce site. If you cannot publish a product, review the steps above to test the connection.

4. The Printify for Woocommerce Plugin

There is a Printify for WooCommerce plugin, which can be found here, and can be installed via your standard WordPress backend plugin process. There are various user comments on this plugin suggesting that they do not publish products to WooCommerce from Printify*, but as the steps above show, the connection should already have been made between Printify* and WooCommerce to publish a product, so it is not the plugin’s job to make this basic connection.

You can install the Printify for WooCommerce plugin at the backend of WordPress in the normal way, as shown in Figure 20. Printify also have a youtube video on their plugin called “Printify Tutorial: WooCommerce Integration (2023)”.

The next section covers what the Printify for WooCommerce plugin actually does.

4.1 Printify Plugin imports Shipping Rates

The Printify for WooCommerce plugin imports the Printify* shipping tariffs directly for a product, if you are passing these shipping rates directly onto the customer. If you are setting your own shipping rates via WooCommerce (e.g. free shipping), do not enable the Override of standard WooCommerce shipping rates (Figure 21)

Tip 3: Printify WordPress plugin is for importing shipping rates from Printify, not for basic integration of WooCommerce and Printify.

5. Conclusions

This tutorial has walked you through how to connect WooCommerce and Printify, and ensure that you have a valid connection by publishing your first Printify product to you WooCommerce website.

When the product you have made in Printify* gets published, it is treated by WooCommerce as a variable product (the variations tend to be sizes and colors, for example). You are likely to have to amend the product attributes once you have imported the product, and this is explained further in another of our articles called “Easily bulk fix of WooCommerce product attributes: Integrate WooCommerce and Printify Series Part 2“