Logistics for 1 drop shipper and 1 fulfillment company on the backend of my Shopify store

[SavagezillaShop]

Hi everyone,

I'm just about ready to launch my first Shopify store that sells both print on demand items via Printful and my custom enamel pins that I'm having fulfilled via an order fulfillment company.  I'm currently out of the country and will be abroad for the next 8 months. It's because I'm abroad right now, that I decided to have an order fulfillment company handle my enamel pin orders,  rather than trying to ship to customers back home.

My questions are:

How do I sent up my store so that customers aren't charged shipping twice? Once from Printful for my print on demand items  and again for my pins from the order fulfillment company?

Because of my circumstances, will my customers always have to receive their orders separately since they're being fulfilled by 2 separate companies? Is there a way that I can ensure that they get their items in one box as one shipment?

Thank you in advance for your replies!!

[JoesIdeas]

Hey @SavagezillaShop 8 months abroad sounds great, enjoy the adventure. ✊

How do I sent up my store so that customers aren't charged shipping twice? Once from Printful for my print on demand items and again for my pins from the order fulfillment company?
You can contact Shopify support to change the way your store handles shipping. I ran into this exact problem and that's how Shopify support recommended solving.

Because of my circumstances, will my customers always have to receive their orders separately since they're being fulfilled by 2 separate companies? Is there a way that I can ensure that they get their items in one box as one shipment?
If you want to combine the shipments, you can ask your fulfillment company if they have a service to do this. In this case, I think what you'd do is ask them if they can combine the shipment, and if yes then you'd ask Printful to always send the order to your fulfillment company, and include the order number in the packaging, so that your fulfillment service can combine them.

It will likely be an extra fee, but worth a shot if you want that service. To give another perspective, I have a company where we fulfill from multiple locations, and as long as you communicate the workflow in the order notification / fulfillment emails, they're cool with it. People get shipments from different services on Amazon as well, so I think most customers will have no problem with receiving packages separately.

[SavagezillaShop]

Thanks for those solutions Joe! You're absolutely right I get my amazon orders separately all the time and it's never an issue, in fact, I don't even think about it! I hadn't really given thought about being super transparent with the status update emails. I'll be sure to have those systems in place. Will also reach out to someone within shopify to work on customizing my shipping. Your response has helped me so much, thank you!!