Why isn't Shopify immediately covering Printful charges after customer payments?

[YnGuns]

Why is it that Shopify does not transfer part of what the customer pays on my store to immediately fulfill the order & pay Printful? Its complete bs and Shopify needs to remedy this site issue.

I’m trying to start a business and am about to launch it. I have around 150 customers that want my merch before launch. Let’s say $200-$300 per customer (tops/bottoms/accessories) as I’m selling a premium brand. That’s $30,000 to $45,000 just from those initial customers minus my costs.

Now the problem is that Shopify receives the money and doesn’t immediately pay out Printful to fulfill the orders. As i just did a mock order and paid Shopify as a customer to my store to see the customers’ viewpoint of the process. Welp!!! Shopify took my money immediately, yet it didn’t show up as paid to my shopify account immediately after checking my debit account that i set up with shopify, then on top of that Printful charged my account as well (so i was double charged) and it was exactly $27.14 more than i charged for my products on Shopify. They charged me California taxes plus digitization fees which i thought were included on the “our costs / your revenue after your price set” section but that’s not the case or I wouldn’t have paid Printful $30 more than i paid Shopify, which I shouldn’t be paying Printful after Shopify gets the money anyway.

So…The problem here is that when my customers pay, I’m getting charged by printful as well rather than printful receiving the costs my customers paid to Shopify from Shopify to cover the full order. Now don’t give me the “they’re a 3rd party bs” we don’t control it, because you do, as everything is third party for DS & POD!! Moreover, I didn’t authorize Printful to take my funds & should have been prompted about it, but I wasn’t. Shopify simply gave them the connected billing info and i was charged again. That’s wrong & unethical!!

I clicked fullfill order in Shopify, not on the Printful site, after placing my own order as a customer thinking Shopify was going to cover all the costs and immediately fulfill the order. Nope!! Printful took my stored info from my connected Shopify account and charged my account the full price plus taxes and additional fees without my consent or a notification from Shopify that they gave my billing info to Printful to charge me again to fulfill the order after Shopify was already paid for the order. To me this is fraud and should be considered fraud. 

Platform store subscribers that pay for the platform should not be charged by Printful or any other 3rd party that Shopify personally advertises for to connect with & use, especially if Shopify was paid by our customers - PERIOD!

Now if i have 150 customers waiting to order before I launch, and counting, how will their orders get fulfilled? I don’t have $450 sitting in an account let alone $45,000 sitting in one for Printful to take from me to fulfill my customers’ orders that just so happened to already fully pay Shopify!

What’s the workaround for this , there must be options or something Shopify can change in their business format to prevent this from happening. 

Explain!!  Thank you. 

[Skye]

Hi, @YnGuns 

Thanks for posting to the Community. I hope your day is going well!

It seems there is some confusion regarding the relationship between Printful and Shopify. Please allow me to clarify that we are two separate entities and are not in business together. As such, we aren't able to front the cost of your inventory to a third party business on your behalf. I do want to clarify that Printful doesn't have access to any of your Shopify information and only processed the payment with the information they have on file for you when you created your Printful account.

To elaborate; there are three different entities at play when you operate a print on demand business. The first is your POD supplier, then your ecommerce software, then your payment gateway. From the sounds of it you use Shopify Payments. This is our in house payment gateway, but is still technically separate from Shopify ecommerce software. For example, some merchants use other payment gateways such as Authorize.net or PayPal. 

When a customer makes a purchase, that payment needs to be processed by the banks before it is paid into your bank account. You do not have to ship, or purchase your customers goods before that payout clears. You can instead choose to wait until the funds have reached your account. You would simply make your customers ware of a processing time for their orders to ship. 

With that being said, your print on demand products are your inventory. A traditional business model fronts thousands and thousands of dollars of inventory before they even make a sale. The beauty of dropshipping and print on demand is that you only need to purchase your inventory when you make a sale. This is standard for all ecommerce and POD software. 

I hope that clarifies things! If you'd like to turn off auto fulfillment so you can purchase your goods after your payouts clear you can refer to Printful's help guide here. 

[YnGuns]

Why would i have to purchase my own inventory if the customer already paid for it?? It’s nonsensical & i’m sure at least 2 out of every 3 people would concur - the 3rd person disagreeing would likely be a Shopify affiliate. Anyway, the entire point of a site like Shopify is targeted towards broke/new customers that want to try to start up a business & make it from nothing to something or at least that’s how it comes off with their advertising - it pulled me in! You see the general populous, or people like me, don’t have “1,000s” of dollars sitting in an account to be used inventory as you mentioned, heck we barely know when we can afford groceries next. From my understandings the entire point of drop shipping/shopping and POD was made exactly for us types of people, not for the rich and wealthy with 100s of thousands just sitting around. 

And.. Yes i set up a checking/debit account with Shopify thinking those funds would be immediately issued & used to pay Printful, or any other 3rd party for that matter, once the customer pays Shopify but that isn’t the case nor does Shopify explain this before purchasing their web subscriptions etc. 

And.. As aforementioned, i do have a Shopify checking/debit & the payments from customers should be processed instantaneously just as it is when Shopify removes it from customers accounts - in nanoseconds! Its 2023 about to be 2024 and blockchain enhancements do just that, transaction transfers in quite literal seconds. 

 

Thanks for your response.

[svalkyrie23]

Hey YnGuns,

I'm curious about your situation, how did you go with it in the end?  I am in the early stages of setting this same process up and thanks to your post you forewarned me about it.  Keen to know how you went, did you go with the paypal option?  What are you running these days?

[StephensWorld]

Hey @YnGuns 

Printful doesn't have any kind of integration with Shopify Payments. You (or your store) is essentially a middle-man for the transactions happening on your site. Customers purchase on your store, and that money is collected by Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments then sends that money to you, after x-number of days (depending on your payout schedule). In order to fulfill orders from Printful, you need to pay them at the time of fulfillment (ie. immediately). This requires you to be able to fund any orders you get (ie. to pay Printful), while you wait for Shopify Payments to send you your payout. One workaround for this is to turn off automatic fulfillment, and then manually fulfill your orders, after you receive the payout from Shopify Payments and have transferred the money to whatever payment method you're using on Printful.

The easier way to handle this is to use PayPal as your payment gateway on your store (instead of Shopify Payments), and then also use PayPal as your payment method for Printful. By using PayPal on both ends, you won't have to do anything. When a customer makes a purchase, the money goes to your PayPal account immediately, and then when the order is fulfilled, Printful is paid from your PayPal account balance immediately. It makes the process completely automated, with no delays, and you won't have to do any manual work with moving funds around. The only drawback with this method is that you have to pay Shopify's transaction fee for using a third-party payment gateway (% depends on which Shopify plan you're on -- it's between 2% and 0.5%) ... not a big deal though if you're making decent margins on your products/sales. 

I do the dual-PayPal setup for my own store, using Printful, and I've never had any issues with it. 

Hope the above helps! 🙂

Cheers,

Stephen

[svalkyrie23]

Hey Stephen,

Thanks for sharing this, it's really insightful.  Do you still recommend the paypal method for both Shopify and Printful then?   I suppose if you make enough profits over time then you could enable the shopify checkout feature and know that you have a buffer of funds in there to use?

[StephensWorld]

Exactly! 🙂

When you first start out, the easiest way to handle things is by using PayPal for both Shopify and Printful ... and then once you start making some consistent sales, and can anticipate future sales, then you can think about adding additional payment gateways to your store (including Shopify Payments) -- but have a 'buffer' of cash that you use for those extra payment gateways.

[svalkyrie23]

This is great thank you! My only dilemma is now I wanted to use Amazon as well, but I know I can incorporate printful to Amazon directly and I dont know if Printful can do both paypal (for shopify) and another payment with card for amazon?

[StephensWorld]

I believe you would need to pick one payment method on Printful's end, which would handle any orders that go through Printful. You can definitely check with Printful's support team though. 

[svalkyrie23]

Thank you