Automatic fulfillment with physical products as well as print on demand

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

A user is setting up a store with both print-on-demand (POD) items and self-shipped physical products, seeking to automate fulfillment only for POD items.

Solution approaches:

  • Native Shopify settings: Enable automatic fulfillment in Settings → Checkout → Order processing, then configure POD products to be fulfilled by their print provider (Printify, Printful, etc.) in product settings. Physical products remain on manual fulfillment.

  • Mixed orders: When an order contains both product types, Shopify automatically fulfills POD items while leaving physical products marked as “Unfulfilled” in the order dashboard for manual processing.

  • Third-party automation: The Order Automator app offers rule-based control for more complex fulfillment scenarios, including automatic fulfillment requests to services, digital product handling, and warehouse location changes.

Unfulfilled orders remain in an open state in the dashboard, awaiting manual action or app-triggered fulfillment.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I will be selling print on demand products as well as physical products (prints and sculpture). I saw that there is an automatic fulfillment option which I would like to use for the prints so they can be sent to the printing company as soon as an order is placed. Since I also have physical products that I ship myself I am not sure if I should select this option. Is there a way to specify which products you would like automatically fulfilled and which products you dont? If an order is not automatically fulfilled what does that look like? Thanks!

2

Hi @kslatz

You can set up automatic fulfillment for your print-on-demand (POD) products while keeping manual fulfillment for your physical items. Shopify allows you to customize fulfillment settings per product.

For your POD products, go to Settings → Checkout, and under “Order processing,” enable automatic fulfillment. Then, in the Products settings, ensure your POD items are set to be fulfilled by the respective print provider (like Printify or Printful).

For your physical products, leave them as manual fulfillment. When an order contains both POD and physical items, Shopify will automatically fulfill the POD items while leaving the physical ones as “Unfulfilled” in your order dashboard

3

You can use Order Automator to control exactly what gets fulfilled by creating rules for fulfillment actions.

Here are some common examples people use it for:

  • Automatically request fulfillment of POD products to the fulfillment service

  • Automatically fulfill digital products

  • Change warehouse location of orders from certain countries

When an order is not automatically fulfilled (answering your question), it just leaves it in an open state, ready for you or an app to take action on it (fulfill, request fulfillment, change location, etc).