Combing Printful Shipping with Own Product Shipping

Hi all

Anyone had any luck combining Printful print on demand products with their own products on their Squarespace store? What strategy did you use?

Adding the products is simple enough, the issue I have is setting correct shipping costs.

Our store offers flat-fee shipping for all orders, which works well for us, and provides a modest incentive for customers to add extra products to a single order.

However, trying to add Printful products to our store, which is an additional and significant extra shipping cost is proving extremely difficult within squarespace as it doesn't seem possible to set shipping rates for individual products without going down the "by weight" route, which I DON'T want to do for our own products.

I don't see any way of having customers charged a flat fee of X for all the products they order from us, and then the additional Printful shipping costs for any print-on-demand products they order. There's no way I can cover the cost of printful shipping within my own site's flat rate - it would mean more than doubling the flat rate I charge everyone, and even then it may not cover shipping. 

So... the only way I can see of doing this is to include the full shipping price in the product price, but even that doesn't really solve the problem as customers will be OVER charged if ordering multiple POD products, and I can't change the product price per geographical region (where the costs will vary), so at best it will cover the cost, but it might not depending on the shipping cost to a specific place. Given the margins on POD are pretty meagre (without the cost to customers getting silly), any money lost to shipping is a chunk out of profits. Adding the shipping to the product also makes the products look really expensive! I appreciate this is what the customer will get charged in the end anyway, but if they order multiple products the shipping price only increases marginally, whereas including the price in the product adds the entire shipping cost for each item, so that's not right either.

I'm about to give up on the whole thing, as the integration with Squarespace is just too basic - unless they offer a much better way of passing through the shipping costs, I don't see how I can make this work for us. It just doesn't seem worth the hassle for what will be only marginally profitable products anyway.

If anyone else has found success with this & worked out a good shipping strategy, I'd love to hear about it.

I’m not 100% sure on the “successful” part of this method, but we worked shipping into the product price and then didn’t add dimensions/weight for Printful items. If we get an order for only Printful items, it does sometimes charge shipping. We just add a note that sometimes the app charges shipping and we’ll refund immediately. The integration’s missing so many important features. Local pickup orders + whole new headache:)

Thanks @domestica. I've currently got it set up in a similar way, though not sure how long I'll keep it going for the minimal revenue it generates. I do wish Squarespace would put a bit more effort into integrations. To be fair, they've added a lot of features in the past couple of years, some of them really good (Fluid Engine), but many of them just aren't relevant to my business or I already have good solutions for. Unfortunately I've found that the existing integrations are either US-only (we're not US based), a bit half baked (Printful) or just plain missing (YouTube shopping). Almost everything integrates with Shopify, which is really frustrating. 

I’m having the same issue with shipping rates. When a customer is buying a product from 2 different POD companies (Printful and Printify) in the same order, the flat per order fee for each POD is added together which gives a larger initial “order fee”, plus a fee per item for each item. This gives a large shipping charge for 1 customer order from multiple POD companies. 

Can you only use 1 POD company per customer order? And if you can use multiple POD companies, for 1 order, how can the shipping be set so the customer doesn’t have a large shipping

Also, both POD companies set shipping for the “first” item and any “additional” items. Squarespace shipping is “per order fee” and a fee for each item. I just can’t figure out how to correlate the rates between the POD companies per item and Squarespace per order + each item fee. 

Any ideas how to do this?