So, last Saturday, I may have …built an online store to sell shirts!

I found Printful, a print-on-demand merchandise maker: shirts, mugs, towels, all the things to put my artwork on! They print to order and ship to the customer… and they have a plant in the Toronto area!

Unlike book printer and distributor IngramSpark, they don’t distribute a catalogue to existing retailers. They need the artist to build an online store and connect it to them.

There was a long list of premade stores they could connect to: Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, BigCartel, Square, Ecwid, GumRoad… want a minute! Square? Oh yes!

I signed up for a free account at Printful, to see whether this would actually work. I enabled the online store in my existing Square account and connected it to Printful. In Printful, I selected a shirt, uploaded my artwork, and chose variants.

Printful pushed my chosen shirt to Square Online, and shirts appeared! I had to choose various options–I didn’t want my books to appear in the online store, for example, because they are distributed in a different way, and I only want to use the Square account to sell them in person with my little payment terminal. On the other hand, the shirts will be sold online on-demand only.

There are endless details. Getting the payment going from Square Online to Printful Customizing packing slips etc. Choosing shipping options. Providing a way for Printful to get paid. Uploading a logo to Printful to be used on their labels and packing slips. Likewise, uploading a logo to Square Online for the online store. It wasn’t quite the “easy setup” described in their comparative review of store systems, but it wasn’t bad.

So then I tried to order a shirt.

It let me choose a size and colour and presented a price with shipping cost. I paid. The money went into my Square Card account, from where Printful debited it.

I got an email thinking me for the order.

Meanwhile, in my internal control panel, I could see the order. As days passed, it went from “awaiting fulfillment” to “being fulfilled” (printed) to “shipped”! Outside, I got another email with shipping info.

Now I’m waiting for my shirt, to see what the quality is like. Printful has all sorts of options for shirts that I haven’t seen before, like custom logos inside the collar!

Hopefully I can get all the bugs out and get this working smoothly. If so, The Lonely Little Fridge shirts (and towels, mugs, stickers, etc) here I come!