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How to Ship Printful Products to Yourself

As print on demand sellers with Printful, we’re so used to shipping products to customers that we forget that we can be our own customers too!

To ship Printful products to yourself, simply create a sample order or standard order within your Printful dashboard. After finalizing the products you want to purchase, make sure that your address is listed as the shipping address prior to submitting the order.

Let’s walk through the process, step-by-step, of shipping your Printful products to yourself:

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you decide to purchase through my links.

1. Make sure you have a Printful account

If you have a Printful account, go ahead and sign into it.

If you don’t have a Printful account yet, make sure to sign up for a free Printful account to get started. There’s no cost to have a Printful account. You’ll pay for each product you order at the time of purchase.

This makes it easy to see your designs on different products and see your options without having to pay until you’re actually ready to make a purchase.

sign up for printful

2. Click the “New order” button

It’s time to get your order started. To do this, you’ll want to click the “New order” button. 

printful new order

3. Choose a basic order or a sample order

Before you start building your order, you may see that you have the choice between a basic order or a sample order. You may or may not have sample orders available to you.

printful basic order and sample order

If you have Printful sample orders available, they’re an amazing opportunity. They’ll give you free shipping and 20% off your order. 

There are some caveats though. Every Printful user gets 1 sample order a month unless they have a certain amount of sales. As your monthly sales increase, your available sample orders increase as well.

You’re also limited to 3 items per sample order. If you had a lot of products you wanted to order, you wouldn’t be able to do so with a sample order.

Lastly, you can only send your sample orders to 3 addresses. I imagine this is to prevent Printful users from using sample purchases to fulfill customer orders. 

If you’re shipping Printful products to yourself, it’s unlikely your address is changing enough to max out the 3 address limit. But, if you move a lot, you’ll want to be in touch with Printful support to see about switching out some of the addresses you have on file.

Alright, so sample orders are a great option for buying your own print on demand products.

If a sample order won’t work for you though, go ahead and choose a standard order.

4. Add your product to your Printful order

At this point, it’s time to add the product you want to purchase to your order. If it;s a product you’ve already used with Printful before, go ahead and choose it from your list of products. 

If it’s a new product, go ahead and upload your design to the Printful product of your choice.

To do that, simply choose the product you want from Printful’s list of products. 

printful products

Make sure to reference Printful’s print file guidelines for that product. You can find them by clicking on the “Product info, pricing & guidelines” button within the product’s listing page. 

printful product listing page

Position your design on your product, choose your product size, and click “Continue”

printful continue with product

5. Move on to shipping your Printful product

Next, you’ll see a page that recaps your order. If you choose a sample order, this is where you’ll see your 20% discount applied.

Double check your product to make sure everything is correct. Then click the “Continue to shipping” button.

printful product continue to shipping

6. Add your address

Go ahead and add the address you want your product shipped to. Remember, if this is a sample order, you can only have 3 registered addresses, so choose your addresses carefully.

printful sample order addresses

7. Review your order

Before submitting your order, review everything. Make sure the product is correct and exactly what you want it to be. Also make sure that your shipping address is correct and reflects the place where you want your product shipped to. 

Finally, review the price and submit your order.

Shipping Printful products to yourself is as simple as that! 

Now, discussing this issue may bring up the opposite question, so let’s dive into that.

Can I Sell Directly From Printful?
Check out more from Adventures with Art!

Do You Have to Ship Printful Products to Yourself?

Printful is a print on demand fulfillment company, which means that each product can be ordered and shipped to each customer individually as orders come in. There’s no requirement for sellers to ship products to themselves and store their own inventory.

Getting started with print on demand can be confusing. What’s this amazing ecommerce land where I can sell products without needing to buy or store any inventory?! Yes, this amazing land does exist and it’s called print on demand.

With Printful, there’s no requirement that you send products to yourself to store as inventory for when customer purchases come in.

Let’s say you have an Etsy store that’s integrated with Printful, for example. When an order comes into your Etsy store, Printful will automatically fulfill it. This includes producing the product and shipping it to your customer.

There’s no need for you to even see the product, let alone have it shipped to you, during the process.

This is one of the big reasons why I love Printful and print on demand in general.

Printful sweatshirt

It’s important to understand that you can ship Printful products to yourself, but you don’t have to. 

You may want to ship products to yourself because you want to get your hands on some samples before making them available to your customers. Or, you want to buy some products for yourself, friends, family, or others. 

That said, there’s no requirement that you ship products to yourself. Printful and other print on demand platforms are designed to be hands-off, inventory-free ecommerce models. Pretty great, right?

I have a list of print on demand platforms that integrate with Etsy if you want to explore more options for selling your art and designs with PoD.

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