Before you take the ecommerce world by storm, there’s one final step you need to take—setting
up your billing.
If it’s your first time starting an online business, some of the things related to payment
processing can take time to understand.
To speed things up, I’ve invited our Brand Manager, Nora, to answer some of the frequently
asked questions about our billing system in this episode of Ask Printful.
OK, let's start simple from the very beginning.
What is the Printful Wallet?
The Printful Wallet is our internal payment system that all transactions on Printful go
through.
We created it to speed up payments and also to minimize transaction errors.
When you're setting up your Printful Wallet, you can set it manually so that you manually
enter funds for each order that comes in.
You want to remember that production and fulfillment won't start if there's no funds in the Wallet.
You can also set up automatic payments, the Auto-recharge function for your Printful Wallet.
So what that does is it automatically enters more funds from the billing method that you
have set up on your Printful account.
And whenever you add money into your Printful Wallet, you can always request to withdraw
it later on.
And whenever we deal a refund, for whatever reason, it's going to go into your Printful
Wallet as well.
So all that sounds super clear and it makes sense.
A lot of people still have this sort of question, why can't their customers Printful directly?
Why does there need to be this middle ground?
So Printful, we are a white label print-on-demand service.
So we print and ship products for our online store owners or our customers.
We don't have any information about our customers’ end customers.
We don't know anything about their payment methods, so we can't charge them directly.
Most of the time, orders are also coming from your end customer onto a platform or a marketplace.
Since we don't host that, we don't know anything about the transaction that happens there either.
Another way to think about it is to imagine that you're running a traditional brick-and-mortar
store like a grocery store or something.
You're going to work with a supplier to stack products on your shelves.
So when a customer comes into your store, they pay you even though they're buying products
that you source from a supplier, that transaction still happens from a store owner.
So in the online world, think of Printful like that supplier, we are giving you the
products to sell, but all that transaction happens through you, not through us.
OK, that makes sense.
But if an order comes in, especially when I'm just starting out, what do I do if I don't
yet have the money to immediately pay Printful?
So this is something you're worried about, you can set up on your store to manually approve
orders before fulfillment.
So what this does is that orders won't automatically start fulfillment.
They'll wait until you manually check that they can go to fulfillment.
You can do this to wait until you have transactions that come in from your customer.
And if you don't have funds in your billing method, which is totally fine, if you want
to wait to get money from your customer before orders go through, you just have to make sure
that you take that into account when you calculate your fulfillment times, because sometimes
it can take a couple of extra days for funds to come into your billing method.
So you just want to make sure that you communicate that with your customers.
That fulfillment might take a little bit longer.
Or you can use buy now, pay later options like Klarna, and you can set that up on your
Printful account if it's available in your country.
So in this system, where do I, as a store owner, get the profit?
As we previously discussed, we are your supplier, we provide products for you and then we charge
you for the fulfillment and shipping.
So that means that your profit is the difference between what we charge you and the retail
price that you set on your store.
So depending on the price that you set, how much you charge your customers, that's your
profit.
You can set that yourself however much you want to earn.
Alright, that makes a ton of sense.
And how does that work with different currencies?
So Printful is always going to charge you the currency that you have set in your account.
It doesn't matter where the order is being fulfilled, where it's going to.
We're going to charge whatever you set in your account, or if you're ordering just a
manual product off of Printful, it's going to be charged in whatever currency you see
displayed.
Thank you so much for coming and explaining a bunch of very necessary things.
This is a topic that we get a lot of questions about, so this is very helpful.
Yeah, happy to help.
And if our viewers have any other questions and drop them in the comments and we'll definitely
answer it, it's what we do here at Printful.
That’s a wrap.
Our team is preparing new content, walking you through the inner workings of Printful
to help you run your business.
In the meantime, I need you to help us understand which topics you’re most interested in.
That’s why I invite you to share your ideas with me in the comments.
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