Hey, it’s Elizabete from Printful!
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to connect Printful with Amazon, add products, and set
up shipping.
To get started, you must create an account on Amazon Seller Central by subscribing to
a paid plan.
It may take Amazon several weeks to approve your account.
Once your account is active, select the regions you want to sell in by going to Inventory
> Selling Globally in your Amazon Dashboard.
Consider your options carefully, as adding multiple regions will increase your monthly
fees.
With that done, head to Printful and instantly create your free account.
From the Printful Dashboard, click Stores > Choose platform, find Amazon, and click
Connect.
A new page for the integration setup will open up.
Under step 2, you must choose the regions you’ll sell in.
With our integration, you can sell Printful products in North America and Europe.
For this example, let’s select North America and press Authorize.
In a new page that opens up, you must log in to your Amazon seller account and confirm
your connection with Printful.
After that, you’ll return to the integration page with a list of available Amazon marketplaces,
from which you must select the right one based on your selling region.
In my case, that’s amazon.com.
Press Save and proceed to the next step.
You must have a Global Trading Item Number or GTIN for short to sell on the Amazon marketplace.
It’s a globally unique 14-digit number identifying trade items, products, or services.
If you don’t already have a trademarked brand, you can register it on Amazon by following
their guidelines or request a GTIN exemption instead.
We’ll walk you through integrating Amazon with Printful, whether you have a GTIN or
not.
Select the option I need to apply for a GTIN exemption.
Below, we pre-filled the field under Amazon Brand Name with the name Generic.
Unlike using a custom brand name on Amazon, choosing Generic is the easiest way to get
a GTIN exemption.
You can also edit this field and use your custom brand name instead.
Next, click Create store.
A new page will open, reminding you about the GTIN exemption requirement for this integration.
Since we need to apply for one, click request GTIN exemption to open up a separate FAQ page,
explaining the process in detail.
Here, click request exemption from Amazon.
After you log in to your Amazon Seller account, you’ll get redirected to this page, where
you need to provide extra information about your brand.
For this example, we will sell t-shirts, so under the Product category, select Clothing,
Shoes & Jewelry, under Brand/Publisher type, pick Generic, and click Check for eligibility.
On the next page, you’ll see the eligibility summary of the product categories approved
for your brand.
You may have to wait for a green checkmark under the Status tab to confirm your exemption
for the chosen product category.
With that done, click Continue to submit proof, and on the next page, type the name of the
product you plan on selling and upload real-life product photos.
If you don’t have your products on hand for product photography, consider ordering
samples from Printful with a 20% discount.
When you’ve uploaded all the necessary files, press Submit request.
Amazon will review and send an email approving or denying your request.
Now let’s go through the connection phase when you have a GTIN exemption.
Under step 3, select the first option, type in your GTIN number or Amazon brand name,
and click Create store.
In the next window, confirm that you’ve got the GTIN exemption.
That’s it.
Once everything’s approved, in the Printful Dashboard, select Stores, and choose your
Amazon store.
Click Add product to open Printful’s Product Catalog.
Let’s add a men’s t-shirt as an example.
Click Men’s Clothing > T-shirts, and select the Men’s Garment-Dyed Heavyweight T-Shirt.
Now select the colors and sizes for the t-shirt and customize the product however you like.
You can choose between standard or unlimited color embroidery or direct-to-garment printing
technique, where you can add text, clipart, or a design you made yourself.
With DTG printing, you also have the option to use premium stock images in your product
design.
For this example, select the center chest embroidery option.
Next, click on Add Quick Design, and choose any pre-created embroidery design.
When it loads up, you can find embroidery design elements on individual layers in the
Layers panel, where you can adjust the composition to your liking.
Let’s scale up the entire design by clicking on the top layer in the Layers panel and expanding
the bounding box of the design in the preview area.
When you’re happy with your product design, you can save it as a product template by clicking
on the three dots next to the Continue button.
This feature is useful when you sell on different marketplaces.
If you add other Amazon marketplaces to your integration, the products you’ve already
created for the North American marketplace won’t automatically sync to the European
marketplace.
You’ll have to add these products again for them to appear on both marketplaces.
Instead of doing everything from scratch, use product templates to save time.
And remember that for every marketplace on Amazon, you’ll need a GTIN exemption for
all product categories or a registered trademarked brand.
With that done, click Continue.
In this step, you can choose between our basic and custom product mockups that will show
up on your product page.
For this example, let’s pick the Basic mockups by clicking Choose mockups.
Under All mockups, you’ll find different ready-to-use mockup bundles.
In the Mockup preview, you can see that the main image for your product listing is marked
with a blue star.
You can change it by clicking on the blue star on a mockup of your choice.
While Amazon has strict rules on product images, all mockup images uploaded through our Design
Maker meet the requirements.
If you want to add custom product images, carefully review Amazon’s guidelines first.
Click Continue to proceed to the next step, where you can edit the product title and description.
We highly suggest creating product titles according to Amazon’s requirements.
You can read more about that by following the link in the video description.
Let’s adjust the product title by adding your brand name.
For this example, let’s use Generic.
Then the department, Men’s, followed by the name of the t-shirt.
Since we’re adding a product in a single color and size, let’s also add them here.
If you plan on selling multiple product variants, you’ll have to adjust the title of each
product in your Amazon seller account.
Below the title, you can see Printful’s basic product description.
To gain a competitive edge in the marketplace, I recommend following Amazon’s suggestions
for product descriptions to improve searchability.
Let’s leave the original product description for this example and proceed to the next step
by clicking Continue.
Now, you can edit the retail price of your product on this page by setting your revenue.
When you click Set revenue, you can set a percentage or monetary value that you wish
to make from each sale.
As you can see, the retail price automatically changes after I set the revenue to eight dollars.
Remember—Amazon charges referral fees per item sold based on the product category and
retail price you set here.
Keep this in mind when you calculate your product pricing.
With that done, press Continue.
In this window, you need to select the marketplace where you wish to publish your products.
Only activated marketplaces in your Amazon store settings will be visible in this step.
Click on the checkbox next to amazon.com and then Submit to store.
After submitting your products to your Amazon store, it might take an hour for them to appear
in your Amazon Seller Central account.
In case your product photos don’t appear on your storefront, don’t worry, they will
show up within 24 hours.
If you head over to the Inventory section and notice that the newly added products have
zero in the product stock column, then the product is not yet fully synced, so you’ll
have to wait for the process to be complete to show up as In Stock.
Once your products are synced, you can edit descriptions and add photos and other details
directly on Amazon.
You can see that the production time for all products added through our Design Maker is
set to 6 days automatically.
We advise you not to change it.
Our estimated standard fulfillment time is 5–12 business days, and if you change the
production time to a speed that Printful can’t fulfill on time, your seller account might
be penalized.
Amazon punishes your account when you ship out late orders.
If this happens too many times, your account can get suspended.
That’s why you shouldn’t change this variable.
There are also other criteria that Amazon looks at when rating the performance of your
account, like your order defect rate and cancellation rate.
To monitor this data in Amazon Seller Central, under the Performance tab, choose Account
Health.
When setting up shipping, remember that the Printful and Amazon integration only supports
flat rate shipping.
We recommend using default shipping rates that Amazon automatically sets, based on industry
standards for each product category.
If you want to create custom shipping templates, go through the information about Printful’s
flat rates by visiting our Shipping page.
Amazon will automatically send your end-customer a notification with a tracking number once
their order is shipped.
You can leave your address in your Amazon shipping settings or add Printful’s address
as the default shipping address.
To do that: Click on Settings in your Amazon Seller Central
account and select Shipping Settings On the next page, choose General shipping
settings and press Edit under the Default shipping address tab
In a pop-up window that shows up, select Add a new address
Depending on the regions you’re selling in, you can add one or all of our locations
here.
You can find all Printful’s addresses on our Contacts page.
Amazon automatically uses your billing address as your return address, so it’s up to you
to decide whether you want to use that or Printful’s address to process returns.
If you wish to update your return address in your Amazon Seller Central account, go
to Settings and choose Return Settings.
In the next window, select Manage Return Address, click Manage your return address, and add
the required information depending on your chosen address.
I hope you’ve found this video helpful.
Check out our Amazon FAQ for more detailed information on this integration and get started
on your ecommerce business today with Printful and Amazon.