Shopify is attractive to many printers and print service providers: a well-maintained platform, tried and tested millions of times, with strong marketing tools and a solid customer experience. But in many print shops there is still a manual process between a Shopify order and a print-ready job in the production system - checking emails, downloading print data, entering orders. This article shows how the connection between Shopify and the print shop backend is successful, which requirements a professional integration must meet and how PrintDesk technically implements this step.
Getting started with online print sales doesn't necessarily have to be via a completely separate web-to-print platform. Shopify offers a quick-to-use, marketing-strong store font that is suitable for printing companies in several scenarios: as a primary online shop for standard products, as a supplementary channel alongside a brick-and-mortar business or as an ordering platform for a defined group of customers.
Shopify knows products, variants, prices and orders - but it doesn't know print specifications, print data workflows and production statuses. Ordering a flyer in A5, 4/4-color, 300g glossy, 500 pieces in Shopify is simply a product variant with a price. What it means in printing terms must be defined and processed elsewhere.
This is exactly where the problem that many printing companies are familiar with arises: The Shopify order comes via email, is printed out, entered manually into another system, and at the same time the employee is looking for the print data in an email or an upload folder. This works – until the tenth order per day.
A professional integration between Shopify and the print shop backend must reliably fulfill four core functions.
Every order received in Shopify must automatically arrive in the production system as a structured print job. This means: Customer information, product specifications, circulation quantity, delivery address and payment status are completely transferred - without an employee manually entering the data. Error-free job import is the basic requirement for scalable printing operations.
If prices, materials, or product configurations change in the print shop software, those changes must be reflected in Shopify. A good integration offers bidirectional synchronization or at least clear rules about which data is treated by which system as the leading system.
Customers must be able to upload their print data directly to the Shopify shop - ideally before or during the ordering process. Good integrations enable the upload of PDF, AI, EPS or other printable formats and automatically transfer these files to the print shop system. Some solutions even offer a simple preflight of the uploaded data directly in the shop.
Customers want to know where their order stands. A full integration automatically plays production status updates (e.g. "In Production", "Shipped") back to Shopify - and triggers the appropriate customer emails there. This significantly reduces support requests and improves the customer experience.
PrintDesk offers a native Shopify integration that can be set up without any coding knowledge. Here is the process:
First, create your PrintDesk account and configure your basic information: company name, tax information, bank details and the products you want to sell. This step usually takes less than an hour. PrintDesk guides you through a structured onboarding process. As Printing software PrintDesk is designed so that all relevant settings can be made even without IT knowledge.
In PrintDesk, navigate to the integration settings and enter your Shopify store URL and API key. You can get the API key in just a few clicks in the Shopify admin under “Apps and sales channels → Shopify API”. The connection is tested immediately; PrintDesk reports whether the connection was successful. From this moment on, PrintDesk can receive orders from your Shopify store.
Every product in Shopify must be mapped to a product in PrintDesk. PrintDesk automatically reads all products and variants from your Shopify store and makes them available for assignment. You define which Shopify variant means which printing specification in PrintDesk - for example: "Flyer A5, 500 pieces" corresponds to "Format A5, 4/4c, 300g Silk, edition 500" in the printing system. This assignment is one-time and then applies to all future orders of this variant.
Once all products are assigned, activate automatic order import. From this moment on, all new Shopify orders will immediately be created as print jobs in PrintDesk. You will receive a notification, the print data will be retrieved automatically, and the job will appear in your production overview - structured, complete and without manual rework. For more information on how to build an online printing store, see the article Build an online print shop.
Even with professional integration, there are typical pitfalls that should be taken into account when setting up:
Tip: Before going live, test your integration with at least 10 test orders of different product types. Check each stage: order receipt, print data transfer, status feedback and invoice creation.
Next to Shopify, WooCommerce is the most used e-commerce platform among printing companies. Both have their strengths - the choice depends largely on your own setup.
| criterion | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Fully Managed (SaaS) | Self-hosted (WordPress) |
| Technical effort | Low | Medium to high |
| flexibility | Medium (app ecosystem) | Very High (Open Source) |
| Monthly costs | From around €29/month | Hosting + plugins: variable |
| PrintDesk integration | Natively supported | Natively supported |
| Print data upload | Via app or PrintDesk integration | Via plugin or PrintDesk integration |
You can read more about the web-to-print decision in the article What is Web to Print?. PrintDesk supports both platforms natively and also enables parallel operation - for example when Shopify is used for B2C and WooCommerce for a closed B2B area.
Connect your Shopify store to PrintDesk in just a few steps and automate your order intake starting today.
Request a demoThe integration of Shopify and a professional print shop backend is not a luxury, but a basic requirement for scalable online print sales. Anyone who bridges the connection manually wastes time, risks errors and limits the growth potential of their business.
PrintDesk makes this integration possible - without programming knowledge, with a clear step-by-step setup and a native connection that combines automatic job import, print data transfer and status feedback. The result is a printing operation that works just as smoothly online as it does offline. Request a demo now and see the Shopify integration live.
Web-to-print automation for modern print shops. A product from Druckhaus interactive GmbH.