Printful Shipping Rates (with Examples): How Much Does Shipping Cost? (2024)

Knowing how to calculate Printful shipping rates can be extremely useful for a print on demand business. If you’re charging your customers for shipping, then it helps to let them know exactly what they’re going to pay straight away, so there are no nasty surprises at checkout.

Alternatively, if you want to offer your customers free shipping (which makes 76% of shoppers more likely to convert), calculating shipping rates can help you adjust your pricing strategy, so you don’t lose out on profits.

Here, I’m going to show you how you can calculate shipping rates for Printful products, with some examples of what you can expect to pay.

Quick Examples of Printful Shipping Rates

How Does Printful Charge for Shipping?

Printful charges flat shipping rates by default, based on the location of your “shipping region”. The flat shipping rate remains the same, regardless of which of Printful’s global fulfillment facilities actually produces and ships your order.

For example, if you’re shipping a single t-shirt to the USA, you’ll still be charged $3.99, and another $1.90 per additional product, regardless of whether the item is fulfilled by a US or EU facility.

If you choose to use the default flat rates for your store, Printful will send orders to customers automatically, with the carrier that offers the best value for shipping, at the time the order is placed.

Printful will scan through the services available for you, considering carrier quality, price, and shipping speed. This means the price charged by the supplier might be different, but you’ll still pay the same flat-rate fee.

Prices are grouped according to product category, so, for instance, every t-shirt produced by Printful, including tank-tops, long sleeve shirts, and polo shirts, will cost $3.99 for the first item, then another $1.90 for each additional product in the 444USA.

What About Printful’s Live Shipping Rates?

You don’t necessarily have to stick to Printful’s flat rates (if you don’t want to). You can also enable “live shipping rates” instead. This means that you receive shipping price calculations direct from carriers when your customer makes a purchase.

If you enable this option, shipping rates are calculated by the location of the facility creating the order, and the shipping address. The weight of your order is also considered.

Live shipping rates for your storefront are available through Printful’s integrations with Shopify, Launch Cart, and WooCommerce, as well as when you’re using Printful’s API.

You can turn them on by heading to Printful’s dashboard, clicking on “Settings”, then “Stores”, then “Shipping”.

There are pros and cons to using live shipping rates. First, enabling live rates could mean that shipping costs are occasionally lower than the flat fees charged by Printful. Although, they could also be higher at times too.

Secondly, enabling live rates gives your customers the option to choose “express” shipping, and pay more to have their order sent them faster. Since customers appreciate fast shipping, this could be a great way to differentiate your store.

How to Find Printful Shipping Rates

The only way to find live shipping rates for your products is to enable the feature in Printful, and your storefront (such as Shopify).

This will show the live rates automatically on your website for all of your customers, so they can see what they can expect to pay at any given time.

You’ll also get an insight into which of Printful’s carriers fulfilled the order when you receive an order confirmation email. If you’re using Printful’s flat rates, there are four ways to check the price of shipping for any order:

Use the Printful Product Page

If you’re creating a brand-new product, and you want to see how much it’s going to cost to ship to your customers, one of the easiest options is to simply visit the product page.

To do this, log into your Printful account, and click on the “Product catalog” tab. Click on the product you’re interested in and scroll down to the section for “Estimated delivery.”

Here you’ll see how long shipping is likely to take, as well as how much shipping costs:

Scroll down a little further, and you’ll see a tab for “Shipping” next to “Description” and “File Guidelines”, above the customer reviews section. Here, you can change the location of your intended customer, to see how shipping rates vary.

Use Printful’s Shipping Rate Calculator

If you’re placing a bulk order (potentially to keep items in stock, or sell them via a pop-up shop or stall), you can use Printful’s convenient shipping rate calculator to see how prices change based on order volume. To do this, visit Printful’s “shipping” page here,

Then click on “ordering for myself”.

Scroll down until you see the “Get Shipping rates” block, and choose the product category you want to order from, and enter the quantity of items you want. Then hit the “Calculate” button:

Calculating Shipping Rates for Multiple Types of Products

If you want to see how the shipping rates compare for different product categories, such as hats, mugs, and t-shirts, the easiest option is to visit the shipping page again, then click on “Selling Online”

Here, you can see the shipping rates for your region by simply clicking on the category you want to sell, and selecting your country.

Or you can scroll down to browse through shipping rates by country for each product category.

Another option is to simply create a “test order” on your Printful account. You can click on the products you’re interested in within Printful’s product catalog, then add them to your order when you’re finished adding your designs.

After you’ve finalized your order, click “continue to shipping” and add your shipping info. Then click the “Calculate shipping” button to see the delivery costs.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)