🛒 Selling on Shopify (Coming soon)
If you sell on Shopify, you'll be able to connect your store with BolloPrint so that orders come in on their own and so you can publish your catalog without copying it by hand.
🚧 Coming soon
The Shopify integration isn't available yet: we'll switch it on when Shopify approves the BolloPrint app. Until then you won't see Shopify in the application. This page tells you how it will work once it's available.
Requirements
Connecting the store is done by an Administrator or Owner; publishing products and importing listings can be done by Workers too. The orders that come in are worked on by the whole team like any other order.
Connecting your store
- Go to Settings → Extensions → Marketplaces.
- On the Shopify card, click Connect Shopify.
- Shopify opens so you can authorize the application. Review the permissions and accept.
- You come back to BolloPrint with the store already connected.
It's an OAuth connection, like linking any other app: you don't give us your Shopify password, and you can revoke it whenever you want.
What permissions we ask for and what for
| Permission | What we need it for |
|---|---|
| Read orders | So your sales come into BolloPrint. |
| Write products | Publishing your catalog to your store. |
| Read locations and inventory | Setting the stock when publishing a variant (if you leave it empty, it's listed as "made to order"). |
| Read fulfillment | Detecting when a shipment has been delivered. |
We don't ask for access to your customers. That's a deliberate decision, and we explain it below.
Your buyers: what we store (and what we don't)
Shopify lets you request two levels of access to order data. We ask for the minimum: we receive the order and an identifier for the buyer, but no name, no email, no phone, no address.
What that means day to day:
- In BolloPrint you'll see the order with its lines and totals, associated with a customer with no personal data.
- Orders from the same buyer are grouped on their own thanks to that identifier, so you can see their history.
- If someone buys without an account (guest checkout), Shopify doesn't send us any buyer. Those orders are all grouped under a customer called "Guest Shopify". It isn't a fault: Shopify simply gives us nobody to tell apart.
- You still look up contact details and the shipping address in Shopify, which is where they live.
What gets synced, and in which direction
Everything comes in, nothing goes out
Shopify is in charge of the order. What you change in BolloPrint is not pushed to Shopify. If you mark an order as shipped in BolloPrint, your Shopify store doesn't find out — do it there too, or do it there and let BolloPrint find out on its own.
Orders coming in
When someone buys from you, the order appears in BolloPrint within seconds, tagged with the Shopify channel. Only orders that include a variant existing in your BolloPrint catalog come in.
From there, BolloPrint keeps itself up to date:
| What happens in Shopify | What you see in BolloPrint |
|---|---|
| You cancel the order | It's marked as cancelled (without touching its production state — it's reversible). |
| You mark the order as fulfilled | It moves to Shipped and picks up the tracking number. |
| The shipment is delivered | It moves to Completed. |
| You issue a partial refund | The amount is recorded; the payment stays as Paid. |
| You issue a full refund | The payment moves to Refunded. |
| You edit the order (changing lines, quantities or prices) | The order is updated exactly as it ended up, and it's flagged with a red "review before shipping" warning. |
All these changes are recorded in the order's History, noting that they came from the integration.
The "review before shipping" warning
It's the integration's most useful safeguard. If a customer changes the order when you already had it half made, you don't find out by chance: the order stays flagged in red until you ship it, so you check what changed before sending the wrong box.
Products you publish
From Marketplaces → Publish you pick products from your catalog and publish them to Shopify. You can filter by tag so you don't have to tick them one by one.
When publishing, if you set a stock figure it's applied in the store; if you leave it empty, the product is listed as made to order.
Products you import
From Marketplaces → Import you bring into BolloPrint what you already had published on Shopify, so you don't have to rebuild the catalog from scratch.
Differences from Etsy worth knowing about
If you're coming from using Etsy, there are two things that work better on Shopify:
- Partial refunds are reflected with their amount. Etsy doesn't notify refunds, so there BolloPrint has to go and check them periodically; Shopify notifies them straight away.
- Delivery is detected. On Shopify we know when the shipment reaches its destination and we close the order on our own.
Disconnecting
There are two ways, and they don't do the same thing:
- From BolloPrint (Settings → Extensions → Marketplaces → Disconnect): the connection is cut instantly.
- By uninstalling the app from Shopify: the connection stops working at that moment, and about 48 hours later Shopify formally asks us to delete the link, which is when it's removed entirely.
Disconnecting NEVER deletes your work
In both cases, the orders, customers and products you've already imported stay with you. What gets deleted is the link with the store (credentials and mappings), not your business. They simply stop syncing.
Quick questions
Can I have Etsy and Shopify at the same time? Once Shopify is available, yes, except on the Hobby plan, which allows one marketplace connected at a time; the other plans have no limit. Each order arrives tagged with its channel and you can filter by it.
Do I have to reconnect from time to time? No. The credentials renew themselves underneath; you don't notice a thing.
An order hasn't come in. Check that one of its lines corresponds to a variant existing in your BolloPrint catalog: orders for products we don't have aren't imported.
I changed something in BolloPrint and it doesn't show up in Shopify. That's expected — syncing is inbound only. See the warning above.