Setting up your shop

Shop lets you sell physical merchandise directly from your public site -- t-shirts, buttons, yard signs, anything you either ship yourself or fulfill through a print-on-demand partner. Before your first product can go live, your organization needs to connect a few accounts. This article covers that setup. For adding items to sell, see Adding and managing products. For handling what comes in, see Fulfilling shop orders.

Open Shop in your workspace sidebar, then Settings to reach the page described below.

What your shop needs before it can go live

Three things have to be true before the Shop status toggle at the bottom of the settings page can be turned on:

• Your organization is verified. This is the same verification used to accept donations. If you haven't been through it yet, do that first.
• Stripe is connected with charges, payouts, and transfers all enabled. This is the same Stripe account used for your fundraising pages -- see Creating a fundraising page for how to connect it from Fundraising > Set up payments. You don't set up Stripe from the Shop settings page itself.
• ShipStation is connected (below). This is required for every shop regardless of how you fulfill orders.

If any of these is missing, the toggle is disabled and the reason is shown underneath it.

Connecting ShipStation

Orders are pushed to ShipStation for fulfillment, and marking a shipment as tracked is what releases the money held for that order into your account. Enter your ShipStation API key and API secret and select Connect ShipStation. This connection is required before you can enable the shop, even if every product you sell is print-on-demand.

Connecting a print-on-demand provider (optional)

If you don't want to hold inventory or pack boxes yourself, connect Printful or Printify (or both). Either lets you design a product with that provider and sell it without stocking anything; the order is pushed to the provider automatically when a customer pays.

• Printful: enter your Printful API key and select Connect Printful.
• Printify: enter your Printify API key and select Connect Printify. If the key has access to more than one Printify shop, a dropdown appears so you can choose which one to connect.

Once connected, an Import from Printful or Import from Printify button appears on the Products page -- see Adding and managing products.

If a connected key stops working (expired, revoked, etc.), the settings page shows the date the connection broke and orders will not push or track until you reconnect it with a working key.

Shipping and return policy

• Flat shipping rate: a single USD amount added to every order's total, regardless of what's in the cart.
• Ship-by window: the number of days you have to ship an order after it's paid. If an order hasn't shipped within this window, it is automatically refunded to the buyer -- so set it to something you can realistically meet.
• Return policy: optional text shown to buyers on your storefront.

Turning your shop on

Once verification, Stripe, and ShipStation are all in place, switch Shop status on. While it's on, your active products are purchasable on your public storefront; while it's off (or before all three requirements are met), nothing on your shop page can be bought.

Why this matters

A shop that isn't fully connected fails at the worst possible moment: a supporter has already picked out a product and is trying to pay. Getting verification, Stripe, and ShipStation in place before you publish any product means the first real order goes smoothly, funds release on the schedule you promised, and nothing gets stuck waiting on a missing connection.