Creating an Automated Merch Store for your Gaming Company

Merch and swag is a great marketing tool to build the brand for your game or your company. It's free advertising as your colleagues or community wear your logo out in the public. If designed well, it can even draw more attention to your brand. Who knows, it could even become a piece of fashion!

While designing the best merch is hard, the often overlooked challenge comes from having to manage selling and fullfilling the orders from your community or team. This is the same issue I faced multiple times in previous game studios, and now at LootLocker. So, I went about and did some research and found a great (and totally free / low maintenence) solution using Gumroad as a storefront and Printful as the fulfillment solution.

Since then I've had other startups and game studios ask me how I set all of this up. So, I decided to write a guide to walk you through setting up, integrating, and running the store for both external customers (they pay you) and internal customers (team members that get merch at a discount or entirely for free).

Prerequisits:

Before we start, make sure you've done the following:

And of course make sure you're logged into both accounts through all the steps of the guide.

Alright - let's get to it.

Configure Printful Store

The first thing we need to do is connect our Printful store to our Gumroad store.

Select Stores in the left menu and select Choose Platform

Select Gumroad from the list and accept to connect Printful to Gumroad.

In Store Settings you can name your store, select default selling regions and speed of delivery, store currency and add a credit card to the store. The credit card will be charged when an order is accepted.

For even more customization head to Settings > Stores > Branding where you can upload your own logo that will appear on the printed label on the outside of the package (this is a very cool touch to add to every order!)

Create a Product Template on Printful

With Printful and Gumroad now talking to eachother, let's create a new product on Printful. In this particular guide we will make a mug (everyone loves a good mug) with our company's logo on it.

Select Product Templates in the side bar and select Create Product in the top right corner.

Search for the product you'd like to add your branding to, in this case we're selecting the White Glossy Mug.

If there are different versions of the product (like in this case the mug has different sizes, or for tshirts you can select different sizes and tshirt colors) select which ones you want to use. For now I'm going to with just the 11oz mug.

Upload your logo and position it on the mug as you want. I like to select Duplicate the design on both sides so that my logo is mirrored on both sides of the mug and you see it from all angles.

Give the template a name and save it. Now you should see the template in your product templates menu.

Product Mockups

Before we move over to Gumroad and set up the product for sale there, lets make sure we get some sweet product shots and mockups.

Click the ... menu next to Make an order of the product in question and select Download mockups.

Choose Basic Mockups and then select whatever mockups speak to you from the premade list, or select Download all mockups if you can't decide. Many of the mockups come with different versions, and you'll be able to select JPG and PNG formats too.

Click the button to generate the mockups and then click again to download them.

Now lets head over to Gumroad.

Configure Gumroad Storefront

In Gumroad, select Settings from the side menu and select Profile to customize your store URL and branding. If you're planning to make money from this store, you'll also need to go to Payments menu and register your business and bank accounts to receive creator payouts.

With that sorted lets add our Printful mug to the store.

Add Your Product to Gumroad Storefront

With Gumroad now configured, we're going to create a product listing in Gumroad for our mug.

Head over to your Gumroad dashboard, and select the Products tab and Create a New Product.

Give the product a name and select Phyiscal Good and set a price. Depending on who you're selling to and how you're selling it, you'll want a price that makes sense to your customers. For example, we sell our internal merch on the same website as we sell our external merch, so I put our internal merch at a very high price to discourage anyone else from buying it. Then I give our team a 100% discount code (I'll show you how later) so they can get it for free. Remember, this is the price it will cost to buy, not to print/fulfill the product order.

Move onto the next step (Customize) and input all the necessary information about the product you're selling. Here you can upload the mockups from Step 2 in the Product Mockups section for the cover and thumbnail of this product.

While most of the Gumroad UI should be pretty straightforward, there are a few important fields you should pay attention to:

Versions

If you're selling different versions (visual, size etc) of your product, make sure you add them in this section. For example, if you wanted to sell other sizes of the mug you'll want to create a version for each size (11 oz, 15 oz, 20 oz) that's available on Printful. If you're selling tshirts you'll want to do this for each size you intended to sell (XS, S, M, L, XL etc).

Shipping Destinations & Rates

Make sure you select all the locations you'd like to make this product available to shippable to and add shipping costs for the product. If you're intending to sell the product to make money, you need to make sure the shipping cost aligns to the cost in Printful. You can see all of Printful's shipping rates on their website - but you can also mark up the shipping rates as you wish. Remember, Gumroad is where you recieve the money from your customers, Printful is a cost to you - make sure you price accordingly!

Default SKU

In the settings section you'll see the Default SKU number. Don't edit this value as this is the SKU identifier which is used to link this Gumroad product to a Printful product template.

With everything now filled in, click Save and continue. You can skip over the Content page as you're not selling anything more than this product. Click Publish and continue.

You've now published your stor epage and can visit your store and buy the product from it! But Printful still needs to be told by Gumroad which product has been purchased.

Discounts

By the way, if you're selling these products internally and you don't want to make your team pay for them out of their own pocket, head over to the Checkout menu and create a New Discount. Add a Discount Name, customize the code (optional) and select which products this is valid for (or just select all products). Apply the discount you want (in this case, 100%) and click Add Discount. Share this code with your team when they buy the swag to receive the discount.

Connect Your Gumroad Product to Your Printful Template

Alright, we're nearly done!

Now we need to link the Gumroad product SKU with the Printful Product Template.

Head back to Printful and click on Stores where you should see your Gumroad store.

Click View Store and (if you've done everything correctly) you should see your mug synced from your Gumroad store.

Click Edit on the mug listing and you'll see options for each of the versions you created in Gumroad. Select Choose Product for each version and navigate to My Product Templates in the modal and select the corresponding version - in this case the 11 oz mug. Then click Continue and repeat this step for all versions.

All Done

That's it - now when anyone (customer or team member) buys a product through your Gumroad store the order will be sent directly to Printful and fulfilled immediately by them. In Printful you can also select to require manual approval per order which can be a good safeguard (and also helpful for testing).

If you're selling merch internally, now you can just send your team to the store with the discount code and they can order whatever they want from you without you having to lift a finger. Yay, business!

If this helped you, please share it and let me know on Twitter (@CABergendahl) if you found it useful!