Selling garments

A shirt is not a book and not an ordinary product. What is true only of it — the product type, the design, where that design sits on the garment, and a picture per colour — is a kind, and the store never opens it. Module: store; supplier: printify.

Three steps

1. Upload the design to the library — the same button every other file field uses. There is no second uploader.
2. Pick the product type. The list is the supplier's own catalogue. You cannot type one.
3. Read the catalogue on the product, and the colours and sizes that type is made in are written in for you, with a picture per colour.

Then price it and publish it like anything else.

Why you cannot type a product type

A product type is the supplier's fact. If you could type one, a typo could become an order — and you would find out when a customer's shirt did not arrive.

So the control offers a list and the file keeps an id, and a file naming a type the supplier does not sell is refused in all three places a file can reach the shop: at the build, at the save, and at the till — in the same words each time, because they ask the same question of the same function. The same goes one level down: a colour the type is not made in is refused with the colour named.

What the buyer sees

A card, the gallery and the picker show the mockup for the colour chosen — the supplier renders them from your design on that garment, and the site keeps the addresses. A garment is photographed per colour and not per size, so the same picture serves every size of one colour.

Where the fetching happens

Nowhere a buyer waits. Asking the supplier is something the admin does, when you press Read the catalogue again — so:

• in cloud mode, where nothing ever builds, adding a colour gets you its mockup without a deploy;
• a product page is never slow because a supplier is slow, and never broken because one is down.

A colour the supplier stops making is marked, not deleted — it goes off sale at once, the till refuses it, and an order already placed still reads as the words the buyer chose. See Suppliers.

Keys

PRINTIFY_API_KEY (a personal access token) and PRINTIFY_SHOP_ID. With neither — or with PRINT_MOCK=1 or PRINTIFY_MOCK=1 — every call is answered locally against a fixture catalogue and a job walks itself to shipped, so the whole chain runs with no account.