A sync that has stopped almost never announces itself. Prices drift, sold-out items stay buyable, and you find out from a customer. Here is how to find the cause quickly.
Most syncs run hourly on WordPress's scheduler, which is driven by site traffic. On a quiet site, "hourly" can mean "whenever somebody next visits". Before assuming a fault, force a manual sync. If the manual run works and the automatic one does not, your problem is the scheduler, not Printful.
Tokens get revoked, expire, or are regenerated by whoever set them up. This is the single most common cause. Symptom: every request fails, immediately and identically.
Fix: create a fresh token in Printful under Developers and save it again.
A security plugin, a firewall, or a proxy in front of the site can block outgoing HTTP.
The site looks perfectly healthy; it simply cannot reach api.printful.com.
Symptom: timeouts rather than authentication errors. This one is easy to miss because nothing in WordPress looks wrong.
Fix: allow outbound requests to Printful's API host. If your host uses a proxy, WordPress needs to be told about it.
WordPress's built-in scheduler is not a real cron. It fires on page loads, so a low-traffic shop can go many hours without one. Some hosts also disable it in favour of a system cron that was never configured.
Fix: set up a real cron job that hits the site on a schedule, and turn off the built-in one. This also fixes every other "why did my scheduled task not run" problem on the site.
Occasionally the API returns an item missing a price, a variant, or a name. A plugin has two choices: write the partial product anyway, or skip it. Skipping is correct — but only if it tells you, otherwise a product silently never appears.
Symptom: most products update, one or two never do.
All four failures are invisible by design: a background job that fails leaves no trace on the page. That is the actual problem to solve, and it is why we built ours around a visible activity log and a self-check that looks for exactly these conditions. The four checks above work regardless of what you have installed.
What ours does not do. The free plugin copies simple products using the first variant, so it is not the answer if you sell one design in six sizes. It does not send orders to Printful and does not quote live shipping rates. It works with Printful only — not Printify or other providers.
These notes are written by sellerkit. We build a Printful sync plugin for WooCommerce (below), which is why we know these failure modes.
Everything above this box works whether or not you install anything. Where a workaround is enough, we say so.
Pro is a separate plugin that sits on top of the free one. It adds work the free plugin does not do; it never switches anything off. If the free sync is all you need, use the free one.
Questions before buying? support@podsync.lifeinsight-365.com