Apliiq ‑ Print On Demand

I had great expectations for this energetic, young company, but I'm pulling the plug, and here's why:

1. Lagging Fulfillment and Turnaround Times: The fulfillment and turnaround times were nothing short of disappointing. Countless frustrated customers bombarded me with questions about the whereabouts of their orders. Despite Apliiq's claim of a two-week average turnaround from door to door (still too long), it often stretched to three weeks. At this rate, you risk losing your valued customers, mind you, this is during the less hectic months. I shudder to think what chaos the fourth quarter and holiday season timelines would bring, with a potential wave of irate customers left waiting for their t-shirts.

2. Customer Service Requires Urgent Enhancement: While customer service is somewhat acceptable, it desperately needs improvement. Live chat is agonizingly slow, and email responses are no better. Waiting for a 48-hour turnaround is common, and sometimes I had to send two or three follow-up emails to address a single issue.

3. Mistakes and Blunders: Yes, we all make mistakes, but Apliiq's frequency of errors and the timing of these mistakes is simply unacceptable. Several of my customers received soiled shirts, one received an unraveling shirt and a few received the wrong shirt. The process itself is part of the problem - Apliiq orders the shirts from vendors/wholesalers only after your customers have placed their orders. So, if one of those shirts is defective (which can be often) I'm sure they just print and ship that dirty shirt. An unwieldy business model at best. What are the alternatives? Apliiq suggests pre-purchasing printed shirts from them, so they can ship out quickly. But at that point, why even involve them? The ENTIRE allure of on-demand printing is to avoid such complications!  Alternative #2, Apliiq suggests allowing them to print on ANY shirt they have available and if anyone knows anything about t-shirts, they know that they vary wildly in quality and many of them stink!  

Declining Quality: I periodically ordered sample shirts from Apliiq to check my designs and received shirts with designs printed crooked and poorly printed. My theory is that they're onboarding way too many new shops and can't cope with the volume. And who pays the price? You, as your hard-earned customers walk away.

I had high hopes for Apliiq, but ultimately, they fell short. The team is undoubtedly kind-hearted, but they urgently need to overhaul their processes and logistics. Rapid expansion at the cost of small businesses like ours leads to dissatisfied customers and disappointment. If you're considering Apliiq for your t-shirt shop, think twice.

Great service, Kim from the customer service is AMAZING and over the top helpful! Their options are fantastic and i love all the services they offer. I love that they set up the shipping prices too for me so i dont have to mess with it! 10/10 HIGHLY recommend them!

The company started off decent but has gone down hill since early 2020. The sizes arent correct and the quality is horrible. Not to mention customer service is rude and the time and cost is ridiculous. Took over 2 months to get my order and the size wasn't the correct size. Sent packages to the wrong address and takes longer thab a week to respond to emails. Chat is never available and the phone number just sends you to an auto message.

I've worked with a ton of print on demand/dropshipping apps, this one stands out. This app is the sophistication of Printful, the wide selection of Printify, and the versatility of Skyou all rolled into one. I'll explain:

Apliiq has been around for a long time and has proven themselves to be very reliable with great prints. The case is the same with Printful, and both can do sleeve prints. So when I heard they were doing dropshipping, I wondered how watered down it would be compared to their non-dropship customization. And the answer is that they didn't water it down at all.

Apliiq has a far greater selection than anything else, even opening my eyes to products I didn't think we possible with dropshipping. Seriously, they can stitch stuff to the inside of the hood? Have embroidery and DTG on the same product? Hell, you can have cut and sew too. Skyou may have lined hoods too, but their fabric is thin and it arrives a month after you order.

Oh, as a side note, the thing that really sold me on this was the fact that they remove the manufacturer's tags and stitch on your own. Printful has this on some shirts - for Apliiq, you could do it to anything, including the hoodies. (These are high quality, sewed on labels, not printed either.) So no more Gildan tags on your hoodies.

They have a decent amount of products - better than Printful, not as great as Printify. I wish they had more colors for some hoodies, the colors I want are only available on the most expensive one (Independent Heavyweight) which is unfortunate. Yet their prices for blanks are pretty low, I had no idea how they were even profitable with their customization until I discovered something else.

With each design you add, it costs an additional $6-$8. For shirts it might be a little less. With embroidery, it's more, and with an inner hood, it's a whopping $16 more. If I design a hoodie, and I want a lined hood, design on the front, and a design on the back, it's going to cost me about $41 and that's with the cheapest hoodie they have (Front is $6, back is $6, and hood is $16).

They allow you to be so ambitious with the versatility, yet bottleneck you at the same time because if you really want to get creative, you'll have to pay a hefty price. This is literally the only problem I have with Apliiq. Is it worth it to pay that price? Yes, definitely. But that doesn't mean it isn't too much. Also some high costs for embroidery digitization in my opinion.

Now, like every on-demand app, there are some downsides. There is a slight smell when you unbox the clothing. The initial print is thick and great quality, but right out of the box the print can feel a little sticky or rough. Almost all providers have this. The smell and print feeling was immediately solved by a quick laundry run, but it is there initially. The print itself is above average, with decent color accuracy. They obviously do multiple coats. As a small complaint, embroideries are only allowed to be quite small. A minor complaint but understandable.

Shipping times are decent. I made a large, 6 item order myself to test and it took about 14 days from order to arrival at my doorstep (I live in Wisconsin, USA). Not sure about international shipping times. Smaller orders might be a day or two earlier but not too significant. Everything is well packaged, and the large order came in a standard box with each garment in a separate plastic bag.

In summary, this is the best of the best for print on demand, embroidery on demand, dropshipping, branding, etc. Finally, some serious competition for the print on demand space. I don't even think Apliiq knows how game changing this is.

I designed and ordered two items from this vendor. I also had someone order one item from my store. The product that the customer received was poor print quality... to the point of being an embarrassment. I did not follow up with Appliq - I felt at that point it was a waste of time since it was the first product I had seen from them, and I had already put my own order in for samples, so I wanted to see how it turned out to give me a baseline for their level of consistency. The print quality of the samples I received was 100% better, as expected. I selected branded label tags to be placed on both the garments I'd ordered as a sample. Only one came with a product tag, and it was literally the poorest quality garment tag I have ever seen. So if you go with them, maybe pay for the woven labels? In one of the designs, I had selected the option they offer to remove the white background from the graphic. They did not. The product came with white surrounding the graphic. Both orders were a week or more later than the company communicated on their app when it first updated on my account. As the order progressed, the shipping info was not updated in their app (which would be my minimum expectation), much less emailed. I did have to email them to make sure that it was shipped at all. And this was a week and a half after the expected delivery date. I found their process does not complete the fulfillment of the item on your Shopify store. You have to email them and ask them to close it out - and when you email them, they don't necessarily respond to you - they do what you ask. Which ---thank you, but acknowledgment communication on how to avoid the issue in the future would be appreciated. I still have one order that has been fulfilled that is marked unfulfilled on my store. Lastly, their design platform is not consistent with the design size that you upload, so even if you triple check the file that you upload or upload, it huge to make sure the DPI is ok since the platform apparently is not consistent in reading the file size, you're never really sure if you're on target. I did email about this, but the response was less than helpful, and time is precious. Too many inconsistencies and poor customer experience for me. I wish them the best. So, on to the next...

The product quality is terrible, especially for the price, I ordered 2 hoodies, which ended up being $107, the hoodies took 2 weeks just to ship, and the digital print quality is awful. It looks like it's been worn for a year, it's all faded and cracked, the colors look off and I haven't even washed them yet. Thankfully no one has bought anything from my store yet since I'm just starting out. I tried contacting them twice about why my order was taking so long since it was a very small order and I never got a response back. The tag on the hoodie is faded too and part of my logo is missing. Their website is really bad as well, the design feature is not intuitive at all and very basic. Did I mention their pricing? One hoodie costs 47 just to print (back, front, and sleeves) and the print is all cracked and faded, the hoodie came in the bag with hair and lint on the hoodie. Definitely would not recommend it. I was really optimistic considering all that they had to offer, but Apliiq is not worth it. Wasted my money and time.

The customer service department is quick to respond to you. They really show that they care about you and your business...

July 10, 2020: I have been working with this app for about a month or so. I placed an order for a sample and I have yet to get it. Estimated delivery was 7/3 and today it updated to 7/24?! This happened after I sent a message and yesterday and have never heard back. Sent another message during normal business hours and still haven't heard back... I have started looking at other apps... I am very disappointed! | October 14, 2020: Just as an update, things haven't changed. The last order that went through my website with them was just delivered nearly 3 months later... Their products are a solid 5/5 stars and look amazing! But that's where the 5 stars end... Their customer service is lacking and lead times are way too long.

Our orders shipped out 6+ weeks late or never and customer service is totally unresponsive. We understand there are delays with COVID19 but these delays were not articulated at all on their website and their customer service has been terrible.

At first glance, i was hopeful: good branding options, and decent selections for hoodies and tees. The first issue i saw, was that some of the models for their products don't seem accurate. Secondly, when you push the product to your shopify store, the image quality greatly decreases to a blur. That would sure turn away customers. But due to their branding options, i thought i could put in the extra work and just use mockups. Though the mockups may not have the right look as the model hoodie chosen.

But none of those things stopped me, i was hoping there would be a better option to printful and others. But someone made an order on April 4. Apliiq contacted me twice to confirm print placement and logo and i confirmed immediately to make sure no delay occurred. Now it's April 10th and the product isn't even pushed to the floor to be printed. Then It's April 14 and i had to contact them. They apologized and said they would accelerate it. Now it's April 18, and nothing. Crickets. By around April 19 it finally gets printed and shipped off. Luckily, i knew the person who ordered the shirt. they liked the print but even they advised me to not use Apliiq, because the wait was too much.

Not to mention, while waiting on apliiq, i ordered 3 samples from Printful and they were printed and delivered a week before Apliiq. Printful isn't perfect either because they don't offer branding on some important products. so it's like choosing between two not great options, but customer satisfaction wins for now.

Now, how am i going to run a business that takes 15 days to put a print on a shirt. I might as well drop ship from Antartica at this point. You know when you really want a company to do well and be the answer but they find a way to screw things up. I had no choice but to delete all Apliiq products and undo all the work i did, because customer satisfaction is the most important thing to me. I could care less about branding options when you are going to take 3/4 of a month just to print a product.