FinerWorks Fulfillment App

Summary: this app is essentially unusable. You are better off manually handling Finerworks inventory and orders. This app has no documentation on usage, and their support is unwilling (and unable) to answer any questions about it. They are absolutely uninterested in any form of feedback, even if it is serious bug reports.

I've spent tens of hours over the last 4 or 5 months trying to get this whole thing to work, and wow, what a disaster. When I first started I discovered numerous serious bugs. Despite some Finerworks documents I found on their website stating "we are looking for feedback on our app", they were not interested in any of the numerous bug reports and bad design feedback I submitted. After spending something like 8 hours trying to find workarounds to the bugs in the app, and sending them several emails in the process, they finally ended the dialogue by stating the app was "in beta" and that they were not currently taking feedback. I should mention that this "beta" app had been out for several years. I don't know how anyone was using it.

Fast forward a bit and they relaunch the app, I guess in some sort of final form that is now listed in the Shopfiy app store (before it was private), and this new version is not better, if anything it is worse. I'll summarize just a few of its core failings.

The feature that syncs Finerworks products with Shopify has very limited value even when it is working correctly (but it is often not). Every product within a an image file is going to create a low resolution image in your Shopify product, so you will have to delete them all, every time, and upload your own image. The product title needs to be unique for every product within a Finerworks inventory file, and that title should match exactly what each product option will be in Shopify. However, how anyone would know this without a lot of trial and error is a mystery, and even if you figure it out it doesn't really work because the title field in Finerworks is too short for the full product option text most of the time.

And then sometimes it just doesn't work. Something goes haywire and the products will say they were synched but they weren't, and you seemingly can't sync them anymore. I could spend all day on this but the short version is you are better off creating your products in Shopify and just copying the SKU's over.

I was manually creating my products in Shopify at that point, thinking that the app still had value for submitting orders, but I discovered that the app was no longer marking the orders as fulfilled when Finerworks shipped the order, meaning that the customer was not getting the confirmation and tracking. This is particularly vexing as Shopify does not let you manually fulfill orders that are set to be fulfilled by a third party. I'm not sure how, or if, you could get around this and get the customer an official shipping notification, but I'm done trying.

Finerworks is still a great print service, but you are better off using them without this app.