Gelato: Print on Demand

After months of use Gelato's app software doesn't work and the customer service has no answers, always. Every facet of Ecommerce has failed with Gelato from start to finish, payment, print quality, inventory accuracy and logistics. Over 10 customer complaints for print quality. They refuse to do reprints forcing you to refund orders. Their frames are not synced with inventory across Europe. Unprofessional, unorganized and unreliable. Its torturous interference partnering with Gelato.

Endless problems with print quality and damaged prints. I used gelato for hundreds of photo, aluminium, and acrylic prints. I'm having to move my services to other providers after endless problems with items arriving damaged in post, and poor print quality.
"Museum Quality" prints are often scuffed and scratched. They do not appear to be high quality. Packaging is typically in a corrugated cardboard envelope that bends easily and damages the print. Gelato will offer reprints on damaged items for free, but often these reprints arrive with the same problems.
Wooden frames are extremely cheap, wood colour does not match that on the website.
"Aluminium Dibond" prints in New Zealand and Australia are not printed on 3mm dibond as advertised, but directly onto 1mm aluminium sheet. Again this often arrives bent. Packaging often has no corner protection. Occasionally the mounting bracket is attached upside down.
The app is intuitive and responsive. Customer service is excellent. But these don't help if the end products have such quality control issues.

If you're an Australian based business seriously reconsider. All of our orders placed up untill this point have been printed overseas resulting in a 3 week wait before arrival. Customer service is prompt but rarely can they solve a technical problem without deferring to their development team leaving you waiting days for a resolution. Beware of the free samples. If you want a true indication of product quality ensure you order outside of the free sample offer. Orders placed in this period must certainly go to their premium suppliers as the quality of the prints produced for free are remarkably different to what we now receive. It's a real shame, they have a great solution. But if you care about consistency and quality look for another solution.

If you’re new to POD, as I am, Gelato has a lot of seemingly great features. I was especially excited about the option for customers to utilize the personalization feature. I like their approach to sustainability and supporting local printers. After several months of trying to work through issues with their customer service team, I am giving up on trying to make this relationship work. Here’s a few problems I have had: Upload/Product creation can be glitchy. Sometimes you have to start from the beginning when the system stalls or crashes. Frame quality is super low. The frames used by the printer I was matched with are horrible and look nothing like the frames shown as examples on gelato’s site. There is barely a single coat of white paint, which is chipping. The joints are barely attached, and the wood grain is rough and totally visible. When I received one frame as a sample of this poor quality, I reached out to customer service. They refunded me and told me this was never the quality of work that I should expect. I went ahead and ordered more samples - and got the exact same low-quality frames again. My plan was to rephotograph some of the frames and keep going with gelato in spite of these two issues. I thought about eliminating frames as an option. As of February 2021, however, they changed how product variants sync to Shopify, with no notice or explanation. When I contacted customer service, they told me that I would need to go into each and every product after uploading and update all the variants myself. They gave me no explanation or recourse or assistance. Sent off instead to a general customer service email that simply sends links/articles from their FAQ instead of addressing the actual issue that I had detailed 3 times by this point. I was frustrated and found a new POD app/printer. I was never given a solution and have had to put a halt to building out my inventory, instead spent the time re-uploading my entire inventory with a new supplier. They have wasted my time and my money. If you are a larger company with your own team to address issues with the API and build out your own system, perhaps Gelato can work for you. If you are a small company or individual, especially creating a store on Shopify, they don’t seem to care too much about your business, and the constant changes to their API will throw a massive wrench in creating and maintaining an evolving inventory.

I've been using (or trying to use) Gelato with a few different stores now. And a few things leave a sour taste in my mouth.
They don't actually blind ship. There appears to be no way to actually have my company address as the sender for manual orders. This has left to angry customers accusing me of ripping them off. The help service wanted proof of this and refused to help me. So for me to NOT have their printing partners address slapped over everything, I have to ship the order to me, then repackage, then ship out to my customer which is a total freaking joke. So by the time I've paid, $15 for a mug plus incredibly high shipping rates from the mug place within my own city to me, repackaging and reposting I'm losing money.

It takes multiple attempts to get the colors right. This might just be an issue with the NZ print partner they use, but I often have to refund and reorder 5 or 6 times before it is right.

Customer service is hit and miss. Unless you are dealing with the higher ups, it really feels like their help team doesn't care about your issues and just wants to pass the buck.

Once you get the products the way you want, they are good quality but again - this is very hit and miss with individual print partners. All in all this company is a headache to to deal with and I don't recommend them if you need to blind ship because they will cost you time and money.

I ordered a metal print of one of my paintings as a test.
I was shocked at the incredibly low quality.
Colors were very dull.
My greatest fear is that someone would order this product. Fortunately I’m just getting started and no one has placed an order.
I have to assume all the other product of similar quality.
Unfortunately I had to removed the app.

Sadly, very disappointing.
I ordered a sample order of one of my products, and the print quality was terrible. It looked as though the printer had run out of ink halfway through the printing process. I can also see that a mistake had been covered up with the new faded print on top! - Just awful.
I will definitely be uninstalling Gelato from integrating with my store, as I will be very embarrassed for any of my customers to receive such a low-quality print standard, and of course, with my brand name on it!!!
Such a shame.

I highly discourage anyone who wants to create personalized products with gelato. Gelato+ still has far too many bugs to fix. I had to recreate a design 3 times because there were always technical problems. I'm just waiting for a response from Gelato's IT team because my theme just won't load and neither I nor support can explain it.

dont take this APP from Gelato, this company is criminal... i made a shop with acrylwallpaper... i bought a test picture..and the acrylic paint was full from errors... and the quality was bad.. 2 days läter they send me the same picture again..with the same problems...... and the criminal is too, the high shipping coost..

all your efforts will be ignored here... DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME USING THIS APP.