Gooten: Print on Demand

Product selection is GREAT, prices are pretty standard (although some products are too high to ever realistically sell for a reasonable profit), but my big gripe is that adding products is a HUGE pain. You need to make custom-sized images for each variant of, say, a piece of wall art, ahead of time and have it cropped perfectly. Their cropping system doesn't really work (you can't resize the image to make it smaller, only move it around or zoom in to make it larger) and it seems to zoom in on the image a little bit by default without letting you zoom back out for some unknown reason. On top of that, searching for SKUs to upload is also a pain and you can't choose a collection while uploading.

Overall, I think the potential is here but it's just not executed well enough yet. Maybe once they overhaul their system for adding products I'll give it another shot!

Really easy and nice to add and create products with the tool but as a Canadian merchant with most of my customers being Canadian residents, this isn't a great app. The pricing isn't intuitive at all. I ended up losing money on a few orders because of this. Printful does a better job .

Not user friendly, SO HARD TO USE compared to other POD apps, customer service is slow,

The app overall is great! What I strongly didn't like about it was that it left the "Gooten" option under the product's fulfillment section, despite uninstalling the app.

It always makes me feel cautious when a Shopify App is unable to fully remove their coding from your website.

I wanted to experiment with Gooten because they had a great range of product which I couldn't find from other suppliers - turns out they don't supply everything under one roof, all they do is act as a middle-man to manufacturers. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but it means that because a single shopping cart will be sourced from multiple locations, cost of shipping nearly doubled the initial cost of my sample cart - I suspect it would be cheaper to go with a more expensive supplier that ships everything from under one roof (plus the security of dealing directly with the manufacturer and not a middle-man, and the satisfaction/ease of everything arriving in one box). Not a realistic solution for anyone trying to source multiple products through them.

Gooten was the first POD that I've signed up with. I did a sample order to see how long it will take to process the order, to get the order, and the quality of the product and I must say that I wasn't the happiest with it.

Process time was a little long, receiving it was long, and finally when the order did come in the mail the product sucked! The image on the shirt was not centered correctly and it was crooked! Not to mention the packaging was a a little boring. I personally will never use Gooten again, but if you don't mind the quality of your product being poor, then go for it!

A Nightmare to use.
Let's say I want to create a baby onesie with my own print. I want to offer it in multiple sizes and colors. Any other POD app I have used, lets you see the colors available in a way that quickly allows you to decide whether your print works on a certain color. A few check boxes to choose what you want after uploading your design and you're done.
With Gooten, you get a text list of all the different combinations of colors and sizes available, making it a nightmare to choose what you're looking for and sometimes impossible to know whether your print will look good on a certain color because you can't see that color until you select it and move to the next screen. The pricing is all over the place with small variations in garment prices as well as shipping prices. So if you choose to price your product the same way, your margins will be different on pretty much every item you sell. If you price them differently, it'll make it almost impossible to manage later if you want to raise or lower prices.
Want to offer a tank top? The company offers 6 types but due to color and size variations you have to scroll through 73 (yes!) pages of tank tops to choose the ones you're looking for. You can filter, which is nice, but what good is filtering by name of product if I have no idea what this product looks like.

The reason this app gets 2* instead of just 1 is that it looks very promising. They do have A LOT of options and the base prices for some of the products are decent. Sometimes I wish other POD apps had some of the customization options Gooten is offering. I will check it again in a few months and hopefully they'll improve it by then. Until then, I'm sticking with other services.

The products looked promising. But I gave up trying to use it, because it is just too slow, and too difficult to use.

Too many details needed to be handled manually - using a terrible interface.

Would have appreciated it if it was presented in a step-by-step manner. Like

0. Upload a design.
1. Choose a Tee
2. Choose all sizes you want
3. Choose all colors you want
4. Choose underbase
5. Mock up options

Or something. Instead I see page after page of words that drive me nuts.
That's even before i see the damned mockup.

Pity.

Of all the POD companies I have worked with and received samples from, Gooten is the most difficult to work with. The specs required are difficult to work with (making repeating patterns wasn't possible), making uploading images for a sample very trying. Then, once I finally got the files approved for printing, there was an issue with billing - which I was not notified about whatsoever. Consequently, I had an order sitting in "billing" for well over a week. Rather than a quick resolution, even that issue (a simple address update) had to wait in their system for another 12 hours before approval. At last the order shipped and the colors of the blanket were muted, the blanket thin, and it was shipped in a polymailer that arrived ripped. Perhaps other products might be better in quality, but after the initial order and the difficulties in getting it made, I am less motivated to try other products from Gooten.