Lulu Direct

Update: 2/5/2021. I am no longer using this app. I had a lot of calendars ordered that took months to arrive, and only did get printed and shipped because I contacted customer service relentlessly. I have entire threads of emails. Customer service did help get the orders fulfilled after customers started complaining, and after MANY emails back and forth. The calendars were really nice, and I would have preferred to keep using Lulu but not at the expense of my customers' business. Update: I really wanted to come back and change my original review saying things were resolved, but I can't. After multiple attempts, I finally got a human on the phone, who I thought was helpful. They did enable my product in my store so that customers could order, which they did, however, it has been 20 days now and the order has not even gone to production because the original issue was not fixed. I am stuck with $400 in sales, no product, angry customers, and still, no answer when (or if) they will get their product at the height of the holiday season. If I could give zero stars I would since they have done nothing to assist nor can I get any product. I made a calendar for my Shopify store, it shows up in my store but you can't order it, I keep getting an error message when attempting to place an order. I have contacted their customer service, no response. I contacted Shopify, they confirmed it was not on their end and contacted Lulu xPress's customer service copying me on the email and I did get an email back several days later. I sent screenshots as requested and since then nothing. I have tried for 10-days to resolve this and nothing. I will move on to another app and start over.

(SECOND REVIEW - 9/21/2020): Production times are over a month. I have customers complaining daily, asking where their orders are. This is not an issue of the USPS or Fedex, this is a production/manufacturing issue that Lulu has faced since we began working with them.

We get the same old runaround from customer service about how they are working on it. We have been working with Lulu for about a year now and it has just been painful from start to finish.

If you're serious about starting a print-on-demand product, look elsewhere. It will save you a lot of headache in the long run for your business. Do not be fooled by Lulu's flashy interface and design. It's all smoke and mirrors. Behind the scenes it's a mess.

(FIRST REVIEW - 4/27/2020): If you are planning to start a business around selling books, be vary wary before jumping in head first with this app. There are issues with the app as well as print quality control.

We have been using the Lulu Xpress App for about 4 months now to print thousands of books. Our library consists of about 90 titles and we have spent thousands of dollars with Lulu.

The app is riddled with bugs and issues. It is finicky and breaks easily. Many times it feels like wrestling a bear to get the app to do what it is supposed to.

Whether you're trying to view your orders or trying to upload/update a book, a new error or bug will present itself. The app requires various workarounds to avoid these bugs, but regardless a new one will pop up in its place, bringing production to a halt. "Internal Server Errors" seem to never go away. We hold our breath every time we launch the app, cringing at what broken mess we're going to run into.

This is not something that a business can afford to deal with on a weekly basis. As it stands, we have not been able to access the app at all in over a week.

We have been working with customer service to solve these issues. This is an additional problem in itself. The line of communication is not efficient. You will be in contact through an email support ticket chain. With this chain, your customer service rep will relay or mediate your issue to a "developer" who is "working on the problem."

It is just flat out inefficient and we expected more support and competency considering the volume we are producing and future plans of growth for our business.

To their defense, customer service does reply fairly quickly. They do try and it seems they are sincere in their efforts to help in whatever way they can. Unfortunately, they're dealing with a broken app.

The backend development of this app has a long way to go. The errors and bugs shouldn't exist to begin with.

Because we are in this far, we will continue using Lulu for the time being, in hopes that they are able to iron out these issues soon. I will update this review once they do. Until then, I would not recommend this app.

Absolutely the worst app I had to use because there is no alternative that connects to Shopify. The prints take forever to get made and sent to customers. There're no notifications if there is a problem. Using this app only had a negative impact on my business's reputation and brand image because Lulu is unable to do their part. I get customers who never receive the products, only to find out that Lulu marked an address invalid because it had a special character used. Ridiculous. I do not recommend this service to anyone. It's better to not sell printed products at all then sell them with this app.

Many if not most of the reviews here are terrible, especially considering that this is a company that more or less boasts that they are "Masters of the Print on Demand" book printing Universe.

Um, I don't think so.

Many here are complaining of really poor customer service as well as comically mishandled orders. Well, I haven't gotten yet to the mishandled order stage, but I have received really poor customer service.

I have been STUCK for about ten days now not getting too much done with LuLu although lately I've been able to forge ahead and make some progress mostly thanks to my own efforts. I finally managed to get one book accepted by the Lulu "platform." With AMAZON, everythng was INSTANT, worked the first time, and took mere minutes, not days. All this time I've been emailing and getting mostly ignored. Incomplete answers provided every 3 to 4 days, at best, with total radio silence in between.

I told their support via email about four hours ago that I had had it and that I was going to be leaving this one star review.

More radio silence.

THEY.DO.NOT.CARE.

They're Masters of the Universe, remember? sarc/

The app is very glitchy and there are major issues with their fulfillment and printing of the books. Their site has a production time of 3-5 business days which is false advertising. When emailing them about how it is taking much longer, now on 12 business days they respond saying that they're aware of it and that I should tell customers that it is a custom printing job for each and every book and that should keep them happy. This is before the shipping even occurs. I'm only in the stage of printing out proofs and am realizing I likely will not be able to use this for print on demand and dropshipping directly to customers due to the insanely long print time. This is not a sustainable model for print on demand and more so a better model for printing in bulk and holding inventory.

This app simply does NOT work! I've actually reached out to their support team TWO times over the course of 3 months and they haven't responded... it's a shame because I actually use their website to print my books...

Poor quality control. Poor customer support. I placed orders for several samples from LuLu (both in Shopify via the app and through xpress.lulu.com). The gloss cover paperback was fine, but the matte covers on three different paperbacks were badly curled. I also contacted support about the customized packing slip: LuLu acknowledged that there was an issue and said its developers were investigating, but it's been three weeks now and I still haven't heard back... It's a pity, because done properly I think this service would be a tremendous success (many small publishers would welcome the ability to have a third party process single book orders for them from their own websites) — but there is no way I could sell such a shoddy product to customers.

This app doesn't work. I installed it then tried to create a book. I keep getting the following message:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Unable to select your Connected Shopify Product?
We've identified a bug that is preventing users from selecting a Product while creating their Lulu xPress project. We're actively working on a fix.

This company takes WEEKS just to make the product, and they do not give proper estimations on production time at all. This leaves your customers angry and without the product they ordered. I literally used to make hand-bound books before trying print on demand, and I can sew the signatures and create a fully custom, hardback book in three to four days. I would think a company using industrial machines might at least be able to keep up with that....Find another company.

I tried to use the app and create a book but I failed. So after a few hours trying I wrote an email to the Customer Service. They answered that my request was highly important but they won't answer because of too high level of request they have to face.
It's an absolute shame to face such a situation so I deleted the app and wen to competition and found some offering great service.
So as a piece of advice, I recommend to flee Lulu "service".