Lulu Direct , 74 değerlendirme

Serious excited to print my first book! THANKS LULU

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.

I'm a small (2 product) self publisher of natural history field guides (BYOGUIDES) who was badly burned a few years back by Shipwire. The combination of Shopify / Lulu has allowed me to relaunch my business without the hassle of warehousing and arbitrarily changing Shipwire policies. The Shopify / Lulu interface / model is not 'simple' to understand or navigate initially, especially if you are trying to distribute globally to small oceanic territories as well as the big ones (e.g. North America). So if you are not a web / developer type I would say you should find someone with solid Shopify store building experience before discovering the many rough edges. I would have rate the Lulu App 3 stars but for Lulu tech support haven been STELLAR and patient as we beat a path (together) to the solution I needed for my customers. I am seeing evidence of constant improvement in the APP but there are still numerous rough edges must navigated daily. For example: there are form field character limits in the Lulu world that are NOT surfaced to the customer in Shopify world. Consequently, orders constantly crash because there is one-too-many characters in a field. The SHOPIFY system doesn't tell you this so they need to discovered by manually checking the Lulu app after each order arrives and hand managed through by me and sometimes tech support. It's a hassle but it is getting better as time goes by.... I could go on esp. w.r.t. to having to manually set up multiple freight rates around for every country you MIGHT sell to - this was auto-magic with my previous solution. But the bottom line is that the system is viable and getting better and there is good support. But if your time is worth anything (or you want to go holidays and relax) make sure you partner with a developer with Shopify store building experience and focus on doing a bunch of test orders that mimic who, and where, your customers are - especially if they are outside the US and EU. Finally, Lulu printing itself, while efficient and of excellent quality does have format limitations. For example, a limited selection of paperweights such that everything feels like a coffee-table book when you might need something with more heft for practical purposes. Also, if you coil bind you can not get a straight run of pages and are forced to have a blank page at the front and back of you book. Otherwise great.

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...

While the product creation was fine, and the order process appeared to go smoothly, I've ordered a total of 5 books between two orders, and haven't received a single one.

**edit**

Customer service via Joseph has been very helpful with my initial problem, my review has gone from 1 to 3 stars after resolving the misunderstandings that were easily resolved. Holding off for the exciting conclusion to give a final review.

**second edit**

After some swift service from Joseph, my initial order was reprocessed and I finally had 3 copies of our book in hand, and they're absolutely beautiful. Far exceeded my expectations.

I'm hesitant to give the full five stars, because there was definitely some kind of mix-up in shipping with the first order, but the quality of the books and customer service is four stars well earned. I've reinstalled the app and will be giving it another go.

I appreciate the fact that this app helps save time in submitting and fulfilling orders, but the print cost / revenue shown on the Lulu.com website is inaccurate with the cost to actually sell a book in Shopify. The Lulu Direct print cost is about 20% higher than the Lulu book store cost--they say that's to cover fulfillment costs. But yet they ALSO charge an extra $1.50 PER BOOK on Shopify, listed as a fulfillment fee. That's crazy, and I'm looking into ways to get around this because having to mark up a notebook over $3.00 just to get any profit it all is not sustainable.

App works but so much room for improvement. It's buggy and often hangs and spins. The connected books cannot be easily filtered in a search and requires you manually search page by page to find anything (a real PITA when you have lots of titles!).

The benefit of the app is that it connects shopify orders and, for the most part, it does achieve that. However, it often causes lots of unnecessary frustration in the process.

Hoping the developers continue to work on this app to improve the functionality and ease of use for the end users.

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.