Printful: Print‑on‑Demand

UPDATE 2: Back to 1 star. I am very shocked with how the customer support handles problems.

UPDATE, bumping my 1 star to 2: The short of it is Printful might be totally fine for you if you just want to slap some designs on t-shirts and then sell them on Etsy without any regard for quality. But if you want to start a brand and are concerned about quality, this probably isn't for you. The main reasons for this are: poor customer support, a painful mockup editor experience, and a lack of variety in the t-shirt options (not enough heavy cotton a la streetwear, too many soft fitted tees that warp/stretch/don't last).

The editor in particular is rough. Using it is a painfully haphazard experience. For example, if you have different versions of the same design (i.e. the same design in white (for dark shirts) and the same design in black (for light shirts)), you have to manually re size and position them separately. The grid is useless for getting the placement identical between these two designs, so you wind up having to move things just a touch, save, check the mock up, then go back and adjust again if needed. Either that or you can settle for your customer clicking between product images and noticing that one design is slightly higher than the other. A small thing to notice, but it makes a world of difference in presenting your brand in a professional way. A good brand should have consistency and avoid simple mistakes like that. And then when it comes to resizing the image, you have to drag the corner of the design while watching the DPI go up or down. Thing is, it doesn't go up or down by 1 DPI at a time. If you have one design perfectly placed and sized at 377 DPI and now you're trying to match another design identically, the DPI will constantly jump between 373 and 378. Again, resulting in a difference that is super tiny, but makes a huge difference in your brand image and consistency across product variants. Other limitations of the editor include not being able to edit the design on the mockup that you will actually use. Let's say you want your mockups to be flat product shots. You'll still have to edit the shirt on a doofy looking model. This again results in too much work between editing and understanding how your final product will look. If you want to get artsy and do a black design on a black shirt, your mockup will be a plain black shirt--no design in sight. Even in other cases (not pure black ink on black fabric), large areas of black in a design will be replaced with the fabric of the shirt. The problem is, that's not how the actual product will look. The black will be printed (that's the beauty of DTG, no limitations on screens like screenprinting), but that means what your customer sees on the mockup vs what they will actually receive after purchase look totally different.

I'm hoping for improvements in the future. If I'm so frustrated, why do I continue to use it? Because it does the bare minimum for now. For now is the key there. Right now I'm using Printful as a foundation for building my brand with limited capital, but if my brand grows to a point where I can leave printful OR if competition springs up that can address these issues, I currently don't see many compelling reasons to continue using it.

I'm not sure why Printful is in charge of fulfillment for other apps (I tried to ignore, once the items were un-synced. It did not work). Why printful is syncing these items in the first place is a major cause for concern, simply because these producuts are not being handled or manufactured by printful to begin with. Once they are no longer in control of what happens on my shopify store, for items that weren't created on their platform to begin with, then I can give them another shot. Right now it's far too confusing and frustrating dealing with a company that simply says "that's just how our platform is set up".

Excited to see what they could do we hastily we placed several sample orders, for multiple garments with Printful (in hindsight this was a mistake).. EVERY garment had 1x or more of the issues details below: • Badly folded and creased after being squeezed into mailing bags that are WAY too small (so they look used/worn)
• Grubby / Dirty factory floor marks
• Misplaced prints (so printed at an "angle" even though all of the artwork was 100% straight)
• Poorly embroidered logos that are bunched. (not enough backing used)
• Pretreatment stains (yellow) on ALL DTG garments.
• Poor delivery times that missed the agreed SLA times. • It was initially claimed that you now have a "UK" based production centre (which is part of the reason we contracted you, but it appears all of these garments were sent from Europe?) To be frank the overall quality and experience is shockingly bad, and if these had been sent directly to our customers (luckily these were all "Test" orders shipped directly to us!) I am certain that they would have ALL been returned leaving our reputation for high quality products and service irrevocably damaged. We raised all of these issues with Printful, and approximately 20x emails later with multiple different reps (you never know who your going to get! another part of the problem: it's basically just a call centre full of people that couldn't care less!!) the general "gist" of their responses we're that it's: "Within Parameters" These people are literally trained to dismiss your issues, and point to some BS "Parameters" that make no sense, and they basically repeat themselves with their fingers in their ears... Not once did they EVER accept responsibility... It truly was a shockingly bad experience. Shockingly bad products, shocking customer services, and shocking inability to accept the fact that screwed up, filthy dirty garments, covered in stains, with wonky prints, and badly embroidered logos are not within anyones "Parameters". Please don't risk it, its not worth it, even if by chance you get a good order once, you'll rue the day when you have a problem... they won't be interested.

I have been using print sources such as this since 2006, I started with cafepress. I have NEVER had worse customer service. When garment was recieved what should have been gray was actually purple. I contacted them right away, 8 days later it comes down to being told that I need to buy color swatches so that I can match their machines color range. Seriously? (in farness I was told I would be refunded the cost of the shirt, and they would give me the swathes for free after I said I was closing the account) 20 days since the product was ordered this is the resolution. I have since used the same file and had ordered fufilled buy cafepress with no issues, within 8 days from order date.

I highly suggest to anyone starting out, before you load your store up and work on your seo, test the product.

This is an update to to repsonse I just got and to the e ail as well. I stated in both my review and email the EXACT issue I was having with Printful and what it was doing. And both this response and the email response said, and I qouted ! " We don't see you store on our shop, please make sure it is synced to printful". Ok, I said it once and I'll say it again! You guys are f******** idiots! If I write to you saying that my store WILL NOT sync to printful. And I'll say this again so maybe youll undertsand. " MY STORE WIL NOT! SYNC TO PRINTFUL !!!!!!! Then why WOULD you be able to see it ????!!!! The answer is you wouldn't !! So instead of the response I got, maybe you should include advice of help to FIX the issue instead of the smart ass reply I got. But then again you guys arent to bright. So again! I won't be using printful again. this app is crap. do not recommend and doesn't matter if they respond to this or not, I will never use it again. Complete waste of my time! Fix your site and get it straight before putting online for people to use!

Fullfillment takes 10 days. Delivery 12 days for Shirts and Prints. No sorry. then i can order directly in china!

LATER ADDITIONAL NOTE here at the top: I did go to Merchify and they are HEAVEN! They have the instant sync between the Shopify platform and their dashboard that this outfit, Printful, completely and sorely lacks. See the below and my glowing review at Merchify's app site:

**************

I'm a card carrying member of MENSA and have subscribed to their magazine for decades. I also owned and operated a software company that sold around the world digitally in the 1990s long before it was fashionable with 4,000+ customers in 40+ countries around the world (including China, long before they hardly had any internet penetration).

I know good software and I know bad software. And a large part of the determining factor of how good a software is less in the coding, and more in the user friendly simplicity and simple, straightforward instructional help.

On this basis alone, not even to mention the fulfillment issues that others have noted below, I am finding this whole process a little terrifying. And like I mentioned above, I'm a member of MENSA and have been online since 1988.

The fulfillment issues warn me that if I manage to put in the hundreds of hours that it appears necessary to effectively interface with their cognitively disorganized mess of multiple videos here and there and everywhere vainly trying to point back to one of the most poorly designed "dashboards" that I have ever seen, that I'll be rewarded in the end by fulfillment problems that others here that have waded thru all of this have discovered.

They escalated me to their head support guy and it hasn't improved much. When you have to be a professional graphics designer to do business with these companies, something is wrong. They haven't thought thru their business model properly to make it work with the masses of people out there. Native intelligence should be all that is necessary, not narrow professional training in a specific field. In today's world, good programming and good instructions should be able to make the latter no longer necessary.

I am still looking at ThePrintful but I am now also looking at Merchify hoping that they might hold themselves to a higher standard. I'll probably be writing a review over there shortly.

I am like another reviewer here in the sense that IF there is a DTG printer out there that has an APP out there with a dashboard that

1. uploads the graphic in one place and has all of the variants and instructional videos and what not in one visual place to STEP BY STEP take the person thru the process instead of leaving GAPS AD INFINITUM in what actually needs to be done, let me know.

2. Then uploads THEIR products into my Shopify store so that I can sell their products as affinity type items with my company's logo on it,

LET ME KNOW!

I'll be there faster than you can say boo. :)

PS Their customer service and tech support is reasonably prompt and they try to be helpful, but I don't think they "get" how poor their interface is with the non-graphic-designer public.

DO NOT USE THIS APP. I saw one of my ads on Facebook and right below it was an ad from Printful asking them about my store and ad. This should not be allowed in the app store and is probably the most unprofessional thing I have seen on Shopify to date.

Products are great. I do have a slight issue with the measuring tool when it comes to designing hoodies. It seems there has been errors.

This App is terrible! Absolutely terrible! placed an order over a month ago and nothing! the order is still waiting to be fulfilled. for just 1 t-shirt!! 1 shirt! They have seriously dropped the ball during Covid-19. Im going to take my business elsewhere. I do not recommend using this Print-on-Demand company. The service is horrible!