Printful: Print on Demand

Started off ok. Easy to setup. However, I had 5 orders delayed for over a month because they updated an item (Black hoodie 1 replaced with Black hoodie 2). I received zero notification that the item was not out of stock, nor did I receive any notice that my orders had been delayed.
Having been told by support that I now "just" had to go manually update all my designs I got an error that the platform wasn't working. Customer support told me (of course) that this was a shopify problem and I should clear cache/cookies and reload. So I did. To the same error.
Deleted the app and installed Tpop.

Here are my frustrations with this app.
1. Expensive!! It's 1/3 the price to print on your own at a printer.
2. The app doesn't work when an item goes out of stock! They give the option to set an alternative but it DOESN"T WORK! So, you orders will sit there and not be printed unless you are paying attention. They also require you to DELETE the product you've already spent time setting up and create a whole new product in order to get products to print when something becomes out of stock. To have to do that on every product when it becomes out of stock is ridiculous!!
I'm looking into other apps because of these reasons.

I expected a better informative process of their production. They vary information to benefit the process in which they work. No interface to clearly state information to clients who are waiting 2 or more weeks on fulfillment. Needs to get a situation where they are able to inform clients of delays and also consumer.

I have used printful for 3 years and have been very happy to date. Recently however they have updated their app due to a permissions change on shopify and following that update my set up has been broken with products showing as out of stock, orders not syncing and no guidance from printful on how this change needed to be managed. I cant seem to ever get anyone on chat at the moment and the emails back and forth don't seem to appreciate the seriousness of this situation that I am sure others are experiencing.

I am getting close to just giving up and closing my account. The Printful Amazon integration is a disaster. I followed the directions and then got a 5665 error code. I don't have a trademarked brand. I brought it up with them, and I brought it up with Amazon, and despite me making it very clear that I did not intend to apply through Brand Registry, they kept pushing it and ignoring my questions and concerns. They then tell me to get around this error, I have to list my brand as "Generic". Amazon said this, and then I brought it up with Printful and they said to go ahead with that. When I encountered an error with products not syncing again, the Printful support agent said, "I noticed your settings has your brand name listed as "Generic"." Then they told me to change it back to the store name. It keeps going in circles. Neither Amazon or Printful seems to fully understand how this works, even though they're the ones who set it up. How do you not know how your own stuff works? Sometimes they have told me in order to get around errors that I should start from scratch again and put in another GTIN exemption request, which takes days of work. This has become a major inconvenience for me. They make it seem so simple and yet it has taken weeks and weeks to get it done, and yet I haven't even gotten started. Anytime I bring up issues with Amazon, they don't even acknowledge what Printful is, or seem to understand it. Printful doesn't seem to understand Amazon either. Any error encountered is explained with automatic and incoherent responses, there's never online chat support available, and if I try to reach them through email, they take days to respond. This has been extremely unfair. I have gone out of my way, and spent money to start an Amazon Seller Account to get this set up, and I haven't even gotten started on it because no matter what I do, there's an error, and the instructions are not clear enough. They tell me to refer to a video tutorial, which I followed fully and encountered errors. You need more than a video for instructions. You need a page with full written instructions that are comprehensive and will explain what to do in case of an error, but there aren't any pages or documents like that. This has been an awful experience. I just want some clear answers. This is how you lose business. If you keep confusing your customers, you won't have any customers.

Subpar customer support. Its not even worth going into detail anymore as I have updated this review many times and never for the better.

This company would not be bad however when you have an issue such as products that never get handed off to the shipping company after shipping labels are created and angry customers who by all standards should have received their order yesterday, and they are unwilling to do anything to help you maintain a positive image with the customer as they site "policy" as the reason for not doing what most companies would deem more than reasonable to provide a solution to a problem even if it requires a small amount of flexibility. They have no problem at all when you take the loss for their mistakes. And it's impossible to get a manger involved who can actually make things happen and approve reasonable requests as the "customer support" team will not escalate major problems when asked.

We use both their printing services and their warehousing services, and have for many years now. Their warehousing is top notch - better than others we've used. Their printing, however, has taken a huge dive, as has their customer service in the past few months. We've had misprinted orders where despite customer evidence being provided, it was still ruled as "correct", and we had to pay the refund out ourselves. Delays beyond what's projected have been constant for us. I'm having to speak with customer service many times throughout the week to try and get things sorted. The biggest thing that worried me was when we ordered a sample of our own stickers during the summer, and the two stickers arrived printed on different papers, with one sticker completely being unable to stick (a complaint we had heard a lot from our customers). I got a lot of run-around about it, and when I left a review on Printful itself, with photo evidence, I was informed by a customer service rep that the review wasn't going to be posted because it "didn't match the experience customers would be able to expect from them". That made me question how many negative, honest reviews were being suppressed from others as well.
We no longer use stickers with Printful, but warehouse our own better-quality stickers instead, for consistency's sake. We're looking into printing and warehousing our own other items now too. I really want this service to be great again, it used to be we'd only have one or two issues every few months. Now it's multiple issues a week. I hope that when things begin to calm down with the pandemic, they can improve their quality and customer service again, otherwise we're likely to change services completely. EDIT: I've lowered this a star since leaving this review. Even in that short time between when I left the original and now, it's gotten significantly worse. Out of stock items stopped syncing stock numbers with my store, leaving hundreds of items available for purchase when they weren't there at all. Looking around social media, I discovered this was common, but customer service said they'd get back to me later about it rather than having any clue about the issue. It would be days of work to manually edit all of these.
We've also had a lot more issues with orders. Just this morning I had to contact them over an order that hadn't been processed or fulfilled long past it's due date. There were no errors or information attached to the order itself. According to customer service, there had been a manufacturer delay, and then the item hadn't restocked yet. Not only was none of these issues told to me at the time, but the item had never shown up on my dashboard as out of stock at any point. Issues like these, with a complete lack of transparency, have become common. Pains me to say it, because I want Printful to be wonderful again.

The fulfillment procedure is VERY counter-productive to being a white label solution. We put in 85 orders (multiple items in each order) in the matter of 5 business days. Example: The first order we placed was for express shipping on 9/19, an order for the SAME exact item, print, and size was submitted on 9/23 and already shipped 9/24 with the standard shipping item selected. They assign the orders to different teams at different warehouses. Some teams are I guess more efficient than others so it leaves our customers talking to eachother about when they placed their order before and wondering why their order hasn't even been started. It makes US look like we are disorganized. I don't understand why their internal system does not place orders with certain teams based on their availability from the order in which they are received to Printful. This process instantly makes it very apparent that this is being done by a third party.

New business owners:
-Printful does everything it says. Drop shipping direct to customer and great design tools. Honestly they are probably the best option in this space.

However, be prepared to face long fulfillment times and angry customers. I would say 35% of all of my orders fulfilled by printful involved customers complaining about the ship times, resulting in many headaches as a business owner.
Oh and you might as well shut your store down during holiday season as printful took 3-4 weeks at times to fulfill some of my orders. I basically had to provide partial refunds due to the angry customer complaints I was getting.

-So this business model is great in theory, but you won't be able to sustain any kind of growth with it.

The App was deinstalled by itself after using it for 2 Month with more then 300 Products on my Shop. And after reinstalling ist everything is gone, the Products, the Orders and Invoices.