Printful: Print on Demand

Extremely slow fulfilment time (more than 11 days!) Our test order has been marked as "Printing" for the last 11 days, they promised it would be fulfilled and shipped last Friday. Now they have told us that they have to print it again due to an error at their end and that it will be fulfilled soon!?! With the delivery time on top, an order with Printful will take nearly 3 weeks. Slow and unreliable. Not recommended!

I hadn't had many issues with Printful up until this Pandemic happened. Unfortunately it seems that this pandemic has caught them off guard and now they are in over their heads. They went from the normal 3-5 business days to 7-10 business now I've recently been informed that is has been extended even further to 15-20 business days. That's almost a whole month in real time to a customer. No customer wants to wait that long. If they were ordering something from China or somewhere else overseas then that's to be expected but not from somewhere on US soil. I was told that during this time they're only operating out of 2 of their facilities with minimal staff while they've closed the other facilities. I'm like, "Hello, you guys are a fulfillment company... closing your facilities should not be an option when you have thousands of customers depending on you to fulfill their online orders!" Our customers are placing orders with us everyday and we're submitting those orders to Printful everyday so it's only making them even more backed up with orders... everyday! I also, hate how they will fulfill orders in a random order meaning they will fulfill an order that I submitted a a week ago when there are still lots of orders that I submitted a week before that waiting to be fulfilled. That makes no sense to me and it's not fair to the customers still waiting while another customer who ordered a week after them gets to receive their order before them. What happened to first come, first served? When I ask them to please fulfill my older orders because they are top priority, they give me some lame excuse about their policy then all of a sudden I have to cancel an order from 2 weeks ago because they refused to do what I asked. Great customer service means listening to your customers and trying to handle their orders the way they would like you to do so. We are the ones in direct communication with our customers. Printful doesn't know when a customer is threatening to cancel their order if it doesn't get fulfilled soon so that's the reason I'm reaching out them to in the first place. Doesn't seem like they care if you're not a huge customer to them. Overall, there has to be a smarter way for them to operate business. As big as they are, I would think they would know how but I guess not. They went from extending to 7-10 (3 day time span) to 15-20 (5 day time span) business days in less than a month. They had the nerve to tell me that they have everything under control... well it sure doesn't look like it. Men lie, women lie but numbers don't. Having things under control would not result in the fulfillment times getting longer and having to disable sample orders so they can focus on fulfilling the regular orders. Since no one knows when the pandemic will ever be over, what's next 25-30 business days?? Printful needs to fix this issue fast. I can't keep having to cancel orders and losing money because customers are tired of waiting.

5/11/20 - My reply to Printful's reply from 5/9...
Just like I guessed it, their fulfillment time has now been pushed back even longer to 20-25 days. I encourage anyone who is thinking about using Printful for t-shirt fulfillment right now to ask yourselves if you are ready to have your customers wait a whole month for the t-shirt(s) they ordered? Printful has not been consistent whatsoever since the Pandemic started. The moment you have updated all of your customers on one extended time period, Printful comes right back and extends it even longer then expects you to go back again and inform all of your customers about the newly extended time frame. This is not fair to my customers who start to feel like they are being "BS'd around" because they are being told one extended time and patiently waiting then being told a week or so later that the fulfillment time will be even longer. That doesn't help the future of my company one bit nor does it help me gain repeat customers. Who wants to put the trust and reliability of their company in the hands of another company who isn't upholding their end of the bargain? Nobody that's who! It really feels like Printful is using this pandemic as an excuse to prolong fulfillment instead of prioritizing getting orders out in a timely fashion. As you see in Printful's response that they are working hard to get the orders out in a timely fashion well from my experience, there is absolutely NO truth in that statement... it is completely false. I'm so tired of having to email and message all of my waiting customers and inform them of the new and even longer extended fulfillment times. It has caused some customers to cancel their orders and demand refunds and I can't afford to keep doing that. I'm in the business of making money not losing it all because the fulfillment company is taking forever to fulfill the orders. I recommend anyone looking to sell t-shirts online to either find you a local print shop with DTG printers who can fulfill your orders quickly or invest in your own DTG printer and fulfill your own orders. I'm personally looking into both of those options. It's not cool to be at the mercy of a large fulfillment company, not have any kind of control over how quick your orders get shipped out and not be a priority whatsoever. I'm so over it.

Seriously, stop blaming Covid for your failures. Enough is enough. Orders from May 25 are still NOT shipped, while orders from Jun 3 are already in process. Makes no sense. It's NOT Covid, it's poor management, pure and simple.

BEWARE. This print on demand company has a lot of hidden fees. Some our products ended up costing more than we sell them in our store for because Printful would decide to ship them from one of their locations in another country resulting in higher shipping costs and a VAT tax all at our expense without consent or verification. They'll charge your card and refuse to cancel the order or refund you. There are so many other print on demand companies that don't trick their customers into paying more and have ultimately better quality product and customer service.

They took away the option to manually fulfill in addition to send to Printful. Horrible update. It's not good if you keep some inventory and send some out for fulfillment.

UPDATE AGAIN:6-12-23 Delivery Delays??? 6 months later still no contact from support about any issues at hand WOW
UPDATE AGAIN:1-15-23
I have been trying t reach support for weeks. You state that you have live chat but I have yet to ever reach Live Chat. I have a business question and I need to reach a live agent. HOW do I do that? I clicked the bottom right and asked for support and this is what I got. How do I get in touch with Printful support?
Get in touch with our team using any of the contact methods below.
Live chat: use our chat widget in the bottom-right corner of any printful.com page.
Printful app chat: go to Settings, click on Customer support > Support chat where you can also upload photos straight from the phone if necessary.
Email: send an email to support@printful.com
Please Reach Out To Me ASAP.
UPDATE: Couldn't figure out why I wasn't selling and would get the occasional message about weight. So I looked to see what shipping weight for 1 tumbler is and they have it set for 11.25pd and one is even 16 pounds! No wonder my tumblers aren't selling. I have tried to reach out to customer service but there is no live chat that I have been able to fund. Printful if and when you see or read this please reach out to me so we can get these issues resolved. Also is there a reason why you aren't showing up on my vendor list?

We are updating our review to 1-star and are convinced that the majority of the reviews here are about the app and have not actually sold anything. Nearly every order has had a mistake. Printful always agrees to fix their mistakes but taking the time to get this right sucks. They don't calibrate printers which is basic operation so consistency problems on the easiest jobs. There is no quality control as a matter of fact it is obvious a person does not even look at the result or the product would not ship. We have made an embarrassing mistake and are removing this ''partner'' and getting back to 100% quality products from Idea Chíc.

Please avoid this app. I am unsure how so many reviews are high, but I have had numerous (literally 10+) issues in the past year. Off-center designs, wrong print files altogether, wrong colors, etc. They have been a nightmare to work with and have not improved. Quality control is non-existent here

I gave up on using printful for my store. I removed everything and went with a different pod who has been fast and fantastic. Wish I could have said the same about printful but they managed covid-19 terribly. Placed an order on May 19th its still sitting but according to printful its on its 23rd day. Um June 19th makes 30 days.

What a joke! Don’t buy anything from these people unless you don’t care about your business and like piss poor products. Ordered 2 hats complete garbage.