Printful: Print on Demand

First the printing they do is really nice . Shipping is horrible! Support is horrible ! Shipping is never on time. They charger an astronomical amount to ship and it’s almost always late. Support always responds with please allow an additional 10 days ….. they should be more transparent for fullfillment and shipping times. Support is not helpful at all they had me wait recently for almost a month for one item. They refunded me only because I threatened a chargeback and claimed it was because they were truly sorry . The tracking is a joke , they claim they use ups but that is fake. And it’s impossible to actually track anything.

easy to set up but sometimes doesn't work and the support confirmed this when my first order didn't make it from Shopify to Printful and they told me to just process it manually because this sometimes happens.

Great concept, great integration - horrible fulfillment experiences.

I placed three test orders (10 total shirts). The first order had major quality issues on all three shirts in the order. Someone reached out to me to ask about my experience, so I sent pictures of the poor quality prints and one defective shirt and he said it looked like there wasn't enough pre-treatment before the print and said they'd all be replaced. I never ended up getting replacements even after checking on the status and being told they'd look back into it. It's been months now.

Anyway, I placed a second order after being told everything from the first would be corrected (customer service seemed good). I wanted to test out some different blends/treatments (50/50, powerwashed cotton, etc.) to see how they printed and to also see my designs in different sizes on different sized shirts to figure out exactly how I should create my print files for each size. This order had an item out of stock (after several days I find this out), so they asked if I wanted to split it. I did, so they split the order. Before they could print the items that were in stock, another item went out of stock, so it held up this part of the order as well. My first items arrived well over a week after I placed my order and the remainder of the order came several weeks after the order was placed. I was told all of these fulfillment issues were due to them moving to a bigger location and the supplier sending the shirts to the old location by mistake.

After having put so much into my website and t-shirt designs, modifying a lot of shopify code, paying for apps, etc., I wanted this thing to work, so I figured their issues from the move should be over and their new, larger location should be able to store more inventory and put shirts out faster. I placed another order to see if maybe things were running smoothly now. I ordered four shirts. After 7 days, I got an "out of stock, do you wanna split your order?" email. I said to split and 1 of 4 shirts shipped. It's now been 15 days and I have one of the shirts. Two more were marked as shipped on 7/23, although they weren't given to Fed Ex until 7/25. My shipping address is little over an hour drive from where they ship this stuff. They mark is shipped 7/23 and expected delivery from Fed Ex = 7/28. The remaining shirt no longer says out of stock, but it's just sitting there on the order screen, yet to be fulfilled.

Bottom line - unless you want to deal with EVERY ONE of your customers being extremely unhappy, don't waste your time with The Printful.

Also, I've researched alternative drop ship DTG printers and they all pretty much have reviews full of complaints about fulfillment issues.

Print Aura is at least up front about the process, saying that they place the order for the blank AFTER you send in the order to have a shirt printed. I'm sure they're all doing this and that's why it takes 7 days for them to tell you something is back-ordered. I'd much rather see a limited selection of styles than have to deal with these fulfillment issues.

I still haven't gotten my first order replacements yet. The print quality since that order has been fine, but for that order, it looked like someone used a $30 printer to print out an iron on and then applied it in a hurry.

If you run a DTG printing company and you can actually fulfill your orders in a reasonable time, please reach out to me!

It's easy to design, but customer-wise, shipping is WAY too long. I bought a hoodies for myself so I can take professional photos. I ordered On Monday and it was not fulfilled until yesterday. I won't get it until AFTER christmas. I might as well not even SELL anything for the holidays since no one will get anything on time.

give more info about profits and insights on business to customer, delivery sometimes drag and tracking number doesn't correlate.

I used printful to promote my brand. The products are ok. The mockups are nice. The chat always responded. I was excited with this app until I ordered my samples. I never received them. I have to say, I did got my money back on a printful digital wallet. It's understandable that COVID-19 slows down the delivery process but in my case, my samples that were sent from the US to Mexico were completely lost. I understand that Printful doesn't control delivery but I belieive is a crucial factor for customer satisfaction. Probably it was just bad luck but personally I can't trust printful at least for international deliveries. I was terrified to think that my customers wouldn't receive their orders! On the other hand, I will try with the warehousing and delivery service only in the USA to see how they do. I will rate this app with a 2 stars 'cause not everything is bad as I mentioned at the beginning and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt with the warehousing service. I suggest you go slow with this app before you invest your time and money.

seriously Printful... disabling the option to add products with slow fulfillment. That's how you lose businesses just saying.

CANADIAN STORE OWNERS BEWARE.

I have operated an online merchandising company since 2008. Our model has been to produce inventory, store it, and ship it out when it sells. Typical retail, nothing new.

We were introduced to Shopify and Printful in late October 2017. It looked like a game-changer - print on demand, no need to handle our own inventory, shipping provided, etc. This method was appealing because it would reduce our financial risk by eliminating the need for inventory, and reduce costs by eliminating the need to handle our our packaging/shipping.

We didn't want to use the service without experiencing it for ourself first, so we placed some sample orders. It was amazing! Products were created and shipped within days of our order. They arrived swiftly. We loved it, and were confident enough that we turned our old store 'off' and turned Shopify and Printful 'on'.

What a mess. Customers placed orders and we quickly learned that the wholesale costs that we were seeing in Printful were USD, not CAD (our store Settings are CAD and we paid the on-screen price for our test orders, not the inflated exchange price). The per-item shipping cost killed us. WE paid out of pocket for our first round of customer orders - deactivated Printful immediately - thank goodness that we can afford to eat the cost. Others might not be so lucky.

We thought the bad dream was over, but then it turned into a nightmare. The quick production/shipping that we experienced? No so for our customers. We had a customer place an order on November 17 and it JUST shipped on December 1, for delivery on December 19. It's 2017 and that's unacceptable, so we just gave the customer a full credit for the cost of their order ($180).

There is no Canadian equivalent of Printful, so we've gone back to producing our goods, holding inventory, and managing shipping ourselves. We're going to stick with Shopify because it means that we don't need to be hands-on with our backend web development anymore.

2 stars because Printful is an amazing service but it just doesn't work in the Canadian retail environment.

When leaving a review, a message appears that says "If you had a bad experience, please try contacting the app developer at support@printful.com before posting a negative review". We could, but realistically there isn't anything that Printful can do except send us cash for the amount that we're out of pocket, and the probability of that is low.

Great concept, but pricing is extremely high and fulfillment is way too slow (if at all) to be a real player beyond a side show for brands. I would caution anyone to use this as a main source as a business. If you are an existing brand and want to make company shirts (for no profit) or something similar, this may work. Otherwise, just a good concept at the moment with no plans on reducing pricing with increased growth and volume (from their mouth). No Economies of Scale?

Overall, poor. I am writing this review as I am switching to a new POD app. The embroidery is good if you follow their guidelines, which I give credit for, but I did not come to this app primarily for embroidery. I had an issue where I ordered a shirt with white text on black fabric, and the text printed grey. Their way of dealing with the problem was to gaslight me that my t-shirt looked fine and that the text was white enough. I even sent them photos of the text next to a white sheet of printer paper. They replied that a reprint would not change how it printed and that it had printed as expected. As who expected? Certainly not me. So basically I cannot trust them to do my designs justice on a Bella+Canvas tee, their most popular option, and as a result am leaving. They could also have a wider variety of products. Very few hoodie options if you care about material.