Printful: Print on Demand

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.

Already ordered a couple of times. The items are ok, but for the quality to expensive. Unfortunately, when you pay and not receive the product, Printify has the worst customer care ever! First, after not receiving the parcel for a couple of months, I wrote them. No reply! Then I opened up the case via paypal, and suddenly Printful, out of nowhere was able to write me an e-mail. With the info, that they don't take care of not received packages and that it is not their problem if my customers or myself don't receive the product! And also, if I would not close the case via Paypal, they would close my account which they did. I wrote the post office and they clearly said that I as customer cannot claim a refund but Printful could have claimed the refund for the not delivered package! That's how they treat customers...

Edit on my previous review
There are a few people there that are extremely helpful and extremely nice graphics department is great but it seems like they need some help (like a whole fleet of graphics ppl!). I'm still confused on the business model they make money when people upload proper graphics and sell their shirts, so why charge for a little bit of simple graphics work or go back and forth and impede me from selling shirts (aka Making you money). Seems like they're nickel and diming you on their already extremely steep profit margins. I could understand a charge if I came with a drawing on a napkin but if my illustrator file needs a little tweak help a bro out.
However they do have the largest selection of printable items to choose from and the most solid platform out of the dropship printing services I have seen available in the app store. So choose your poison

NO POLYBAGS on your apparels!! Let me repeat, as of 9/15/15, they DO NOT PUT POLYBAGS when they ship their apparels!!

So... if you want to create a website for your small school team, or small town fair, Printful could work and save you some upfront money.

But!! If you want to create a "Brand", Printful is a No No! As a costumer, imagine if you order a Tshirt from Store, and they send you the Tshirt or a hat without POLYBAG!! What kind of impression would that leave!? That customer will NEVER shop from you. Not only that, he/she will spread the bad service like wild fire. Polybags are a must to keep the product from dirt as well!

I had customers that complained because their apparel came with dirt and stains. Come on Printful... You can do so much more. And actually, you had!!

Yes! They actually "did" send their apparels in polybags.... but for whatever reason (Which is always to save couple bucks), they decided to "REMOVE" the "polybags!!" from all their apparel shipments!!! Come on... How much would that save you? 5 cents at most!? So jut to save 5 cents, you would loose so many possible costumers!!? You can do the math here. You'll end up loosing thousands, millions of dollars... just because you wanted to save... 5 cents....!!! Come on Printful.... BRING THE POLYBAGS!!!!

If they do bring their polybags in time for the apparels, I'd easily give them 4 stars. But as of 9/15/15, because they DO NOT OFFER polybags on their apparel.... they get 2 stars! Again, if you want to sell you apparels to your family and small town fairs, Printful might work. But if you want to create a Brand, and you want Printful to be stepping stone, look elsewhere.