Printful: Print on Demand

I gave this app two months...

THE GOOD: The products themselves are indeed well built and customer service was very good.

THE BAD: The two hurdles that made this product unfit for my store are the pricing and the configuration. The pricing is incredibly high and put me in a position of either charging such a high price sales suffered greatly or sell product nearly at cost. The configuration is tricky even with a vanilla environment, and positively maddening when using other apps that access product variants like customer pricing. At one point I had nearly 60 skus for one shirt when all variants and custom pricing discount variants were factored in. Arranging the relationship between synched and un-synced items made my head spin and with each and every detail being so important, it was frustrating to work so hard to get it right and still find errors due to the complexity of the process.

THE VERDICT: If this print on demand concept were ever made intuitive to install and profitable it would be a Godsend. As it is, it is perhaps only suited for clientele that feel nearly $30 is a fair price for an Anvil shirt. The app is not bad per se, but think carefully if you think it is easy to use or an easy source of revenue.

Edit: Had to change to a 1 star review. This is by far the worst customer service I've ever experiences. Would absolutely not recommend using Printful for your business.

I was really excited to use this app for my online shop, but I've had some bad experiences with my test orders. The customer service can be a bit rude and it feels like they do not read your messages at all before sending a standard reply that does not answer your questions.
I'm afraid I'm gonna have to look for a different print on demand service.

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".

Easy to make cool products but high costs make it impossible to make sales

I use the app to sell online products & clothing. I like how it was fairly easy to set-up and use! I also like the tutorial videos and LIVE webinars. It takes some time, but with patience and perseverance I did it!

Finding the integration very smoothe between adding new products and having them show up on my website ready to go. So far so good!

I will not forget the amazing support service. Recommend to try out. I will not forget the amazing support service. Recommend to try out.

I really do like this POD, It works great, and connects to my online store perfectly. I think the only thing that would be missing is more mockup options, besides that, I love this app!!

The biggest problem I had was not all my products are POD and the sync instructions were not clear which resulted in my having to recreate a lot of products. Once it's synced, I can't really unsynced and that make my back end messy. I ended up deleting products and recreate it. Also had a problem with ordering the sample swatch color shirt in White and Black as suggested by their support. It's a Printful House design (showing all the colors and codes) and not upload by customers. But the black color swatch shirt have all the codes printed in black ink (on a black shirt) which is totally not readable and not usable. I went on support for a few days to get a new one send to us with the codes in white (on a black shirt) so we can match the color codes, and somehow it is all my fault for Printful charging me for a swatch card/shirt that is totally useless. I am NOT IMPRESSED. Printful sold a faulty product here. If you need to get a color code swatch shirt, skip the black one altogether as it is of no value. As the the integration, it works well. Very easy to set up and use. However, it cannot compensate for sometimes long and sometimes short fulfillment time. I have to answer to my customer too and that totally rely on the POD fulfiller's ability to delver as promise and deal with problem as they come up. The app is good, the support to go with it is only so so. Fulfillment time is a bit too long and prices higher than others.