Printful: Print on Demand

used to loved the app,
but now they added 10$ for worldwide shipping.
So - one t-shirt costs like 12$, which make it 22$ for every person that is not from USA/EUROPE/CANADA.
i used to sell shirts at 20$. now i have to change ALL OF MY PRODUCTS PRICES
10$ shipping worldwide is a lot for a t-shirt. A LOT
i lost money because of that.
have never received a mail or a phone call about it.

but what can i do? all of my products are based on Printful.

Printful makes setting up a online store easier. Im still setting up my store and I'm going to test out the shipping and stuff so stay tuned. 3-23-19

This is the first time I am writing a negative review about an app, but this is truly ridiculous.
An order for a product went through and looked like it would be fulfilled normally. A full week later, the literal latest the product should have been shipped out, I get a notification that the item is out of stock and the order cannot be fulfilled. When contacting the support they said that I should send the customer a substitute product, WHICH IS NOT WHAT THEY ORDERED. They continued saying that I should remove the product as visible on my store WHICH THEY SHOULD HAVE WARNED BEFORE THE ORDER OCCURED. There is no way that Printful does not know that they are going to be out of stock of a product, yet they issue no warning and expect us to send customers products that they did not order. Printful's integration is extremely easy which is what makes the app attractive initially, but they clearly could not care less about their customers.

It does not give options for the mock ups as far as Caucasian, African american, and etc. Not all business' are targeted toward white people

Very Good. But I don't know whether it is me or the app but I don't seem to be able to edit an existing product. I need to remove it and re-create it.

Nice solid app with quick responses, I wish the window wasn't just a pop up. I often enjoy going to the site to upload because of this.

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.

I like the way it adds my templates to my Shopify store. I just wish that when I give a template a name that I don;t have to re-enter the name when I add the product to the store.

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.