Printify: Print on Demand

UPDATE: I set up my store for fun, and assumed I was making money. It started getting more and more orders, but I didn't really dig in, just thought of it as "free money" for the most part.

I say that to explain my mindset when finding Printify. The app was pretty easy to use, they had products different from Printful, and it seemed decent. I was pleased.

Fast forward 6 months and I'm trying to get serious as a business. I started digging into my expenses, and saw that for several orders, I was LOSING MONEY. How could this possibly be?

It was ALL because of PRINTIFY'S SHIPPING. Let me dig deeper...

I started with Printful. I had it set up so that Printful was setting the delivery price that my customer saw because they were my only print provider. Then I added Printify. I couldn't use that delivery price thing anymore, couldn't figure out another way to set it up, so I said "Screw it" and just set flat rate shipping. Printful's shipping was usually around $3 in the US (with some rare outliers) and $7-8 internationally, so I set my shipping prices as $5 flat for US and Canada, and $12 international.

Then I set it and forgot about it. That was so stupid.

Each of their printers has their own shipping, and they are not just charging you the costs. They are charging you like I charged my customers, with a little padding. That is not cool. Let me break it down:

Printful:
A mug
A backpack
A t-shirt
- All printed from the same place, and shipped to the same place, so shipping would be like $4 domestic, $8 international

Printify:
A mug - comes from one printer who charges $5 dom./ $12 int.
A backpack - comes from one printer who charges $5 dom./ $12 int.
A t-shirt - comes from one printer who charges $5 dom./ $12 int.
- All shipped separately from different providers, costing $15 domestic and **$36 INTERNATIONAL**

I don't know about you but that would be my entire profit margin. I added coasters through Printify, that were really popular but they were cheap ($9 or so bucks, $5 cost I think). I thought it would be an easy way to upsell. They ended up draining profits because the shipping ($5) would eat up the profit margin and then some.

Don't be fooled by this. Do not use Printify unless they fix their shipping costs. I tried talking to support and they were just like "it's not up to us, the shipping providers set their own prices." So they don't really even care. I deleted all my products, cancelled my subscription, and uninstalled the app.

I left 2 stars because for everything else, they are great. If they fixed this, I'd come back.

Original Review: I love the app. It's pretty easy to use. There are a few small things that bug me, but overall it's a great app. I wish there were more products available. Right now, I have to use several different POD services, and I wish I could just use Printify. Great app!

I thought this would be a cool app. The first couple of orders were ok but they last one was terrible. I took months to get my shirts. When they arrived they arrived in different shipments at different times... like 5 shirts one time and then another 3 a week later. After one washing all of the printing peeled off. Terrible. Deleted from my store.

The print quality is super cheesy and unprofessional. They do not follow your specs and will distort your art. In addition, their customer service is non-existent.

To be fair, I am following up with my review. Customer Service finally reached out to us and for that effort, I'm changing my 1 to a 2 star review.

Currently using this app to fulfill apparel orders, purchased sample shirts that have been in production for over 2 weeks due to no stock from one of the printers that showed a 2.5 day turnaround . Asked for a refund if shirts were still not in stock to go with another printer that printed and shipped internationally within that 2 week timeframe.
I was declined a refund for the shirts and told to buy more samples from another printer to compare quality then asked to pay for printify premium in the future when I advertise my store.

I think a way to review the printers and better communication between the printers and stores would make Printify 100%
Until then I'm worried about shirts taking the better part of a month to ship.

for the most part customer service is good but 8 out of 10 times the sample products are junk and have to be redone. while looking for a print on demand app to add to your store use as a last resort and always order a sample before adding to your Shopify store

I'm using two POD providers on my website, And omg, how much I hate Printify... If not for good products that the other POD service just doesn't have, I would just delete this app, forget it as a nightmare and never look back. The biggest thing that makes my experience so horrible and forces me to waste hundreds of hours of time on absolutely unnecessary monkey job is Printify's inability to sync product updates made through Shopify back to their platform. So you can't make bulk updates to your products through Shopify's awesome UX, but forced to go to Printify and manually republish all your products one by one through a crappy dashboard and then spend HOURS on cleaning the updated products on Shopify to remove all the mess Printify created after republishing. Just some examples: it keeps reordering updated products in the collection, removing the brand name from "Vendor" field and plugging its own name there, and competely f up product variants order. For example, if you sell phone cases, each with 33 phone variants, then each time you update your price, be prepared to find your variants just randomly mixed together. If you have a dozen phone cases, you will spend 1-2 hours doing an absolutely unnecessary dumb monkey job just to fix the mess. And if you have 100... well, good luck. Why is it so hard to make the app sync data from Shopify, whenever I update the product there? The other POD service does this absolutely seamlessly. I just absolutely hate it. Once the other service adds the products I need, I'm out.

The interface is great and setting up products is a piece of cake. I really wanted to be able to use this for all our custom clothing. However, it doesn't adjust when distributors' items are out of stock, so that forces you to refund a customer order if out of stock. That comes off as really unprofessional and made my business look bad, not to mention losing a sale. While customer service was very responsive, they had no fix for this issue.

Edit - I'm taking this review from 3 stars to 2. This company has the strangest way of dealing with mediocre reviews. I told them precisely what the issue is (inability to predict when an item is out of stock), they told me they had no fix for the issue, I told them I wouldn't be able to use Printify anymore. They THEN sent an email asking me to remove my review or change it to a higher rating because "I believe I have covered every area of concern you had." They in no way addressed my concern other than saying they can't do anything about it. I'm very surprised they asked me to remove a review when the underlying issue still exists!

Here is the customer service response to the out-of-stock issue:
"You mentioned that you would like us to incorporate a system that automatically accounts for out of stock items and/or variants. I completely agree that that would be ideal. When it comes to items that are out of stock, we only find out when our print providers notify us. We have been in discussions with them lately trying to work out an effective system to notify our merchants when these issues occur. This is an issue we have been addressing and I can assure you that we are woking on an acceptable solution.

For now, our policy concerning out of stock items is as follows...

For temporary out of stock issues, no notice will be sent out. We expect these issues to be dealt with quickly and will be only a minor inconvenience. For out of stock matters that will be more lengthy, we will send out an email to all our merchants notifying you of the issue so you can make the necessary adjustments to your account.

I totally understand that in some cases this can lead to some inconveniences. I would like to assure you that we are committed to finding a solution. Your patience and understanding are appreciated."

It is a great App if you don’t mind having to contact Tech support for anything. It will take days to get back to you and even then the “tech team is still working on it” so try this…or this…or this….or this….
I have had emailed about 15 times, get a different person every time and each tries to have me trouble shoot something else…theme..product..uninstall reinstall…and on and on and on. I used to make a lot of money with Printify but they are becomeing unrelieable.

Glitchy app, doesn't integrate well with Shopify and often lags severely when syncing. After using a few other fulfillment services, it's a bit strange that Printify does not offer a discount on sample orders. They will reimburse you up to $50 of sample order fees after you achieve $500 in sales. If your customers are mainly in the US, some products are more expensive than if you use their manufacturers in the UK.

Terrible customer service! I have written in 4 or 5 times to check on an order that has gone missing and they refuse to get back to me. I even upgraded to Printify premium hoping to finally get a response, to no avail. If you have order issues I do NOT recommend printify. It's a shame because the interface is good and easy to use but they ignore my requests for help and I paid a lot for this order.