teelaunch: Print on Demand

***UPDATED***
I WILL START HERE... I have had a very challenging experience with Teelaunch. That said, they have found out what the issue was with the disconnect between their application and my store. That alone has led me to change my rating from 1 star to 4. If I have success moving forwards, with minor issues in the coming weeks, I will revisit a 5-star review. Until then, I will be in touch and see how the application's interface works for me. ***I have been emailing back and forth with this company since October. The connection between my store and the application stopped working. They sent me instructions and asked me to send a screenshot. I followed all the instruction, and sent both a screenshot and a recording. Now, every time I send a message.... I get the same reply... that they have sent my request to a manager. I have sent a message today as well. I have had application issues before, but this is just beyond unappealing. I took the time to prepare several designs for products, but none of them will be pushed to my store. The makes things awkward, as I have prepared Items for clients but the items cannot be completed. I wish I had a great experience like other merchants, but here I sit disturbed and unhappy with this app, which I was very excited to you. I'm very jealous of those who could get this company to reply in a timely manner, as that has not been my experience. I'll be on the hunt, once again, for yet another supplier.

Positives:
1) Really really good app! Fantastic process of setup, although you can't easily set every combination.

2) Product came quickly

3) They list the value of multiple tshirts as $10 (total) so that customs doesn't bother charging Canadian customers for importing - nice. Potentially illegal though.

Negatives:
1) Not great email customer service. I think they're still ramping this team up. That said, when I asked for a phone call with a manager, it got a response within a couple of hours. Not a deal breaker.

2) They basically have two tshirt types that are exactly the same but different labels on them. They were really helpful in explaining that I didn't need to pay more for the more expensive tshirt. But I ended up deciding to do so for the perceived value of the product I'd be shipping. Only thing was, they didn't HAVE the expensive one in stock, so rather than contact me and ask what I wanted, they just opted to send MY product out to MY customer on the cheaper shirt.... and charged me the extra buck for the more expensive tshirt. I didn't like them making decisions about my brand that way. To their credit, they immedaitely refunded me 100% when I complained and they said it would never happen again. Not a deal breaker.

3) Their system is really picky about the size of the image. I can understand why it shouldn't be too small, but how can it be too large? Not a deal breaker.

4) Their printing process leaves a smell on the shirts that resembles vinegar. It dissipates after a wash or two, but it's pretty strong coming out of the package. When we ordered a test run of a half-dozen shirts the team in the office complained until we sealed them back up. Not a deal breaker.

4) Their printing process involves making subtle changes to the image to optimize how it looks on a tshirt. In my case, it printed a white background behind the colour ink to make it pop. That might work for other images, but our product is faux-vintage. There are "holes" in the images to represent where the shirt is worn.
Without the holes, the product doesn't look right. Ultimately it was this product incompatibility that caused us to switch to Printful. If it hadn't been the case, I probably would have continued to work with them... and I might work with them on other products. I will update this review as I try that.

Teelaunch provides great customer service and numerous of products . Our recommended drop shipping company.

Please STAY AWAY from this app. Particularly if you have many SKUs; whenever you receive an order, it will require you to manually go to the app, find the order, and select MANUALLY which items belong to teelaunch and which items don't. It's an absolute waste of time. I had to refund my first order and delete the app after a week of trying to fix the app. The customer service is basically useless as well.

BEWARE Store Owners - teelaunch Customer service is seriously lacking. Be prepared to send 2-3 emails before getting the specific information you requested, if at all. Shipping issues from my very sample first order. I ordered samples on 2/25 and as of 3/14 the shipment still not received by carrier (USPS) despite listed 3-7 day production time. Multiple attempts to get updated information/status but have only been provided the tracking information again and again with no further explanations and no attempt to make it right.
For example: If you are used to Printful's level customer service - you will need to drastically adjust your expectations for teelaunch.
Aside from that, their pricing/cost is more favorable for the seller in most cases.
Give them a try, but be aware they might not resolve your customer service issues to your satisfaction.

love this app i love the fact that i can design flags and do not have to buy them in bulk to sell them

AMAZING! 10 times better than any other t-shirt fulfilment app and cheaper pricing. Also the print quality is better than any other company I have used.

Why is it better? Previously I used "theprintful" and "print aura", with both of those you had to upload twice / once adding products to your website and again uploading the designs to the fulfillmet site. You had to do this for every single product. It took forever. I also checked print samples from them and they weren't great. Also they rip you off on pricing! $13 base cost + $5 shipping, $18! And that's the cheapest item. Crazy.

With Teelaunch you just upload your design for the products you want and process it. That's it. And the base cost for a mens shirt is $8.50 + $4 shipping, $12.50 total. Waay better. I now make $18 profit per item compared to $12.

This beats everyone by far. Highly recommend

Why I left 3 stars?
I loved this service I hope these guys read all comments)
But I simply beg you to make it quick and easy to make a manual order with the image uploaded and not create a pile of product twins in your store.
The way that now exists is a mockery of the users.
All large print houses have a way of manually loading images and creating an order directly in the office.
Thanks

Jeffrey

Very disappointing service and very little support. We responded to the email introducing Teelaunch and stated we would like to use it and didn't hear from anyone for nearly a month...and they are the ones who wrote to us first! We had to follow up our own request to hear from someone.

Once we got the app installed and prepared to post products, we realized there is no product information other than color. We both wrote and called trying to find out about fit and fabric weight/materials, and have hear from no one for almost two weeks now.

BE SURE TO REVIEW PERMISSIONS BEFORE INSTALLING

Turnaround times are 5-7 business days *from the time they enter production* which is much longer than average for same product types.

All orders are also placed on mandatory 24 hour hold before being processed, adding further delay.

TeeLaunch is requesting an extremely high level of access & authority which is completely unnecessary and unrelated to their stated function. This includes access to ALL customer data whether related to TeeLaunch orders or not, control over all pages, the ability to create redirects and modify shop coding.

Support's first step was to demand even further control.

I placed three initial orders. The orders were pushed to TeeLaunch and appeared under the orders tab in the app. However, shortly thereafter I received a message insisting that the shop's master fulfillment setting be changed to "Automatic" or the orders would not be processed. Three days after the initial order was placed it still had not progressed from pending to production.

As confirmed with Shopify support, this is not only unnecessary but highly unadvisable. TeeLaunch's API already had authority well beyond what was needed to create products, receive, process and fulfill orders. Further, the only legitimate difference between "Manual" and "Automatic" master fulfillment settings is whether the shop owner/staff need to click 'Request Fullfillment" prior to the order being pushed to the app.

Pressed on the issue, TeeLaunch support staunchly stood by the requirement and refused to fill the orders until it was done.

When the extent of the permissions granted to the app were reviewed, I confronted support about the extremely suspicious degree of access & authority and asked their reasoning.

I received a one sentence response: "I can delete the app."

Strongly advise any shop against installing this app until is reviewed further by Shopify and requested permissions are curtailed to necessary and applicable functionality.