teelaunch: Print on Demand

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Teelaunch and I would love to see them improve their interface, as they seem to really care about their customers, but I must choose to go elsewhere after over 20 hours of tweaking my collection and having to start again from scratch. I just realized today, when I was ready to launch, that their interface has a glitch that will alter design sizes (please read below) when you are creating multiple garments using the same design/file.

The good:
- Customer support is amazing. A girl named Kristy answered my questions in 5 minutes or less during business hours. I had some questions about resolution and Dave was helpful and even recorded a video showing me how to fix my problem.

- When you upload one design, you can create many different types of t-shirts (unlike Printful, where you need to create each piece individually). This should be basic on every POD. I don't understand having to upload the same image on every. single. t-shirt.

What I'd love to see changed:
- Many times when you finish to place your design and you hit "Create", the interface bugs and you need to start from scratch.

- Many time while you're adjusting your design on a piece (let's say on a t-shirt), the interface changes the size on other pieces as well (that was the last drop for me).

- There are only three options of moving your design on a garment. This means you need to create a single individual size for each product, except for t-shirts.

- Automatically their interface will cut down your design where it has transparent areas. The problem about this is that, for example, if your design is too close to the neck, as you only have 3 pre-determined options of placement on the t-shirt (no dragging), you need to reopen your design on Illustrator, create an invisible pixel on it so it doesn't get trimmed by their interface, export and upload it again. It's annoying because sometimes it looks great on a Hoodie but it looks bad on a Baby's Bodysuit.

- The info of the products and titles DO NOT go automatically to the description, which I find to be really time-consuming. This means you need to copy it individually from their website (or uploading area) and paste them individually on each product. I ended up downloading a bulk editor.

- The measurement of clothing come only on a single PDF, so you have to navigate through it, find the garments you are working with and then type them down manually, as you cannot just copy and paste them on a chart.

I have tried all PODs that have reviews above 4 and I understand no POD will be perfect, but at this point, I was going to have to redo my entire collection as I just noticed the interfacing changing my design sizes continuously.

I loved their customer support and I do hope they improve these issues that make it really hard to work around despite my best efforts (such as creating invisible pixels, typing down all measurements manually, using an external bulk editor. If they do, I'd be happy to revisit my review and their interface.

prices are higher than what their description says, only accepts PNG files larger than 2400px for a t-shirt which is just a ridiculous size compared to most photos being half of that. This app isn't for me, I will find another one like it.. hopefully better.

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.

UPDATE...

June 7 2017... After I wrote about my REALLY frustrating experience with Teelaunch (see below)... Christopher the owner of the company contacted me via email and spoke with me about my issue with them... he was... quite honestly... greatly concerned with my poor experience and wanted to take the time to reach out to me... He didn't have to step up... but he did and I appreciate that a lot... so... I'm going to try them again.

I had originally rated my experience as a single star... I am changing that to 5 out of 5 because he made the effort to connect with me.

I have to get into the nuts and bolts of the app and figure it out... but I'm hoping round two goes better!

ORIGINAL REVIEW... June 5 2017...

This review is strictly about Teelaunch's customer service...

I added their app today to my Shopify store... but because I am from Canada their app wouldn't let me add my correct 2 letter province acronym when entering my credit card billing information... they only allow US credit card billing addresses... Dave... the customer service guy I was dealing with was quick to respond but WOW... was NOT helpful WHATSOEVER. Many of his responses were one line at best and contradictory to his other messages... BRUTAL! I have NEVER dealt with a customer service agent who did less and cared less than he did... EVER!!!

I solved the problem myself by deleting their app... If I am having this much trouble with customer service... I don't think doing business with them will be any better.

Good riddance!

If anyone who plans to build your brand on Shopify or on the Internet, you should definitely walk away from this one!!!

We have spent an awful load of time trying to communicate with them which they just seems to bring us around their gardens with their issues unresolved.

First, after months of researching, we finally decided to give them ago and paid for our first shopify store, they would not have any idea how to tell us about their shipping charges and how can we go about setting up on shopify.

Secondly, after we decided to forego and not charge for shipping, we managed to setup and tried to order our first tee for testing. Created one order which we issued refund to the test buyer, the order was stuck in TeeLaunch Backend system in Pending mode if we decided to turn on their "auto batching”. We were told that it would be ordered even though the "customer" cancelled their order and asked for refund.

We contacted them a few times in multiple issues but our queries always ended up this guy named Dave. He would just bring us around the garden without giving us an answer. Makes the experience with TeeLaunch a complete disaster.

Despite continuously asking for help, we were brought around their gardens waiting for disaster to happen. All the time, efforts and money spent trying to deliver to our potential 2millions+ audiences, TeeLaunch to us, is not out here for business. Now we had to pull the plug, clean up our community pages and hope for them to forget about us trying to launch a new business. This will definitely cause a dent in our brand image since launch day (Thank you TeeLaunch!)

That is even before we managed to place the orders to buy ourselves a tee for quality checking purposes. Looking at those print quality reviews below our post here, we are done taking another risk from TeeLaunch. It is not worth all the time, efforts and money we have spent here.

And on a side note, maybe it is time for Shopify to step up to ensure the Apps approved on their App Store are of real quality and not junks. We actually took quite a lot of time signing up other different Apps here to find out or test out their platforms before subscribing to shopify to setup a business. Then we ended up with App Publishers in these qualities, which is obviously very ANNOYING!

Uploading is a nightmare compared to printful and printify. you are limited to 15mb for a picture with 2400px. that 15mb limit needs to be removed asap.

Working with this app was great. Very easy to create items and they give you a template to work with! I would recommend this absolutely!

Mega schlechte Bedienung, sehr unflexibel in der Erstellung.

Easy to create and load, love so far! I have added the 32 oz tumbler with multiple colors and it looks great on my website.