Coven of Corals review for creativehub: Sell Art Prints

Jan. 5, 2022

I have been using the creativehub app in combination with my art store on Shopify for several months now, and it has been a very elegant way to ensure my art prints are manufactured to the highest quality standards - I had personally ordered prints at ThePrintSpace in Düsseldorf before, so I was already a fan of their paper choices and brilliant prints. Plus, the packaging and shipping leaves a highly professional impression with my customers, especially when adding a certificate of authenticity - which comes with a hologram and all. Dropshipping my art prints via creativehub allows me to fully focus on painting and exhibiting my work, and I can be sure that I'll be able to handle whatever amount of orders come my way :D I used to run a different shop where I printed and shipped my art myself, but this is a massive improvement for me and makes it much easier to explore larger sizes for my work. It is an incredibly satisfying feeling to wake up to a chain of E-Mails telling me that 1) an order has been placed in my shop, 2) the order has been printed, 3) the order has been shipped, without me even realising it - and needing to do nothing about it! So, the orders from Shopify are pulled by creativehub at midnight each day and then printed & fulfilled within 24 hours on a business day, often quicker, so if a customer orders at say 10pm and I sleep really long the next day, this does indeed happen - and is welcome to happen more often in the future :D As a special benefit, I would like to mention the flat shipping fee - wherever my customers order from, creativehub charges me a flat shipping fee (I think it is 8 pounds or something of that magnitude), which I can easily absorb for my customers and just offer them free shipping altogether. Going forward, there is one wish I would like to express though, and that is a quicker and maybe more in-depth response from the creativehub helpdesk. I encountered a rather painful glitch once where an important order placed by a customer of mine on Shopify got "stuck", i.e. it could not be seen and processed by the creativehub backend and I did not know what to do - in the end, the Helpdesk and I managed to pin down the root cause of the problem, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation, the problem is now solved and I learned how to prevent this type of situation (it was about selling prints as edition and how to correctly import the edition as a "variant" to Shopify, which is required for the order to be processed correctly). However, the exchange with the helpdesk dragged on for more than a week (!) and I felt that the data I provided for troubleshooting was not properly or accurately ingested, so it took unnecessarily long to solve the problem or even to offer a pragmatic workaround for this very instance. And all the while I had a customer waiting, which made it all quite stressful for me and I must admit that I felt left hanging in this situation. So going forward, I would hope for helpdesk communication with creativehub to be consistently quicker and more responsive when there is an acute problem on hand, so an issue like this could probably be worked out in maybe 2-3 business days if everyone is cooperating and there is a good back and forth of data. Alternatively, one could just quickly offer some sort of goodwill process to fix the immediate situation and figure out the root cause later simply to prevent extra waiting times for end customers. Creativehub states on their page that they try to answer queries within a couple of hours and this would indeed be a very good response time to ensure. So this is one improvement I would like to see, on top of an already very powerful and ambitious technical solution to help me as an artist focus on doing art.