River Road Print Shop review for Gelato: Print on Demand

May 1, 2021

If you’re new to POD, as I am, Gelato has a lot of seemingly great features. I was especially excited about the option for customers to utilize the personalization feature. I like their approach to sustainability and supporting local printers. After several months of trying to work through issues with their customer service team, I am giving up on trying to make this relationship work. Here’s a few problems I have had: Upload/Product creation can be glitchy. Sometimes you have to start from the beginning when the system stalls or crashes. Frame quality is super low. The frames used by the printer I was matched with are horrible and look nothing like the frames shown as examples on gelato’s site. There is barely a single coat of white paint, which is chipping. The joints are barely attached, and the wood grain is rough and totally visible. When I received one frame as a sample of this poor quality, I reached out to customer service. They refunded me and told me this was never the quality of work that I should expect. I went ahead and ordered more samples - and got the exact same low-quality frames again. My plan was to rephotograph some of the frames and keep going with gelato in spite of these two issues. I thought about eliminating frames as an option. As of February 2021, however, they changed how product variants sync to Shopify, with no notice or explanation. When I contacted customer service, they told me that I would need to go into each and every product after uploading and update all the variants myself. They gave me no explanation or recourse or assistance. Sent off instead to a general customer service email that simply sends links/articles from their FAQ instead of addressing the actual issue that I had detailed 3 times by this point. I was frustrated and found a new POD app/printer. I was never given a solution and have had to put a halt to building out my inventory, instead spent the time re-uploading my entire inventory with a new supplier. They have wasted my time and my money. If you are a larger company with your own team to address issues with the API and build out your own system, perhaps Gelato can work for you. If you are a small company or individual, especially creating a store on Shopify, they don’t seem to care too much about your business, and the constant changes to their API will throw a massive wrench in creating and maintaining an evolving inventory.