Pigh Designs review for Gooten: Print on Demand
June 6, 2018
Gooten was a nightmare! The customer service issues over the holidays were the last straw for me. Just as in any line of work, you know the holiday is coming, so be prepared for it. Gooten’s prices are very competitive, but the amount of time I have to spend due to all of the issues and not being able to provide good customer service left me no choice but to switch fulfillment companies. I made the mistake of trying them again for an international order last month – which reminded me exactly why I won’t use them!!! And prompted me to finally submit this review. I don’t see them improving, especially with condescending reps. I do hope they can work out these problems, but I’m not sure how I would ever know if or when they get so many and such large problems sorted out. I am happy with my current fulfillment company they just cost more, but it’s worth it for things to run smoothly, so I don’t see any turning back. 1.) Quality: Gooten products are outsourced and there is no quality control like with other companies. T-shirts are taken off the printer hot, crumpled into a ball & sent to the customers that way! Sometimes the graphics stick to themselves as a result and arrive damaged. If you do not choose a SKU with an underbase, they will go ahead and print it without one and send it to the customer even though the design does not even show up on the shirt. They have a good point that some people ‘want’ a vintage look. But in my cases it was obviously not wanted for the graphic to not show up at all - the point is there is no quality control, it is as if nobody even sees the finished product or cares how it looks. Sometimes the graphics are also crooked. 2.) Shipping: The t-shirt vendor for my products only ships DHL express, so it takes customers over a week to get their orders even after the week it takes to make the shirt(s). If you ship international the order just shows in limbo forever and there is no way to track anything about it. This past month my order just sat somewhere ‘unscanned’ for several weeks with no way to know there was a problem. 3.) Platform: I had a pretty good experience with the platform until they implemented their ‘hub’ and now it is a nightmare. This happened as I was taking my Etsy business to Shopify and building a Shopify store. I had to put off launching my Shopify store for months because I either can’t get my products to stay linked or the fact that it now takes hours to build a single product with multiple variants. You can no longer use a CSV with Shopify without it unlinking all the products on Gooten’s end and having to start over linking every single SKU and graphic. It is very error-prone since you have to completely reselect every SKU and graphic without even a heading at the top as to which shirt design you are working on! Product write-ups are overridden when syncing, so you have to copy and paste those every time you make a change or add a variant. I’ve tried working with them but there is no phone number just email and it’s just too much for me to spend hours, days, weeks and months helping them fix their whole business. 4.) Mockup errors: Many shirts are mocked up with the wrong image color. I have learned that since switching fulfillment companies. So I was using the wrong graphics colors at times the whole time because I thought the mockup was the actual color of the shirt. Also it makes the customer-facing mockups misleading, as people think they are purchasing the color shown. 5.) Customer service: Customer support was the reason I stuck it out and gave them such a long time to get things right; they were great up until I had some problems around the holidays, and then some got condescending. One of my customers received a defective product, and they could not do anything at all to expedite the shirt to her…I couldn’t even pay for anything to be done. The production is outsourced, and there was nothing they could do to get the vendor to prioritize the problems. Also the vendor doesn’t offer any shipping except DHL Express, so I was stuck providing a level of customer service that is not acceptable for my business. I made the mistake of trying Gooten again this past month for an international order, and when my customer made a mistake in the address I got another condescending response (the same lady, I believe!) in a very punishing reply. I get it, someone made a mistake, just help me move forward and take care of the customer!! 6.) ‘Expedited’ inconsistency: There is a huge confusion regarding expedited processing versus expedited shipping. I pay for expedited processing every single time I place an order…it isn’t much and is supposed to bump up the processing time from 12 days to 6 days. But expedited shipping has never been an option. I would use it every time if it were! Some people at Gooten use the two terms interchangeably and even tell me that expedited processing isn’t an option…even though I pay for exactly that every single time I place an order! I'm exhausted; which is how I usually felt back when I was using Gooten!
