MotorsportMaps review for Lulu Direct
Sept. 21, 2020
(SECOND REVIEW - 9/21/2020): Production times are over a month. I have customers complaining daily, asking where their orders are. This is not an issue of the USPS or Fedex, this is a production/manufacturing issue that Lulu has faced since we began working with them. We get the same old runaround from customer service about how they are working on it. We have been working with Lulu for about a year now and it has just been painful from start to finish. If you're serious about starting a print-on-demand product, look elsewhere. It will save you a lot of headache in the long run for your business. Do not be fooled by Lulu's flashy interface and design. It's all smoke and mirrors. Behind the scenes it's a mess. (FIRST REVIEW - 4/27/2020): If you are planning to start a business around selling books, be vary wary before jumping in head first with this app. There are issues with the app as well as print quality control. We have been using the Lulu Xpress App for about 4 months now to print thousands of books. Our library consists of about 90 titles and we have spent thousands of dollars with Lulu. The app is riddled with bugs and issues. It is finicky and breaks easily. Many times it feels like wrestling a bear to get the app to do what it is supposed to. Whether you're trying to view your orders or trying to upload/update a book, a new error or bug will present itself. The app requires various workarounds to avoid these bugs, but regardless a new one will pop up in its place, bringing production to a halt. "Internal Server Errors" seem to never go away. We hold our breath every time we launch the app, cringing at what broken mess we're going to run into. This is not something that a business can afford to deal with on a weekly basis. As it stands, we have not been able to access the app at all in over a week. We have been working with customer service to solve these issues. This is an additional problem in itself. The line of communication is not efficient. You will be in contact through an email support ticket chain. With this chain, your customer service rep will relay or mediate your issue to a "developer" who is "working on the problem." It is just flat out inefficient and we expected more support and competency considering the volume we are producing and future plans of growth for our business. To their defense, customer service does reply fairly quickly. They do try and it seems they are sincere in their efforts to help in whatever way they can. Unfortunately, they're dealing with a broken app. The backend development of this app has a long way to go. The errors and bugs shouldn't exist to begin with. Because we are in this far, we will continue using Lulu for the time being, in hopes that they are able to iron out these issues soon. I will update this review once they do. Until then, I would not recommend this app.
