Coast Mercantile review for Printful: Print on Demand

Dec. 2, 2017

CANADIAN STORE OWNERS BEWARE. I have operated an online merchandising company since 2008. Our model has been to produce inventory, store it, and ship it out when it sells. Typical retail, nothing new. We were introduced to Shopify and Printful in late October 2017. It looked like a game-changer - print on demand, no need to handle our own inventory, shipping provided, etc. This method was appealing because it would reduce our financial risk by eliminating the need for inventory, and reduce costs by eliminating the need to handle our our packaging/shipping. We didn't want to use the service without experiencing it for ourself first, so we placed some sample orders. It was amazing! Products were created and shipped within days of our order. They arrived swiftly. We loved it, and were confident enough that we turned our old store 'off' and turned Shopify and Printful 'on'. What a mess. Customers placed orders and we quickly learned that the wholesale costs that we were seeing in Printful were USD, not CAD (our store Settings are CAD and we paid the on-screen price for our test orders, not the inflated exchange price). The per-item shipping cost killed us. WE paid out of pocket for our first round of customer orders - deactivated Printful immediately - thank goodness that we can afford to eat the cost. Others might not be so lucky. We thought the bad dream was over, but then it turned into a nightmare. The quick production/shipping that we experienced? No so for our customers. We had a customer place an order on November 17 and it JUST shipped on December 1, for delivery on December 19. It's 2017 and that's unacceptable, so we just gave the customer a full credit for the cost of their order ($180). There is no Canadian equivalent of Printful, so we've gone back to producing our goods, holding inventory, and managing shipping ourselves. We're going to stick with Shopify because it means that we don't need to be hands-on with our backend web development anymore. 2 stars because Printful is an amazing service but it just doesn't work in the Canadian retail environment. When leaving a review, a message appears that says "If you had a bad experience, please try contacting the app developer at [email protected] before posting a negative review". We could, but realistically there isn't anything that Printful can do except send us cash for the amount that we're out of pocket, and the probability of that is low.