Societal review for Printful: Print on Demand
June 22, 2020
So far so good. Good customer service, Nice platform. We would give printful 5 starts except for one major - hiccup we have encountered two months in we have spotted a huge problem which we wish we spotted before. It will not apply to everyone, but most certainly to businesses who focus on selling one or five products i.e. tshirts. Read on if this is you and consider alternatives if printful do not can up with a solution to this. The Biggest draw back is that if you have a large range of designs (0ver 1000 like us) that you intend to use on say 1 product and they suddenly discontinue the product you will be in big trouble (the end of the world) as there is no way to easily replace the one products you have 1000 designs that took you two months to upload if the tshirt is discontinued. In fact if you change your mind and simply want to change the t-shirt the 1000 designs are printed on you can not. It will take months. Even worst still if you have 3 products and all are discontinued in the same month, this could then take you again months just to recreate and sync 1000 designs - it will kill your website and google will most likely blacklist you or ignor you in the future as you will have thousands of broken links. Its something that has only just occurred to us and we are worried......... Surely there must be a quick way to replace a discontinued product without having to create all 1000 products i.e. tshirts again? I think this is where for example DBH platform trumps as they offer the ability for the customer the ability to choose the product that they want the design on as opposed to the other way, but that platform is not available to us as its a private business. Like i said i dont know what we would do if the most popular tshirt we are uploading 1000 designs on gets discontinued on the printful platform, but hopefully printful will come up with a solution before then. Otherwise it maybe the end for us even before we have taken off. Or we may just have to start looking around now and migrate items to another platform. But hopefully not after all this work. 21 May 2020 Thanks for the quick response. As I said i think from reviews and my experience so far has been generally positive. The other issue that would be fixed with the above is that when products become redundant as we've found after creating 250 in the last month. My shopify site is left with lots of 404 errors. Would be good if the prihtful app created redirects as my site is new and this badly affects my listings in google. The images that get uploaded to my shopify site are also in google listing that helps attract people to the site, so when you completely and automatically make a product redundant and pull it from the store along with the images this is not good. Better to leave the product in place so I can benefits from the pictures listed in google and let me have the opportunity to set up a redirect. Why cant i also go straight into a discontinued product and change it within the product information section like changing a printfile. surely that would be easier and cleaner seo wise etc? Sorry one more issue, why cant i select any alternative for my products it seems to be limited to what your system feels is the best alternatives which is not good. Its its getting it wrong in some instances?
Hi, thank you for your review! We really appreciate it! I'm glad to hear you have been having a good time with our customer service and platform in general! Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback on the product update functionality! As you have noted, it isn't currently possible to update the entire product (or bulk update multiple products) with a new item, in case the initial product is discontinued or if you would like to change it. This is a limitation on our end, but I can definitely understand how a feature which would allow updating the products would be useful, especially if you have many products with the same item. I have passed along your feedback about this feature to our development team for further consideration and I hope we are able to find a solution for this. Thanks again for your input, it is definitely useful for us to know what features and products you would like to see available on our platform! Update: Hi, thank you for your review update! Regarding product redirects, if products are removed from your store, it will cause a 404 error when trying to access that product in your store. Unfortunately, we can’t create redirects to a new product on our end, but you could consider checking in with Shopify support to see if something like this could be set up in your store’s admin for the products. As for discontinued products and changing them - it is possible to change the product to a different item. This can be done by going to the Printful app -> Products -> Discontinued -> Edit -> find the discontinued variant -> click “Edit” -> click “Back to browse” in the upper left corner of the pop-up window and this will take you to the catalog where you can select a new item. Regarding available alternatives - at the moment, not all items will have comparable alternatives or have limited alternative selection, so we are offering the closest substitutes you could use. As we are adding more products to our selection, the options for alternatives will also increase. Thanks again for your feedback and input, we certainly appreciate it! In case there's anything we can help with or if there's anything else you'd like to share about your time with us, be sure to let us know at [email protected] anytime! - Zana
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