Birch + Bat Studios review for Printful: Print on Demand

Nov. 19, 2020

We use both their printing services and their warehousing services, and have for many years now. Their warehousing is top notch - better than others we've used. Their printing, however, has taken a huge dive, as has their customer service in the past few months. We've had misprinted orders where despite customer evidence being provided, it was still ruled as "correct", and we had to pay the refund out ourselves. Delays beyond what's projected have been constant for us. I'm having to speak with customer service many times throughout the week to try and get things sorted. The biggest thing that worried me was when we ordered a sample of our own stickers during the summer, and the two stickers arrived printed on different papers, with one sticker completely being unable to stick (a complaint we had heard a lot from our customers). I got a lot of run-around about it, and when I left a review on Printful itself, with photo evidence, I was informed by a customer service rep that the review wasn't going to be posted because it "didn't match the experience customers would be able to expect from them". That made me question how many negative, honest reviews were being suppressed from others as well. We no longer use stickers with Printful, but warehouse our own better-quality stickers instead, for consistency's sake. We're looking into printing and warehousing our own other items now too. I really want this service to be great again, it used to be we'd only have one or two issues every few months. Now it's multiple issues a week. I hope that when things begin to calm down with the pandemic, they can improve their quality and customer service again, otherwise we're likely to change services completely. EDIT: I've lowered this a star since leaving this review. Even in that short time between when I left the original and now, it's gotten significantly worse. Out of stock items stopped syncing stock numbers with my store, leaving hundreds of items available for purchase when they weren't there at all. Looking around social media, I discovered this was common, but customer service said they'd get back to me later about it rather than having any clue about the issue. It would be days of work to manually edit all of these. We've also had a lot more issues with orders. Just this morning I had to contact them over an order that hadn't been processed or fulfilled long past it's due date. There were no errors or information attached to the order itself. According to customer service, there had been a manufacturer delay, and then the item hadn't restocked yet. Not only was none of these issues told to me at the time, but the item had never shown up on my dashboard as out of stock at any point. Issues like these, with a complete lack of transparency, have become common. Pains me to say it, because I want Printful to be wonderful again.