Printful: Print on Demand

Sept. 15, 2015

NO POLYBAGS on your apparels!! Let me repeat, as of 9/15/15, they DO NOT PUT POLYBAGS when they ship their apparels!! So... if you want to create a website for your small school team, or small town fair, Printful could work and save you some upfront money. But!! If you want to create a "Brand", Printful is a No No! As a costumer, imagine if you order a Tshirt from Store, and they send you the Tshirt or a hat without POLYBAG!! What kind of impression would that leave!? That customer will NEVER shop from you. Not only that, he/she will spread the bad service like wild fire. Polybags are a must to keep the product from dirt as well! I had customers that complained because their apparel came with dirt and stains. Come on Printful... You can do so much more. And actually, you had!! Yes! They actually "did" send their apparels in polybags.... but for whatever reason (Which is always to save couple bucks), they decided to "REMOVE" the "polybags!!" from all their apparel shipments!!! Come on... How much would that save you? 5 cents at most!? So jut to save 5 cents, you would loose so many possible costumers!!? You can do the math here. You'll end up loosing thousands, millions of dollars... just because you wanted to save... 5 cents....!!! Come on Printful.... BRING THE POLYBAGS!!!! If they do bring their polybags in time for the apparels, I'd easily give them 4 stars. But as of 9/15/15, because they DO NOT OFFER polybags on their apparel.... they get 2 stars! Again, if you want to sell you apparels to your family and small town fairs, Printful might work. But if you want to create a Brand, and you want Printful to be stepping stone, look elsewhere.

Aug. 25, 2015

Functionally sound - this review is more as a cautionary tale for UK-based online businesses. Alas! I really wanted this app to work for me. It is, in theory, exactly what I need, but the high cost of the items, the shipping fees and the surprise customs charges meant it wasn't a viable option. We ended up losing money on all products because we refunded our customers their excess customs charges before pulling everything from the online store before too much damage had been done. on the upside, my customers are delighted with their now super-limited edition items! If a local option were available, we'd still consider it, as the shipping and customs really were the dealbreakers more than anything. quality of products we used was fine and no fulfillment issues aside from customs. a pity! We were really keen on this!

July 27, 2015

Great concept, great integration - horrible fulfillment experiences. I placed three test orders (10 total shirts). The first order had major quality issues on all three shirts in the order. Someone reached out to me to ask about my experience, so I sent pictures of the poor quality prints and one defective shirt and he said it looked like there wasn't enough pre-treatment before the print and said they'd all be replaced. I never ended up getting replacements even after checking on the status and being told they'd look back into it. It's been months now. Anyway, I placed a second order after being told everything from the first would be corrected (customer service seemed good). I wanted to test out some different blends/treatments (50/50, powerwashed cotton, etc.) to see how they printed and to also see my designs in different sizes on different sized shirts to figure out exactly how I should create my print files for each size. This order had an item out of stock (after several days I find this out), so they asked if I wanted to split it. I did, so they split the order. Before they could print the items that were in stock, another item went out of stock, so it held up this part of the order as well. My first items arrived well over a week after I placed my order and the remainder of the order came several weeks after the order was placed. I was told all of these fulfillment issues were due to them moving to a bigger location and the supplier sending the shirts to the old location by mistake. After having put so much into my website and t-shirt designs, modifying a lot of shopify code, paying for apps, etc., I wanted this thing to work, so I figured their issues from the move should be over and their new, larger location should be able to store more inventory and put shirts out faster. I placed another order to see if maybe things were running smoothly now. I ordered four shirts. After 7 days, I got an "out of stock, do you wanna split your order?" email. I said to split and 1 of 4 shirts shipped. It's now been 15 days and I have one of the shirts. Two more were marked as shipped on 7/23, although they weren't given to Fed Ex until 7/25. My shipping address is little over an hour drive from where they ship this stuff. They mark is shipped 7/23 and expected delivery from Fed Ex = 7/28. The remaining shirt no longer says out of stock, but it's just sitting there on the order screen, yet to be fulfilled. Bottom line - unless you want to deal with EVERY ONE of your customers being extremely unhappy, don't waste your time with The Printful. Also, I've researched alternative drop ship DTG printers and they all pretty much have reviews full of complaints about fulfillment issues. Print Aura is at least up front about the process, saying that they place the order for the blank AFTER you send in the order to have a shirt printed. I'm sure they're all doing this and that's why it takes 7 days for them to tell you something is back-ordered. I'd much rather see a limited selection of styles than have to deal with these fulfillment issues. I still haven't gotten my first order replacements yet. The print quality since that order has been fine, but for that order, it looked like someone used a $30 printer to print out an iron on and then applied it in a hurry. If you run a DTG printing company and you can actually fulfill your orders in a reasonable time, please reach out to me!

Sept. 8, 2015

I've been using printful for the past 3 months with my webstore and they are absolutely amazing. The customer service is top notch, The quality of the product is perfect. The price for products may be a little high however if you want the best quality your going to have to pay for it. 1 Year after using Printful - I'm coming up on a year using this company and I have to say, I've been experiencing what people are saying. Slow turn around time, Low quality printing standards, and sky high printing prices. I would have say about 4-5 months ago I started experiencing these changes. My customers were complaining about defects in clothing products. Printful charges way to much to even make a profit. I would have to say printful is good for when you start your company to see if your products will sell. After that I would recommend finding other print shops if quality, price, and turn around time is your main concern.

April 29, 2014

Great concept, but pricing is extremely high and fulfillment is way too slow (if at all) to be a real player beyond a side show for brands. I would caution anyone to use this as a main source as a business. If you are an existing brand and want to make company shirts (for no profit) or something similar, this may work. Otherwise, just a good concept at the moment with no plans on reducing pricing with increased growth and volume (from their mouth). No Economies of Scale?

April 12, 2014

I gave this app two months... THE GOOD: The products themselves are indeed well built and customer service was very good. THE BAD: The two hurdles that made this product unfit for my store are the pricing and the configuration. The pricing is incredibly high and put me in a position of either charging such a high price sales suffered greatly or sell product nearly at cost. The configuration is tricky even with a vanilla environment, and positively maddening when using other apps that access product variants like customer pricing. At one point I had nearly 60 skus for one shirt when all variants and custom pricing discount variants were factored in. Arranging the relationship between synched and un-synced items made my head spin and with each and every detail being so important, it was frustrating to work so hard to get it right and still find errors due to the complexity of the process. THE VERDICT: If this print on demand concept were ever made intuitive to install and profitable it would be a Godsend. As it is, it is perhaps only suited for clientele that feel nearly $30 is a fair price for an Anvil shirt. The app is not bad per se, but think carefully if you think it is easy to use or an easy source of revenue.