Ella's Canvas review for Printify: Print on Demand

April 28, 2020

Apr. 2020 (updated review) 2 STARS Printify needs more USA production partners. When something goes wrong, there are essentially 3 partners in the USA total to juggle your order, or just have it cancelled after waiting almost a month. I can't run a growing business like this. Use printify if you are a startup and want cheaper pricing and a hit and miss on quality. If you have more than a few orders per day, you may have to go through the 3rd party nightmare printify has become, being told day after day, week after week, your tee is going to be made, only to have it even more late or cancelled. I have proven to printify how I can get any color within a day or so for any order. Yet their production partners can't get it for weeks!? If printify adds 5 to 10 more production partners in the USA, I'll come back. Otherwise I feel forced, after sending them thousands of orders per month, to find another solution as I am finding 95% of my negative reviews come from PRINTIFY orders vs the orders I do locally with the plentiful printing companies for both DTG and SCREEN. PRINTIFY knows what they need to do, I've given them a year of thousands of orders per month, and although COVID-19 hasn't helped, it makes it 100 times worse as I realized they don't have enough production partners to help offset issues. Their software is improving, but i can't tell you how many times I've told them their support ticket system is the worse by far. They have amazing support team, but the way it's setup is very counter intuitive, disconnected from any flow to the orders involved. PROS Affordable. Cool setup. Awesome backup process if one partners fails your order, another can cover (if it exists). Awesome staff. Forward thinking CEO and company. CONS Affordable (quality issues). Backup process (literally your business is in the hands of two large-ish companies and one smaller one, so if they fail, you are doomed). Awesome staff (who will just give you the same answer again and again). Ticket system is very frustrating as it's not connected to orders, you can't search tickets (unless you are tech savvy and know how to search your own emails), orders are not linked to tickets, but it's all copy and paste manual work. Jan. 2020. (updated review) 3 STARS Printify is pushing for being the best. I appreciate their efforts. Biggest problem is knowing if your order will actually be fulfilled on whatever colors the POD vendors run out of. There is NO WAY so far to tell what will be out of stock. PRINTIFY knows what they need to fix, we'll see how they do this year. Printify is worth your time and money, but do not depend on them if you have higher numbers of orders and they end up telling you their print partner ran out of stock and CANCELLED (did you read that? Cancelled) your orders after waiting for two entire weeks. Very unprofessional, must be changed. Printify is the best POD 3rd party software out there for the price. Printful is better, but you'll spend thousands more with them. I'm using a mix of both now, per Printify not being able to fix the issues of stock shortages and orders sometimes an entire MONTH with no update, status, or anything, until we get an angry customer. POD SHOUD be auto fulfilment, but so far, I'm spending more time than needed to figure out which orders Printify and their production partners just simply put off for good. ------------------------------------------------- Oct. 28 2019 (updated review) See my initial hopeful, thorough reviews below this one. Printify uses production partners and shows an average production time for each production partner. This production time is not accurate. Sometimes off by weeks! We have seen maybe 85% of our orders shipped within 7 days or less. But good luck with the other 15%. If we had not been spending (wasting is a better word) so much time reaching out to PRINTIFY through their very useless ticketing system (see review below) who then reaches out to the printing partner, again and again, we would have not even known why in the world, some orders were 20 to 24 days late and counting! We got the same answer again and again from printify staff. Stock shortage. Will reach out to partner. I did tests myself and found the same colors were in stock, readily available and we had it shipped to us and out to customers within 3 business days, whereas we are still waiting for a week and a half and nothing has moved on hundreds of our orders - suggesting other issues outside stock shortage. The holiday is here already, and now Printify is refusing to refund us for these super late orders, they promised us their printing production partner would have out in time for the holiday. Unprofessional. Damage control is no fun. The brand image hurt. Customers disappointed and infuriated. I hope this will get PRINTIFY's attention. If they resolve these orders with full refunds, I'll remove this review and keep it removed unless PRINTIFY continues to show they are unwilling to help us for bringing thousands of monthly orders through their app. when they promise something and their printing partner fails us repeatedly. ------------------------------------------------- Oct. 2019. (updated review) With a few thousands of orders now pushed through PRINTIFY app, I can now see where they shine and fail. I write this so others know what to expect and not expect and beware of as well as enjoy. I'm downgrading my review from a 5 star down to a 3 star, hopefully, to raise it up again when some key issues are fixed ASAP, if not I'll downgrade in a few months to a 2 star - as these issues can literally break your brand reputation and customer trust. I hope to update this review as I go forward to give PRINTIFY and their PARTNERS a chance to wow us. PROS: - CUSTOMER SERVICES: Printify staff isn't in some remote garage. They are a legit company, who cares about your experience using their platform and production partners. - TICKET SYSTEM: Also a HUGE CON, but the pro side of their ticket system is it is more than just a couple of people - and they do respond to every issue. - UI (user interface): Although it is lacking in functionality, their interface is not clunky or difficult, but fluidly designed (this coming from a UI designer for a decade himself) - POTENTIAL FULFILMENT TIME: This is huge for us, and what attracted us to PRINTIFY amongst other things. This also has a HUGE CON i explain below until PRINTIFY enahnces their app. - POST PRODUCTION ISSUES They have a smooth "submit issue" link you can use, setup beautifully for any post shipmpent and production issue. This is awesome, but boy oh boy do they need to tie it to the details page of an order ID. CONS: - LOCATION & TIMEZONE: Although staffed well, it could be a con that the company is in Europe. Time zone conflicts are an issue. This can also be a potential PRO, in that you almost have a 24 hour business - but you have to time things right and it looks like they have staff to cover the off hours you are awake and they are asleep (depending on where you live & where print partner is located, I'm in Utah, USA). - TICKET SYSTEM: This is a huge con. When you have an issue with an order, you have NO WAY OF KNOWING what is going on with your order and the POD parter making it, as there is no notes tied to any order details. You have to manually go find whoever responded to you, (there is absolutely no search function with tickets, a HUGE TIME WASTER). We have had multiple orders now, go for over 20 freaking (yes, I said freaking) days, without a single reason as to why, only to find out on some orders, after another 4 days passes, that there was a stock issue???? PRINTIFY must change their ticket system to tie with orders, otherwise it's just a huge waste of time for customers, POD partners, and esp. printify, as numerous tickets have to be submitted so as to not lose time trying to find the last response, by manually scrolling and guessing which rep answered you. - ORDER ISSUES: To tie in with the ticket system issues, if you have an issue with a live order (not shipped yet), and even if that issues is resolved and the order finally shipped, there is no notes on the order details, and the tracking info is never updated to the order details page, so the only way to figure out what happened to that order and get tracking is to search your email, to find that order and tracking, as good luck searching for tickets, it's impossible, you have scroll and guess who it was that resolved the issue. - STOCK ISSUES There is absolutely NO WAY to know if the colors available with some POD partners are in stock or not. You will find out mind you, but this will be 20+ days after the order was submitted, with an update you had to ask for, that something was out of stock. - REPORTS and STATS Printify has Zero information with a paid subscription to let us know how we are doing. We have no idea using PRINTIFY: 1. How many tees we have sold? 2. Avg. ship time with each POD partner? 3. Our avg. cost per unit for each POD partner? 4. Actual total costs, showing both shipping and POD costs? 5. stats for the day, week, month, previous 90 days? 6. actual savings we are getting for the volume we are brining. They talk about it on their site, but I have no idea at the end of the day or month, what I'm spending and discounts or savings I'm receiving through using PRINTIFY and pushing my business through their app. SUMMARY: I love what I'm seeing with PRINTIFY. I love the innovative feel I've gotten as I've tried to figure out how PRINTIFY company works in our behalf. They have a great staff, team, and seem to be pushing for new updates quickly (a must or they will lose our business not because we leave, but because their system is not helping with the most important, shouldn't be this hard, order issues). I'd give them a 2 star at this point, just for the sake of the headaches of their ticket system and having ZERO updates by them on orders that have sat for 24 days, when I've asked for updates a few times on those orders. Printify is a middle man, that does well, but to have to wait 20+ days on some orders without updates, when a simple phone call to the POD partner could have solved it, screams for PRINTIFY to improve their ticket system so we can communicate, see, and easily access all notes on the order details page, rather than the nightmare it is right now. IMPROVEMENT SUGGESTIONS: - PRINTIFY must update their ticket system so that it integrates smoothly with the order details page. Connect all notes to the details page. - PRINTIFY needs to have a way for customers to communicate with the POD partners, through the order details notes area. - PRINTIFY must kill this difficult manual scrolling and guessing game with their ticket system, to try and find what a rep said about some orders, because the notes are nowhere on the order details page itself, but lost somewhere in the completely separate support ticket chat / systems. - PRINTIFY must integrate a stock update functionality. You have no clue if the colors you have are in stock. PRINTFUL has a way to choose a backup solution where stock is low, and they actually let you know what's out of stock, discontinued, etc. - REPORTING We need to see what's going on, how many sales with each POD, total costs of shipping (nowhere does it show you this that I can find) and reporting on fulfilment time averages, number of tees sold, colors, etc. Make me believe I need PRINTIFY as a middle man, by providing me the data that will make me never leave PRINTIFY for. Why am I paying a monthly fee and who knows what other fees, for ZERO stats, data, and insights to what we are bringing through PRITNIFY app. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sept 2019. 4 STARS I'm coming at Printify after years of using other apps. There is a reason I'm switching to Printify, and will update my review as time goes by. Printify's UI (user interface) is hands down super fluid, user-friendly, and amazing compared to the others I've used. I absolutely am finding a safe place with their app, coming from the failed experiences of other apps, costing our graphic apparel business thousands and potential tens of thousands of lost customers due to inconsistency, bugs, software issues, and lack of quality control and ownership of problems. So far so good. Choose your partner wisely on this app, and you will be happy. will update in a month or so. But as of yet, this app and company has done it right, and our business looks and flows more smoothly since transitioning over to Printify from other POD apps.