Karl Drinkwater review for SPOD ‑ Print‑on‑Demand

Jan. 14, 2024

I have used Spreadshirt in the past. Generally very happy with them. I thought I'd try their Shopify app. Ouch. Setting up shipping is ridiculously complex! You have to manually copy and paste hundreds of prices to cover all the rates, options, order totals etc for all the countries - maybe setting up to a thousand options to cover global distribution. And also every time the prices change, redo them all manually. That is beyond belief! "Keep it simple with SPOD" is their tag: I almost feel like this is an April Fool's joke when I see that comment. All the pricing for shipping should be maintained by SPOD as part of the app/Shopify integration, not foisted on users. I also use Bookvault and they do it automatically - I didn't have to do anything except connect the app to Shopify. All the shipping is maintained, calculated and updated by Bookvault, as it should be. It is always up to date. They don't expect users to create hundreds of options (and continually update them). Really, SPOD needs to set the app up properly, because this is unwieldy, over-complex, and shifting a task onto every Shopify-SPOD user rather than just doing it once centrally. I'm surprised this doesn't get mentioned more. Oh, also - when settign up you have to choose EU printing or US. You can't have both, and orders don't ship from the nearest place to the customer - only from the one you pick at the start. So global coverage means high shipping prices for half your customers. Again, they could have done it properly like BookVault (it prints in US for US customers and nearby, UK for UK and Europe - all done automatically). I'll uninstall SPOD and close my account, this has been a waste of time.