Printful: Print on Demand

We are updating our review to 1-star and are convinced that the majority of the reviews here are about the app and have not actually sold anything. Nearly every order has had a mistake. Printful always agrees to fix their mistakes but taking the time to get this right sucks. They don't calibrate printers which is basic operation so consistency problems on the easiest jobs. There is no quality control as a matter of fact it is obvious a person does not even look at the result or the product would not ship. We have made an embarrassing mistake and are removing this ''partner'' and getting back to 100% quality products from Idea Chíc.

I'm no longer doing business with Printful because of the way they treat customers who wear extended sizes. It shouldn't take over two weeks to receive a t-shirt order if you wear a 2x. Either offer extended sizes in the same way you offer all sizes, or skip them altogether. Don't make the false promise that you're inclusive when the reality is you have an outdated bias that only adds to body shaming and treating plus sizes as "less-than". It's insulting to my customers that their size is not even kept in stock and has to be special ordered.

They met their print timeline, but then chose to ship DHL to USPS. The item got lost between DHL and USPS for a week, and missed the event the t-shirts were needed for. When contacted, and requested that they not use DHL but ship with USPS directly and save a full week of go-between, they told me it was my fault. DHL isn't a shipping service I offer in Shopify, or a shipping service I had selected with them, and they had never use DHL to ship prior. If they can't figure out a way to not repeat a poor experience, and just point fingers, I'm not sending business their way.

So, print and quality was always great. And if you want to wait 2 weeks for your mail to arrive, after if was sent, then you should be fine.

Worst support ever. Nobody can help you out, they just keep sending video tutorials. But nobody, after 5 attempts, can help you install everything properly. We finally managed to have it working, and now we found out they have the worst delivery system ever. Items don´t arrive on time or directly just don´t arrive. And if you try and contact them for shipping issues they just want your clients to find out what has happened, instead of them taking care of the problem. Incredible. Don´t waste your time, very unprofessional. Not what we expected.

WHAT A HASSLE!!! WOULD NEVER EVER RECOMMEND THIS. EVER.
Printful is constantly running out of variants of products that I have in my store, has very pricey products AND shipping, and also REFUSED TO PRINT MY PRODUCTS frequently over the DUMBEST possible copyright infringement fears when there is clear parody and other, similar products exist all over the market. As examples, they are too afraid to print the Facebook logo and spoof parody cartoon that looks similar to Dora the Explorer. On top of all that, fulfillment is slow. Printful has decent quality printing, but, no thanks, it's not worth the COST. I am DONE. Good riddance! Save your time, find another manufacturer.

Fraudulent orders creation machine. Instal and delete as app full of bugs and synchronisation problem and most important started created face orders just copy old our orders and imported like new.

Update: Still 1 star review. Printful has sent a client a product from another store. This made my brand look extremely unprofessional especially since that brand had warehouse items of way lower quality. They are not even bothering to reply and solve this issue.

Been using printful for 3 years. I think it is safe to say that I have issues with 50% of my orders. They just shipped the wrong product to a client from warehousing, and more than half the shipments either get lost or are bounced back. They lack better and more reliable shipping options - especially internationally. Shipping internationally usually only has 1 tracking option and for some reason they always charge huge duties on arrival - way over ticket price. This is a real bummer since they have a state of the art facility which i've been to personally and I am sad to be forced to leave them since I can't operate a reliable company with an irresponsible supplier like Printful.

Printed a design for us for two years, then decided to say it violated acceptable use. Refused to refund the digitisation fee they had accepted to embroider it. Patronising customer service, particularly Ismails

UPDATE 2: Back to 1 star. I am very shocked with how the customer support handles problems.

UPDATE, bumping my 1 star to 2: The short of it is Printful might be totally fine for you if you just want to slap some designs on t-shirts and then sell them on Etsy without any regard for quality. But if you want to start a brand and are concerned about quality, this probably isn't for you. The main reasons for this are: poor customer support, a painful mockup editor experience, and a lack of variety in the t-shirt options (not enough heavy cotton a la streetwear, too many soft fitted tees that warp/stretch/don't last).

The editor in particular is rough. Using it is a painfully haphazard experience. For example, if you have different versions of the same design (i.e. the same design in white (for dark shirts) and the same design in black (for light shirts)), you have to manually re size and position them separately. The grid is useless for getting the placement identical between these two designs, so you wind up having to move things just a touch, save, check the mock up, then go back and adjust again if needed. Either that or you can settle for your customer clicking between product images and noticing that one design is slightly higher than the other. A small thing to notice, but it makes a world of difference in presenting your brand in a professional way. A good brand should have consistency and avoid simple mistakes like that. And then when it comes to resizing the image, you have to drag the corner of the design while watching the DPI go up or down. Thing is, it doesn't go up or down by 1 DPI at a time. If you have one design perfectly placed and sized at 377 DPI and now you're trying to match another design identically, the DPI will constantly jump between 373 and 378. Again, resulting in a difference that is super tiny, but makes a huge difference in your brand image and consistency across product variants. Other limitations of the editor include not being able to edit the design on the mockup that you will actually use. Let's say you want your mockups to be flat product shots. You'll still have to edit the shirt on a doofy looking model. This again results in too much work between editing and understanding how your final product will look. If you want to get artsy and do a black design on a black shirt, your mockup will be a plain black shirt--no design in sight. Even in other cases (not pure black ink on black fabric), large areas of black in a design will be replaced with the fabric of the shirt. The problem is, that's not how the actual product will look. The black will be printed (that's the beauty of DTG, no limitations on screens like screenprinting), but that means what your customer sees on the mockup vs what they will actually receive after purchase look totally different.

I'm hoping for improvements in the future. If I'm so frustrated, why do I continue to use it? Because it does the bare minimum for now. For now is the key there. Right now I'm using Printful as a foundation for building my brand with limited capital, but if my brand grows to a point where I can leave printful OR if competition springs up that can address these issues, I currently don't see many compelling reasons to continue using it.

Review #2
I have orders that have been waiting way past the fulfillment days more than 28 days. Instead of making sure my orders will be processed in a timely manner all they do is send a generic message. They have not been properly marking my products as shipped. Leaving customers wondering why they haven’t received a tracking number. I have my account automated so they can properly process my orders which they have been doing a poor job.

Review #1
The 'quality control' feature must be the biggest scam feature that Printful has. I don't think caring humans even check the products. I have contacted them multiple times about embroidery orders such as snapbacks being mailed completely damaged. Their machines do not seem to handle simple jobs, they are shipped with unreadable text. I have custom orders that have been shipped twice in terrible quality. It's an embarrassment when a customer has to receive damaged merchandise twice.