Printify used to advertise itself as the “safest” Print on Demand provider you could trust with orders and fulfillment.
Those days are long gone.
Custom Cat and other manufacturers have bailed from the service.
District Photo purchased a competitor, TeeLaunch, which posted messages telling sellers not to use Printify but instead to use TeeLaunch for fulfillment of District Photo’s products to get faster and better service.
Printify then had to “merge” with Printful and now it is no longer an independent company. Unfortunately, even with the merger the service continues to get worse.
Printify decided to shift delivery where possible to OnTrac, a cut-rate service with a 1 star review resulting in hundreds of complaining seller posts. The cost savings by using OnTrac instead of USPS – pocketed by Printify. No cost savings passed along to sellers – just customer support headaches dealing with angry customers.
As I write this Printify’s Amazon integration broke two weeks ago, was fixed, and has broken again and is now on day 5 – yes and incredible 5 days and counting of being completely broken.
Products cannot be created on Amazon using Printify. Orders are not being received. Tracking is not being sent. It’s a clusterfuck of magnitude 10.
If that wasn’t enough, Printify started saying it was going to delete products – 3 days ago (WTF) without explanation, with a fake link to “learn more” about what is happening.
EVEN WORSE – IF YOU USED PRINTIFY TO INTEGRATE WITH A MARKETPLACE OR WEBSITE PRINTIFY WILL ALSO REMOVE YOUR PRODUCT FROM YOUR WEBSITE OR MARKETPLACE.
Frankly, it could be criminal trespass on your website and interference with your Etsy, eBay, Amazon contract.
This is what you need to do to protect yourself:
1. Whenever possible do not use Printify’s product creation tool. Instead, create designs yourself in Photoshop, graphic tool of your preference, AI, whatever, and then upload your completed design to Printify.
2. If you want to preserve product mockups created on Printify always save them to your computer or backup storage device.
3. Whenever possible do not use Printify’s integration tool to create products on websites or marketplaces. Fact is for single version products it will be just as fast for you to create the listing directly on the marketplace or your website. Maybe even faster. This is because Printify’s integration tool is garbage and savvy sellers already have to edit and modify every listing anyway that Printify creates – if anything, so it will be compliant with marketplace terms and have the SEO you want.
For multiple version products, such as tshirts with many colors and sizes, Printify’s integration tools can provide considerable time savings instead of downloading every mockup to your computer and then uploading to your sales channel. That’s something for you to decide. It’s time / risk tradeoff.
4. This means for orders not using an integration tool you will need to import each order. This can be fast enough within Printify, but ultimately not hands-off and automated which defeats a major benefit of POD and which can be critical as your order volume increases.
5. For imported orders, to be safe, do not click Printify’s box asking if future orders are to be imported. I don’t think these products are actually synced (you’re just telling Printify to automatically import orders with that SKU) and removal from Printify would not also remove the paroduct marketplace, but I’m not sure about that.
6. Consider opening accounts with manufacturers directly. It is handy to have all your orders in one place with Printify, but many manufacturers are also connected with Order Desk which you can use instead as a command center to review your orders.
7. If you’re really concerned I believe you can break the integration by changing the SKU in Printify and/or the marketplace where possible. Creating SKU mismatches may prevent Printify from being able to delete a product elsewhere.
Link to this page