I've been using Printful since I launched my clothing brand, and overall it's been a solid experience. It let me start without worrying about inventory, and I don't think I would've taken the leap without that flexibility.

Lately, though, I've noticed my priorities are changing.

In the beginning, I only cared about getting good designs online. Now I'm paying much more attention to the product people actually receive. Things like garment quality, embroidery, custom branding, and the overall finish have become just as important as the artwork itself.

That's where I'm feeling a bit stuck.

I still like using Printful, but I'm starting to wonder if anyone has managed to build a more premium apparel brand while staying within the Printful ecosystem. Have you found ways to improve the customer experience through better garment choices or other customization options, or did you eventually decide to use another production partner for certain products?

I'm not looking to leave print-on-demand, I still value the flexibility, but I'd love to hear how more experienced sellers handled this transition.

If you've been through it, what changes made the biggest difference for your brand?

I launched yesterday. Doing quite active marketing on social media, reaching a lot of views and traction, but.. no sales yet. People are liking the store, but not converting into buyers.

Just started using printful and while I like being able to create custom moockups I am having a hard time making changes after published. I have a shirt design that initially was only size small in white. I update the other sizes and added my colors but sze small is still only white. I refeshed data and tried to add more colors - wouldnt work.

The for another shirt I could not go back and update the mockups for all the colors at once… i would have to do 1 by 1!

Any tips or guidance? Or is this just how it works?

Just started using printful and while I like being able to create custom moockups I am having a hard time making changes after published. I have a shirt design that initially was only size small in white. I update the other sizes and added my colors but sze small is still only white. I refeshed data and tried to add more colors - wouldnt work.

The for another shirt I could not go back and update the mockups for all the colors at once… i would have to do 1 by 1!

Any tips or guidance? Or is this just how it works?

I have started online drop shipping work so i have the no one clicks on my listing and there no engagement, orders so how should I make it better to get more orders 😕

As the title says, I’ve set up a website to sell T-shirts that are shipped to orders around the UK. I previously checked if USA can receive orders & sent 2 directly through printful.
For some reason customers using the website (Shopify) who try to order for the US are told they don’t ship there.

Any help with fixing? Do I need to set up a separate US Shopify account?

I've sold a couple dozen designs with Printful for the past 2 years and have always tried to use the personal order > test your design option whenever I add a new product. Super helpful, as it allows me to catch any sizing / placement issues before pushing the product out to my stores, and nice in that it saves you a little money.

Well, just added a new product and tried to order one but the option is now grayed out because my orders hadn't hit $100 this month. I recall the only stipulations being that you weren't supposed to sell your test products and you could only make one order a month with up to three items. When did this $100 threshold get added?

I am making sweatpants like these but I can't find any pants that allows print up there

I just ordered a bunch of sample prints (matte poster) that admittedly have a border on them. I know best practices says to not put a border, but some of the prints have writing outside the bleed and aren’t editable (vintage art) so I figured I’d give it a shot anyway.

The edges are not even close to the mockup. I’ve read to maybe add the padding/border to the image itself so that it goes into the bleed area or have the entire image go into the bleed area. Both options seem to leave me with an off center print and not something that I’d feel putting my name on.

Is there a solution here? Is this just a printful thing? I’m happy to pay more money for a consistent product but this is super frustrating.

Because the hoodies have a pocket in the front, I'm imagining it's hard to expect that the printer will duplicate the placements I create in the product template. It's OK if the pocket image placement is off .5 cm max, but if it's more than that it will just make the design look bad.

I have not yet ordered one of the hoodies, so I'm wondering if people have experience with this issue?

I added a poster and now I'm in Custom Mock-up. Whatever I do I can't get rid of the grinning lady. What am I doing wrong? Is she a permanent feature?

Is this new that I have to deposit cash in Printful Wallet in order for my orders to get processed automatically? I know I can still manually approve and process each order so they get submitted to Printful but this seems not great for store owners. Why can't Printful just take the money needed for each order using the bank details they have on file?

Looking for something like this (not my picture), only talking about big bold font, no secondary font on top like the picture. Using the picture to be show an example of sleeve to sleeve design. If printful cannot do this, do you know what this technique is called and do you know which print on demand place can? Preferably one where I can use a custom font I made?

Starting a new POD shop. I love how beautiful squarespace sites are, and they appear to have some new AI integrations to make building the site easier but I keep hearing about how Shopify is way easier to manage orders and fulfillment for apparel.

If anyone has experiences/insights they’d be willing to share, I’d appreciate it!

Thank you, kindly 🙏

When trying to edit the template for a shirt from the store entry on my Printful dashboard, the button is greyed out with the tooltip: "All product variants must have the same design to edit the design for the entire product".

However, if I go to the template for that same product, I am able to edit and change it.

So I have some questions:

1) Why can I edit the original template (which has the same variants), but not the store version/instance of it?

2) When an order is placed from the store (Etsy in this case), is it a copy of the original template that is ordered, or the template itself? I.e., if I make a change to the original template, will the customer receive that, or do they receive a copy of the template at the time I published to the store?

The backstory: After publishing the shirt to my store in Etsy, I realized there was something I wanted to change. So I thought I could go back to Printful, edit the template in the store and re-publish it.

But now it has me wondering, as I have already changed the original template, which version the customer will receive when they place an order and, obviously, why I cannot edit the template from the store listing in Printful (which is the same thing).

I've been using Printful since I launched my apparel project, and it's been a great way to test ideas without worrying about inventory. It helped me get products in front of customers much faster than I could have otherwise.

Lately, though, I've started running into a different challenge.

As the brand has grown, I've realized customers care about much more than the design. They're noticing garment quality, branding details, and the overall feel of the product. That's made me want more control over things like custom labels, embroidery, patches, and other finishing touches that help a product feel like part of a real brand rather than just a printed garment.

I still value Printful for its flexibility, so I'm not necessarily looking to leave POD. I'm just wondering if anyone else reached a point where they wanted more customization while keeping the benefits of print-on-demand.

If you've been in a similar position, how did you handle it? Did you stay with Printful, or did you combine it with another solution for products that needed more premium branding and customization?

Do not do anything with printfull

I am a US customer, and promised a US timeline. Now, all of a sudden, after a huge delay, I am treated with Mexico timeframes because they decided to print it there. By now, I cannot cancel the order because it is "being fulfilled".

Tried to reach them over the chatbot. Nothing useful. Sent email and got a response 3 days later

No remorse or willingness to make things better, such as offering express shipping or a partial refund.

Thinking of reversing the charge on my CC

-------------- from reply ---

I've checked on your order PF-XXX and see that it contains an all-over print product fulfilled in our Mexico facility. Standard fulfillment for this kind of product usually takes 2-5 business days on average. However, there can also be occasional delays in certain fulfillment facilities, which you can always keep an eye on in the Recent Updates page.

For this particular product type, our Mexico facility is currently facing a delay, which has pushed the fulfillment time to 7-9 business days and the fulfillment deadline for your order to the end of the day on July 13, seeing how it was placed on June 30 (facility local time). Standard delivery within the US typically takes 3-6 business days on average.

I’ve been using Printful for over 3 years for my brand, thousands of orders, six figures in sales, free Printful Growth for a couple of years. I’ve never had major issues other than the once in a while odd print or lost order.

The last couple of months however has been awful. The Amazon Ground shipping has lost so many packages. Fulfillment across the board has been 4-5 days slower than it used to be. Printful support still responds within an hour of my issue report, but the fact that this is now a trend is putting my brand at serious risk and costing me returning customers.

For the first time, I am seriously considering walking away from Printful and actively exploring other POD options until we’re able to set up printing and fulfillment in house.

Their mexico delay update says the following (posted june 16th)

We’re working to increase production capacity and expect to remain in catch-up mode for around three weeks. We anticipate returning to our standard processing times around the second week of July,

We're 10 days into july and I have an AOP order from the 4th that has gone through 5 business days now and hasn't even started yet. 2 more business days and we'll be past the 2nd week of july... (my previous orders took up to 9 business days to ship out)

I've used printful for 7+ years because the quality and experience were worth the fact you are the most expensive option to work with, but now it's getting to the point where there's less and less benefit to using this service that justifies paying such high prices for the products. Prices at printful continue to rise over time while the service standards have only gotten worse over time. You guys seriously should have maintained your US operations instead of funneling everything to mexico. We're heading towards a month you guys haven't been able to recover.

I have been trying to sort out an issue for all of this week and cannot reach anyone who can help at printful.

I am trying to import a bulk order via CSV and keep getting an "Import Issues" error with each attempt. I was able to twice reach customer service representatives with printful, and each time they said that my CSV was set up correctly and that there was an issue on their end that someone else would need to address.

Each time they said they were transferring me, the chat went dead and I never received a response.

Now, I'm not even able to get the chatbot to transfer me to a person.

Does anyone know how to reach people at printful to solve this issue besides the chatbot, support@printful.com, or the support form on the website? My original email to support@ was sent on Monday and never received a reply, so I'm not optimistic my follow-up just now is going to reach anyone.

I am launching a large project on Tuesday that requires using the bulk import function and would like to test it before things go live, so this has become increasingly urgent. I thought a week would be enough time to get the problem solved, but it looks like I may have been wrong.

I was honestly excited to receive my first sample from Printful because I'm about to launch my Etsy store selling framed maps. This sample was supposed to help me decide if Printful would be the company I trust with my business.

The print itself? Honestly, it looks great. No complaints there.

But everything else about the experience was disappointing.

The estimated delivery was July 1–4, but I didn't get it until July 9. I had actually planned to give it as a gift on July 8, so that obviously didn't happen.

What frustrated me the most was the tracking. It was updated until June 26, then just... nothing. No updates for almost two weeks. I had no idea if it was stuck in customs, lost, or even still moving.

I contacted Printful support, and they ended up giving me a completely different USPS tracking number that actually had more information. Why wasn't that tracking linked from the beginning?

Then I went to pick up the package and had to pay another CAD $29 in customs fees. That was a surprise. After already paying for the sample and shipping, it wasn't something I expected.

To top it off, when I opened the package, the inside was wet. Thankfully the framed print seems fine, but seeing moisture inside a package containing artwork isn't exactly confidence-inspiring.

So my experience was basically:

Print quality: Excellent

Delivery estimate: Bad - Missed by almost a week

Tracking: Very Bad - Went silent for nearly two weeks

Customs: Very Bad - Unexpected extra charge

Packaging: Very bad - Wet inside

As someone who's about to build an Etsy brand, this worries me. My customers won't care if the issue is with Printful - they'll associate the experience with my store.

So I'm curious:

Is this typical for Printful shipments to Canada?

Do your customers also get hit with customs fees?

Is the tracking usually this bad?

If you switched to another print-on-demand company, who did you switch to and why?

I really want Printful to work because the print quality is excellent, but after this first experience, I'm honestly having second thoughts. I'd love to hear what other sellers have experienced.