Dear Printify: Create "Printify Provider Select"
Dear Printify,
US-based seller here. I sell Bella+Canvas 3001 t-shirts both domestically and internationally. I'm not so much wanting to "rant" than to offer a critique of your Printify Choice and Global Fulfillment programs, and suggest for a potentially better approach.
I have tried Printify Choice (PC) and found it to be less than ideal, because I have no real control over which provider will get the order. They might be a 9.5 or more like a 6.9, there's no telling. The prospect of having my products fulfilled by a 6.9 or 7.1 rated provider is very unappealing to me.
Global Fulfillment (GF) is a step in the right direction, sort of. It handles orders domestically within the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the EU - which is where the majority of my customer live. Sadly, GF's current selection of B+C 3001 shirt colors is very disappointing. Across all my products I currently use 30 B+C colors, but only 7 of them are available via GF. Having only 20 colors available via GF is very limiting, because I use lots of very vibrant colors for specific listings. Yet several existing non-US providers actually do offer nearly all of the colors I use. ~sigh~
What might be better - and maybe this is already your ultimate goal - would be a program where the seller can pick multiple providers around the world to fulfill their products, based on their individual needs.
So... Please consider setting up a way where sellers can select their own collection of specific providers around the world to fulfill their orders. For now I'll call this concept Printify Provider Select (PPS).
PPS may theoretically let me select any number of providers across the planet, but for my purposes I would only need to select 5 - one for each of the above named markets, based on whatever shirt colors they might regularly offer.
Thus in my case, I could select SwiftPOD or Stylus for the US, Shirt Monkey or T-Shirt and Sons for the UK, OPT OnDemand for the EU, The Print Bar for Australia, and Print Geek for Canada. This would yield me a team of providers with ratings of ~8.5 or better, and my nearly all my customers would get domestic shipping rates... except (for now) my Japan and Korea customers 🫤
PPS would be a truly excellent if not perfect solution. Based on my choices above, I would have to switch out or drop 3 or 4 shirt colors to get my products to match up across all 5 of my selected providers. That would be much better than having to drop 23.
Anyway, I just wanted to share this idea with you. I think the key here is to either let the Seller select their GF providers, or allow them to block providers they don't want to process their orders for whatever reason.
Thanks for reading... TBB