It is with a heavy heart that I must announce I am deleting and uninstalling the print-on-demand platform Printful and all connected plugins from my website in order to reset and start over. All the products I had listed on my site are no longer available until I can reconnect and upload them with a fresh start with a new print-on-demand company. The Print on Demand services of Printful have revealed themselves to be an absolute fraud. The plugin does not work, and customer support is a joke. I am unable to sync or create new products.
The Printful integration plugin that works with the WooCommerce integration with WordPress suddenly stopped working, and there is no fix. The company blamed my hosting company; when that was found not to be the issue, they then blamed the WooCommerce platform. When WooCommerce was contacted, they referred me back to the third party, Printful. Then Printful claimed that the latest WordPress update was causing the problem. WordPress also confirmed that the problem is with the third party, Printful. The only solution Printful offered was to downgrade my versions of WordPress and WooCommerce—not just to the previous version, but a year’s worth of updates. I did this, and it still did not fix the problem.
After hours of searching the web for answers, I came across the same information repeatedly, with not one solution to the problem. This issue appears to be very common and has been ongoing for a couple of years now. I was devastated to discover that even uninstalling and starting over did not solve the problem.
So I have been left with no choice but to delete, uninstall, and start over. I have 3 and a half months of time invested, and money invested in the server and the design software I use. Over 300 hours of my time, gone with the click of a mouse.
When I researched print-on-demand solutions before signing up, Printful was near the top of the list. The concerns I was looking for had more to do with my intellectual property rights and the products available. I never thought to research problems in community threads about problems—it never occurred to me.
It still makes no sense that an overseas privately held company with an estimated value of $1 billion, which shares office space in a Deka Bank Building with Amazon EU, can have a constant problem with technology. Considering the WooCommerce platform is used by one-fifth of the world’s e-commerce websites, you would think they would spend some of that billion dollars to keep the integration updated.
It’s no use crying over spilled milk. It’s better I find out now than a year from now when the site is established. I am going to look at this as another lesson learned the hard way. As I said in my very first blog entry, this is organized chaos. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I am smart enough to figure it out and determined to overcome any challenges that will and have come up during this process of building my own e-commerce website to sell my artwork and to distribute my writing.
I hope you are enjoying this adventure of mine and that you stay with me. In this world full of so many unknowns, I can’t wait to see what is going to evolve from all of this.
Ok, back to work,
Iain Smillie, The Haus Of Legends
