Hey everyone! It’s Noni from Printful.
We've dealt with a lot of challenges these past months together, and we want to keep
you updated on everything we are doing, starting from our expansion plans going into action,
removing the option for customers to opt-out of fulfillment centers, new volume discounts
and customer support updates.
So today we sat down with Davis, Nora and Diana to get the latest news on everything
Printful related.
SCALING UP
So Printful is scaling up right now because we're seeing a massive surge in demand in
recent months due to the pandemic.
A lot of people have become unemployed or underemployed.
And on top of that they're confined to their homes and are looking to make money online.
So Printful is seeing a massive surge, something we have never seen in our history.
So the things we've done so far, we’ve hired massively across the board.
All our locations, we hired more people.
We reached a new milestone - Printful is now more than a thousand people strong worldwide.
And we also announced new facilities - Canada, recently we started working in Spain, we also
partnered in Australia.
All our facilities received new equipment.
It's largely being delivered by now and installed and now the focus is on actually training
those people to operate all that new equipment.
Printful is a global company by now.
We have been operating in Europe and now announced plans to expand elsewhere internationally.
In order to do that we also translated our website in multiple languages.
So far printful is available in English, Spanish and Japanese, recently we added French, and
we have plans to add German.
So all these languages are very important so you can sell internationally.
We localize product descriptions and are doing a bunch of other stuff to help you sell internationally.
FULFILLMENT TIME IMPROVEMENTS
So all the work we've done so far in these months have given us some results.
We are pretty much back to normal across all product categories in Europe and have slowly
begun to reenable the product categories in North America.
We expect all other product categories to largely be back to normal and re-enable for
all functionality by mid-august, unless some crazy surge happens again.
PRINTFUL IN CANADA
We are opening a fulfillment center, it's gonna be in Mississauga which is just outside
of Toronto.
As a Canadian, I am personally super excited about this because we're gonna make the principal
experience a lot better for Canadian customers, which is a huge segment for us.
So our goal is that we want to be operational by the fall.
We're starting out by adding DTG and some embroidery products but soon after we hope
to add posters and mugs and our warehousing and fulfillment service.
What it means for our Canadian customers is that you're gonna have local fulfillment for
products that are available in Canada.
It also means faster shipping.
So we estimate it'll take about two days for orders to ship within Ontario and four days
to most other provinces.
And that also means no import duties or taxes because it's all fulfilled locally within
Canada.
We launched the Canadian dollar as well as part of our localization effort for customers
in Canada.
What that means now is you can pay Printful for your Canadian orders in the Canadian dollar.
So if you also charge your customers on your storefront in the Canadian dollar, then you're
not losing out on exchange fees.
PRINTFUL IN SPAIN
We've been working on our second European facility in Barcelona for a while now and
are so excited that it's finally open.
This facility will help us with your orders going to countries like Portugal, Italy, France,
and other European countries.
Right now we're actively investing in equipment and are offering warehousing services there
as well, so you can store your non-Printful products.
PRINTFUL IN AUSTRALIA
And that's not it!
We also have two partner facilities in Australia now!
One in Brisbane will help with your DTG orders and one in Victoria will help with non apparel
orders.
We're starting off with a selection of products, but are working really hard to expand our
catalog there.
You can now offer framed posters and canvases to your customers in Australia.
We couldn’t ship those to Australia before because of different laws but now we can.
Fulfilling locally in Australia means that we will have to reevaluate our product prices
there.
Labor and other costs are more expensive in Australia.
This means that our products fulfilled there will be more expensive also.
However, you will get faster fulfillment and shipping for your customers.
FULFILLMENT CENTER OPT-OUT REMOVAL
Recently we announced that we are removing the option for customers to opt-out or in
specific fulfillment centers.
The main reason why we're doing this and why we're doing this now is because we are opening
a lot of new fulfillment centers around the world and partnering with new fulfillment
centers, and it's just getting really hard to maintain that order routing system and
to make sure it's working efficiently while factoring in customer choice.
So how our order routing system works now, is that when we choose where to route an order,
when the algorithm rather chooses where to route an order, it takes into account the
end address for the order shipping to, as well as product availability, efficiency,
where will be fulfilled the fastest, among other factors.
So what we want at the end of the day is to give you and your end customers the best experience
possible.
So the vast majority of the time an order will be fulfilled in the same region where
it's gonna be shipping to.
So if you have a customer that ordered a t-shirt and they're ordering within the US, then chances
are we're gonna fulfill that order in the US as well.
There will be some edge cases where that doesn't happen.
So for example, you have a customer and the US that places an order for a product, but
it's only available in Europe.
Well, we don't really have a choice there, we have to fulfill that in Europe.
But the vast majority of the time it will be fulfilled in the same region as the order
will ship to.
A couple of other things to keep in mind is that shipping prices won't change.
If you see on our website, shipping costs for a t-shirt to the US costs $3.99.
It costs $3.99 whether it's fulfilled in the US or elsewhere, so that's not gonna change.
VAT as well.
I know some customers are concerned with taxes, but Printful only charges VAT on orders that
we fulfill in Europe that get shipped to Europe.
So if you have a US order that’s being fulfilled in Europe, that's not gonna be charged VAT.
As we continue to grow globally we can't really guarantee “made in the USA” or “fulfilled
in the USA” anymore, because we have all these new fulfillment centers and it's not
just being fulfilled in the US.
So if that is a really big part of your store of your brand then now might be a good time
to reevaluate that and to change up your messaging.
MONTHLY DISCOUNTS
It's been a tough couple of months, so we wanted to reward our customers with a new
discount program.
It's called Monthly Discounts, which means - each month, if you sell more, you get a
bigger discount.
On the 1st of every month, we calculate each customer's accumulated sales and see which
tier you belong to.
Once you get a monthly discount it will be valid for all of your orders in the next month.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT UPDATE
More than 50 new team members have joined our customer support team since the start
of Covid-19, and we're actively hiring more.
Unfortunately, Covid-19 prevented us from growing the team as quickly as we wanted but
we're now making up for that.
Our customer support team balances a lot of customer channels, as well as behind-the-scenes
processes.
You might have experienced slower responses as we've downscaled response times and channels.
That's because we want to focus on the channels the majority of our customers prefer, and
where we could help more effectively.
For us, that's email and livechat.
While it may take a little longer to hear back from us, our team never ignores emails,
and will always get back to you.
We also recommend staying up-to-date with Printful’s Covid-19 updates and estimates
because it’s the same base information that our support team uses to help customers.
Those updates and estimates are always current.
Stellar customer support means so much to us and is one of our top goals at Printful.
We’re working on getting back to it and we’re really grateful to all of our customers
for working with us during this time.
We want every single customer to feel like we have their backs so that they can focus
on running their shop.
We’re hard at work scaling up support to be faster and more helpful!
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