Complaints about Merchize

I’m starting a print-on-demand merch business

I’ve previously used #Printful, which has a brilliant and easy user experience. But they don’t have some products I’m interested in designing, specifically hooded blankets (see Exhibit A). My kids walk around the house dragging blankets around so this product just makes sense.

After finding a bunch of vendors that sold hooded blankets, I settled on Vietnam & US-based Merchize due to product selection, shipping times, prices, and most importantly integration with WooCommerce. The prices are the most important factor, followed by shipping times. Merchize fulfills hooded blankets for $29 while other vendors (not based out of China¹) charge $35-50 plus shipping.

WooCommerce integration is my #1 requirement – and Merchize sucks at it

WooCommerce integration is a deciding factor for me because I work exclusively with WordPress and I can do almost anything I want in WP and with WooCommerce. And this “integration” is where Merchize is making me think really hard about whether they are worth the effort or not.

Their sync with WooCommerce is limited, to put it kindly. And their entire backend interface is frustrating and poorly conceived.

If I – someone who is a geek, a web dev, and has prior experience with POD integration in WooCommerce – finds their system frustrating, I wonder how many less tech-y customers they lost because their system was too hard to navigate. To me it’s obvious that their system is made by developers with barely any lip service to the user experience (UX). And they are losing money due to this, despite excellent print quality and better shipping times than Chinese vendors.

Note: the rest of this post is specific and to the point, otherwise this post will take hours to write and I won't get anything else done today.

I just tested syncing new products to WooCommerce as they said that proper photo sync was added – but it works the same as before. And possibly worse.

Regular products²

Regular products do not sync with any photos at all, like before; this is expected behavior. But while it included product sizes as attributes, it also did not create any variations for the product sizes, nor did it sync prices for each variation.

The only things that synced were the product name and description. And I learned that their WYSIWYG editor adds a shit-ton of needless html & styling so it’s better to leave the description blank and add it in WordPress.

So when creating a ‘regular’ product, you make the product in Merchize, sync it to Woo, and then you have to

1. Create variations from product attributes
2. Add prices to all products
3. Create mockups using antiquated Photoshop files that are a pain to work with
4. Add categories
5. Add tags

For comparison, Printful does 1, 2, and 3 as part of their WooCommerce integration and thus saves a LOT of time. I’ll have to factor in the cost of hiring someone to make mockups into the product cost because making mockups is time-consuming af.

Campaigns³

I made a single product in the Campaign and it was an improvement over the Regular product: in addition to the product name & description, it synced synced 4 variations (S,M/L/XL) with photos AND prices. This would be a win, except for the following issues:

1. There were 8 sizes; it only synced half of them so I still had to make more variations and add prices manually.
2. It made mockups for the 4 products it synced, which is cool, but they look the same so what’s the point?
3. It did not sync a photo for the main product image, which is what appears in the store to customers (see Exhibit B). Saving 4 identical variation photos is pointless; variation photos are optional and only make sense to show different colors/styles. The product image is REQUIRED so syncing at least one to the product image field is necessary.
4. I still had to add categories & tags, but at least I saved time on making product photos.

There’s a 5th issue but it deserves it’s own section:

The big problem with Merchize Campaign products

When syncing Campaign products, they include variations for Product & Color:

It seems innocuous but on the product page customers are required to pick the product, the color, and the size before they can add the product to their cart.

Even though product only has 1 option.

Even though color only has 1 option.

Their “integration” is adding friction to the customer’s experience. And this will reduce conversion rates, resulting in lower revenues.

Unchecking the two boxes under the attributes will remove them from the live product page but Merchize support has not been able to tell me if doing this will result in fulfillment problems.⁴

The final ignominy

When Merchize products are synced to WooCommerce, they are PUBLISHED AND LIVE ON THE SITE.

This means new products with no photos and no pricing are visible to customers so you have to quickly unpublish them to avoid making your store look bad. You’d think that syncing products as drafts would be the norm as they surely know⁵ that publishing products with incomplete data is bad for business.

There has to be a better way to sync with WooCommerce

Printful does this much, much better. Maybe I can create a webhook to submit orders instead of their sketchy integration.

1. Vendors in China have ridiculously low prices (hooded blankets for under $10) but shipping can take up to 20 days or more. ↩︎
2. They have 2 types of products: Regular and Campaign. I haven’t received a good explanation yet as to which one is better for integrating with WooCommerce. ↩︎
3. Campaigns are theoretically cool because it can make & sync multiple products at once – which would be great if it actually worked well. ↩︎
4. Merchize support is fairly responsive but there are language issues that prevent getting answers clearly & efficiently. ↩︎
5. I hope ↩︎