#PrintfulApp, #ShippingPrices, #WixStores, #HighPriority, #Urgent
PLEASE LIKE THIS POST TO MAKE SURE THIS SERIOUS ISSUE GETS THE ATTENTION IT NEEDS!
I am utterly stunned at the amount of time Wix has spent writing all of the workarounds for managing shipping prices for items a customer buys from Printful via a Wix site. Rather than what should be some VERY simple and obvious (pseudo)code: “setWixShippingPriceFrom $var $printfulShippingCost”, Wix is expecting users using the Printful app integration to construct an arcane & brittle pricing matrix involving setting up separate pricing structures for 10+ different shipping regions, based on either the product, a category of product, or by a ‘fake’ weight, regardless of the fact that Printful already calculates the shipping price based on where the product will be shipped from & to, how many items there are, and how much they weigh. And it does it instantly and accurately. Why must the shipping price be re-calculated in Wix, especially when there is no accurate and always-correct way to do so?
For someone that has a large quantity of products from Printful, the task of creating this overly complex and brittle matrix is incredibly tedious, especially when you know all of that work could be eliminated with just a few lines of code in the integration. If fact, it would take less time to write that code that it would to develop all of Wix’s explanations of the workarounds, let alone the insane and ridiculous amount of time it takes to implement the arcane, brittle, temporary system on 100+ products we want to be selling from Printful.
And unfortunately, even if you DO spend the hours of time it takes to dig thru (today’s) Printful shipping costs for a given item (or category of item), it could change tomorrow, because of supply chain problems (oops, we have to print that in Lithuania today due to inventory problems in Mexico), gas prices (which affect shipping prices), postal rate changes, currency changes, and more. When any of these things change (as they frequently do), who is left paying the difference? Me, the Wix customer (since shipping rates typically go up), or in the scenario where shipping prices go down, my customer. The point is, not only is it incredibly tedious, time consuming, and error-prone, and it’s also only accurate for a day. This means that ANYONE AND EVERYONE who is using the Printful integration is suffering from needlessly complex shipping structures that result in largely inaccurate and out-of-date shipping prices. That is a HUGE problem.
And it can be fixed by adding just a few lines of code.
So here I am today, faced with setting up all of these different product groups, all of these different shipping regions, separate prices for each group for each region, when Printful already calculates what the actual shipping prices will be, accurately, at the time of the order, and charges me that exact amount, which I can NOT accurately charge my customer in turn. Why can’t that price simply appear on the Wix invoice, instead of me having to (inaccurately) re-create the wheel in Wix? What’s more, there is no flat shipping rate, as the rate changes if there are multiple items. For all of these reasons, it’s impossible to accurately reflect a shipping price using any of the prescribed tools available in Wix. And yet I have no choice but to do it. It is INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING to have to waste my time this way, creating obviously false and inaccurate prices, and it is also just sheer insanity in this day and age!!
I discovered this problem 3 months ago, and I have been conversing with support at both Wix and Printful since, and each of you points to the other for the blame. It took Printful awhile, but they finally did say that they can’t send the shipping price to Wix because Wix doesn’t have the capacity to receive it.
Will you please save your users (ie, your customers) hundreds of hours of entirely unnecessary data entry time, save us from (cumulatively) potentially thousands of dollars in shipping price errors, and make it the highest priority to add just a few lines of code the Wix / Printful integration to allow them to transfer their ACTUAL, PRE-CACLULATED, ACCURATE shipping price directly to a Wix invoice?
Three months ago I assumed that someone there would understand the importance of having Wix use accurate shipping prices for POD products, and how easy it would be to fix, and so I have delayed this setup process with the expectation that it would be fixed prior to our site going live. No such luck. It only adds to the frustration knowing that after I jump through all of these needless, ridiculous, inaccurate and technically unnecessary hoops to re-calculate inaccurate shipping prices in Wix (that has already been accurately calculated in Printful), that it will all eventually be a waste of time once the decision is made to fix this big, glaring, obvious, painful deficiency in the integration that essentially makes it non-usable when accurate is required (and BTW it is), especially at scale.
If you are the person at Wix reading this, and do not have authority to make the decision to fix this problem ASAP, please forward it to someone who does.
PLEASE FIX THIS ASAP!