An outline of problems we encountered during first two months of running Big Little Cities.
When we launched our t-shirt company, Big Little Cities, we encountered several issues that impacted fulfillment, customer experience, and overall efficiency of getting shirts from the printer to the customer. We picked the print-on-demand method because we thought it would be a "set it and forget it" type situation. Boy were we wrong. Here I've outlined some of the problems we faced during the first two months of running our new t-shirt company with the print on demand model.
1. Customer receives wrong product
This is something that has happened multiple times over the last couple of months. What happens is that the customer will receive a different design than what they ordered. For instance, the customer ordered an Atlanta tee but received the Minneapolis tee, or they ordered an ivory color but received the pepper color. In this case we apologize and send the customer a new shirt.
The other instance - and more wild - is that the customer receives a shirt that we don't even make. In two orders the customer has received t-shirts with bible quotes instead of their t-shirt. It makes sense how this might happen, given that we're using different printers and printing on demand.
2. Damaged Products from Vendor
Printify fulfilled multiple orders with damaged shirts. This is just part of the business, really. Print shops have a lot of ink and it's easy for a shirt to pick up some of the dirt laying around the shop.
3. High Return Volume
The number of returns exceeded my initial expectations and created an unplanned customer service email burden. There have only been about 10 straight up returns, which is awesome. But we're doing a lot of exchanges for sizes, not a crushing amount but enough to keep us busy.
When we started with the t-shirt business, I did some research on how people were handling returns/exchanges. Our exchange policy is that the customer ships the shirt to our PO Box and then repurchase the correct size online. Because we don't have a physical shop, we can't do exchanges.
This leaves us with new physical stock when the customer sends back a t-shirt. In order to try to get back the cost of printing that shirt, we've created a sale section on the website. From the sale section customers are able to buy shirts for half the price and we are able to get our money back for the initial exchanges. All these shirts are unwashed and in new condition. The only difference is that all sale shirts are final and customers cannot exchange them.
4. Website User Interface Issues
The product selection interface was not intuitive for customers. Customers often selected incorrect colors or sizes due to the layout and lack of clarity when they were on the product page. Initially our Shopify theme only had buttons for colors and sizes. This led to issues where customers didn't put the color and the button together. In the first month we had a few customers email us saying they had chosen the wrong color but didn't realize it until they received their order confirmation email.
To fix this problem, we installed a Shopify app called Swatch King. Swatch King displays a thumbnail for each color variant of the t-shirts. Since moving to Swatch King, we haven't had any issues with the wrong color being selected. Size still has a few as that variant is still in the button form.
5. Shipping Discount Malfunction
We often have free shipping discounts and other % off order codes available. I didn't have the email sign-up shipping discounts and % off set up correctly at first. It took a few mistakes before we got it where things needed to be and now seem to be running smoothly for free shipping and discount codes.
6. Inventory Not Updated for Known & Unknown Out of Stock
We are using Printify Choice through Printify. This is an option through Printify where Printify will select the best printer to send your order to. They have rules in place that decide what makes the best printer for the order. 99% of the time this is a great feature and I love it. However, we've run into a huge problem where Printify will say that a blank is in stock, however none of their printers actually have the blank in stock. Therefore, customers were able to order a t-shirt but when the t-shirt went to production, inventory was not set to zero for blank shirt colors and sizes known to be unavailable at Printify. These items remained purchasable.
Blank shirts at Printify’s print shops were out of stock, but Printify did not mark these variants as unavailable.
- Example: Comfort Colors 3023CL sold out in Ivory XL, then Ivory S, and eventually in all Ivory sizes.
- Customers continued to purchase these products.
- Orders entered production, where cancellation is not possible.
- Orders remained in production for up to 14 days before Printify either canceled them or the print shop shipped without the correct item.
7. Missing Shipping Zone Assignments for Sale Items
Sale shirts were not assigned to a shipping zone in Shopify. During checkout, customers received an error indicating the product could not be shipped to their location. This was public for about two weeks before a customer emailed us to tell us the problem. It really makes me wonder what else is out there that I haven't caught yet...
Summary
These are just the things that I can remember for the last two months that have come up. Like in any business there are going to be issues, but I thought I'd share some of the pain points that have come up for us in this new t-shirt journey.
I'm still working full time as a software developer so all this work is done on the weekends and during off hours. Getting into POD I had the idea that it would be more hands off, but so far I'm putting in a few hours a week at least with the logistics of it all. And after thinking about it more, that's actually pretty awesome considering the amount of shirts we are pushing out into the world.