Gelato: Print on Demand

3D viewer is good for designing products.

'Gelato' seems to want to take over your store though even though I didn't tell it to. It imports products from other vendors/sources and wants to control them itself. VERY annoying. Customer support was useless about it. I selected 'Ignore' on all other products and yet they're still there.

Getting to understand Gelato has been relatively easy. I'm a bit disappointed that the personalisation part doesn't work with my Stilleto theme as that was one of the major draws to using Gelato. I would also like to undersatnd how migrating my products from Printify to Gelato works as the SKU's remain Printify SKU's meaing when I delete the product from Printify it removes the SKU that Gelato are using.

Good quality products, worldwide delivery and relatively fast customer service. However the order platform is somewhat buggy and prices for product tend to be increased with short notice (or even no notice).

In November, upon selecting Sync Products in the Gelato dashboard, half of my Shopify products lost their connection to their corresponding Gelato products. Unfortunately, I could not reconnect my Shopify products with my existing Gelato products in the Gelato dashboard. Therefore, I asked the support team at Gelato to manually reconnect my products. I provided a detailed report about the issue and answered all their questions. Being a software engineer, I even offered to help with debugging, but they declined the offer.
After making me wait for *two months*, the support team deleted my existing Gelato products and asked me to create each of them from scratch, which would take me at least six hours. I refused to do it in November, and I refuse to do it now, because it would be an unfair solution to an issue that I did not cause in the first place.
While Gelato’s products are fine, and while their Shopify app probably works well most of the time, my experience with their support team is sufficient to justify the score. It’s a shame, because I believe their model “sell globally, produce locally” is the only sustainable one.
*Update*
Perhaps triggered by this review, Gelato finally scheduled a call with their head of customer advocacy and head of product management. They sincerely apologized for how they handled my issue, solved my issue within a few hours, and informed me about upcoming improvements that should prevent similar issues from happening again. I appreciate the efforts they put into this, so I am updating the score accordingly.

The business model is very promising but unfortunately the technical solution (including the Shopify integration) does not live up to the high expectations. Errors occur too often causing orders to fail or be charged incorrectly.
In addition to this they have severe problems with products (particularly frames) out-of-stock. There are no automatic notification neither when an item it out-of-stock or back in stock. This of course leads to bad customer experiences. Support is generally helpful but they are fixing problems that should never have occured. Once Gelato manages to finish the development of their platform they will be a powerful partner. Until then you should expect to monitor all orders manually and to spend time writing the support team.

I have been using Gelato for a few months with mixed results. 1 - More than half of my customers' orders arrived heavily damaged - while the box was not damaged, indicating the printers damaged the product and thought it was ok to ship it like that. Thankfully, Gelato has always been very good at refunding me for replacing orders, but it has left my customers with a bad first impression. With one customer, her replacement was also damaged so I had to have a third one sent to her. It also means a lot of extra work for me. 2 - Prices for the items I sell often fluctuate - sometimes dramatically - without notice. Recently, after having gone up significantly (one item went from $43 to $62) almost all of the prices have been slowly creeping up. Making it really difficult to set my pricing and plan properly. I brought these price jumps to their attention several times and always get a generic answer like "That does look strange, we'll forward this to the appropriate department", after which I never get a satisfactory answer or solution. 3 - The aluminum prints are very nice, with great printing quality. It seems some of the sizes ship from Canada and arrive very quickly and in great condition, while other sizes ship from the US, take a long time to arrive, and almost always arrive damaged, as mentioned above. 4 - The app is good to use and the product display images are great. I would love to continue using Gelato because my customers really like the aluminum prints (when they are not damaged), but a few things are making it rather frustrating to use. I will happily change my star rating if these issues are properly resolved!
**UPDATE**
Achille from Gelato reached out to me to address my concerns and he was very patient and we had a video conversation. I really appreciate the time he took and that he followed up by explaining the price changes were caused by an introductory signup discount that had not been clearly communicated to me before. He apologized for the lack of previous communication and promised to do better in the future. He assured me that they have not had a significant number of complaints about damaged orders so it was probably just very bad luck on my part. I'm currently in the process of redesigning my shop and introducing new products so have not had more sales since to confirm that quality control is not an issue. I will update again when I've had satisfactory quality control, but as I said before, I appreciate that they always refund quickly for replacing damaged orders.

Easy to navigate but I would love to have some free mockups