Why I Quit Printing With Fine Art America…
In this blog post I am sharing my personal experience of placing orders on printing at “Fine Art America” website, major likes and dislikes regarding service they provide.
At the very begining when I started to print my art on apparel, I thought that all Print On Demand (POD) services are more or less the same.
At that time I somehow have heard of Fine Art America, Red Bubble, Society7.
Now I got to know that ALL the above mentioned services are not a print fulfillment companies… But what are they? :)
Actually among all POD services there are some reall print fulfillment companies, which control the whole printing process from A to Z, and there are another ones which are just POD websites - they let you upload your images and pay you royalties of each order placed. They do not control the printing process like fulfillment companies but deligate it to a smaller printing sub-contractors worldwide.
For some reason I have started my Print On Demand experience with Fine Art America. Now I’m kind of disappointed with it and can honestly share what I like/dislike about it most :
Like at FAA:
the personal “prints shop” page they create for each account with 15 free of charge listings.
a good selection of beautiful frames and Matt (for framed prints orders)
Dislike at FAA:
Delivery! - takes a lot of time. As FAA is not a print fulfillment company it poorly controls delivery.. Several untrackable orders got lost and I have never received them.
The personal “print shop” page they create for each account is good - BUT! it is full of redirecting links to the root FAA shop with millions of other artists’ merch! Do I really need this?
whenever someone of my clients placed an order at FAA and bought some of my merch, they were afterwards “bombed” with ads and offers from FAA redirecting to FAA homepage with all that thousands of merch produced by other artists…which is not fair enough I believe.
Prints on Apparel were very often asymmetrically printed and had some other defects.
FAA does not provide free shipping on artist’s sample orders
Apparel arives in bad condition: all rumpled and without any polythene packaging, just thrown in a thin postal plastic envelope.
So, taking into account all the above mentioned - I DO NOT place apparel prints orders at FAA anymore. Now I order print on demand items at Printful. Why? - Read more about it in my next blog post.
Though I still keep in mind FAA’s beautiful framed prints options…