Mountain Goat wrote:I would kill to know what a professional printer thinks of Vistaprint's business model of everything 'free', and just scratching their humble millions out of the 'postage'.
MG
I’ll say it again – The unavoidable fact is that VistaPrint is an enormously successful international commercial printing company which also happens to offer loads of little free things to non-commercial people like you and me.
which also happens to offer loads of little free things
Free things that aren't actually free, you mean. Shipping charges are pretty outrageous and are clearly meant to absorb the cost of production. They're not doing us any favors; if they were, they wouldn't be so successful.
Well, a quick look at 250 free business cards quotes me £3.27 for the 'slow' 21 day delivery, I'm not up on p&p charges per se but would have thought that was cheap as chips in anyones book.
Maybe the fact that they come with the vista print logo on the back is considered 'free advertising' in itself on the basis that every card is given to a 'new source' of revenue ? Add to that that customers return to what they know and voila, a winning forumula I presume.
which also happens to offer loads of little free things
Free things that aren't actually free, you mean. Shipping charges are pretty outrageous and are clearly meant to absorb the cost of production. They're not doing us any favors; if they were, they wouldn't be so successful.
Brooke,
I think you are spot on. Their P&P charges are "interesting".
I haven't got time to see what the catch is, but having had a steady stream of 'everything free for 48 hours' from dear old VP, today's eye-catcher was '100% off everything plus free delivery'.
On the other hand, if everything's free, how do you get free delivery on orders over £20? Catch-22.
What does one do? Wait for their next offer? 'If we send you £50, would you please, please, order from us'?
MG
We've given up on extracting compliment slips out of Vistaprint - they're astronomically expensive - same as their letterheads, so we're using colour postcards instead with varying text on the reverse.
Minor technical point - if you're adding text to the reverse of a postcard - how do you centre it? Just trial and error? We've never been able to get a reply from their customer services to answer this.
Their 'free' website offers seems to vary between 1 - 3 months only, BTW.
Adding text to the reverse:
You can always upload an image to be printed on the reverse. So create a hi res image file with just your text in the right proportions. Mind you, there is a small charge for uploading the additional image.
So create a hi res image file with just your text in the right proportions.
"hi res" being the important detail here -- find out what they print at and set your image pixels-per-inch to that number. The image should be very large in pixels, but print at a postcard size -- otherwise the text will look awful.
To follow up on Brooke's point, I did a postcard with LOTS of words on the rear. There were many paragraphs, approx 363 words, and it came out finished looking something like 9pt Arial.
I uploaded a PSD (photoshop) file as follows:
1677 X 1300 Pixels
(approx 5.5" x 3.3")
300 Pixels/inch
The file size was 4.4 mb !
They have a limit of 8mb, so this seemed optimal.