Vistaprint sounded like a good idea when I first heard about them and the myriad of other online printing companies.

About a year and a half ago I decided to order some cool, retro-looking postcards when my business launched. I found some nice ones on their site, spent an hour or so customizing my cards and was quite pleased with them.

So I placed my order.

About 7 days later I got my postcards. They had a big blue box sitting on the front - a big blue box that did not appear in my design or my template.

I called them, unhappy, and they assured me that they would fix them right away.

They sent me a second box. With the same mistake.

I called them again. Once again they couldn’t tell me why I had a blue box, but this time they referred me to tech support.

Tech support checked out the template finally and lo and behold, they found a big blue box sitting right on the template. And no one else had ever complained about it before.

They assured me that they fixed the template, and sent a third set of cards with a big blue box.

I got my money back and never considered using them again… until a few weeks ago when I got a flyer advertising a free t-shirt.

I thought it would be cool to get a Parallax shirt for my business, and only have to pay shipping for it and a few dollars for using my own design. So I spent two hours putting together something really cool and placed my order.

Today it came. It was a shirt for ‘First Class Mortgage Funding.’

I called them and complained. They assured me (but I have a very difficult time believing this) that my correct shirt would be mailed out again tomorrow.

I should have learned my lesson, but I figured it’s been 18 months or so and they’re still in business, maybe they’ve improved? But I’m not counting on seeing my own shirt when the box arrives in the next few days. Not very much at all.