Battle of the Business Cards | Hacker News Reader

Battle of the Business Cards

p.printingchoice.com

177 pointskmfrk72 comments

Or, you could just go to a local print shop. My wife used to work at one before moving up in the world. Practically ran the place for the owner. Good quality cards, and if something was wrong, they'd fix it. You got to see the options before you made a choice, and much easier to get exactly what you wanted. Also, from what I see in the chart, you'd get it a LOT sooner then most of the places.

In my experience local print shops can be really expensive, and the quality of the card is normally pretty poor.

YMMV, of course. Local prints shops vary. Here in Montreal, they are a dime a dozen, and having a wife in the industry, she has connections and knows what to look for.

However, I still think it's worth the time and effort finding a good local print shop and developing a good relationship with them.

This is easily the best option, especially if you already have the design ready to go. My dad used to run a print shop and he had all the card styles (paper, printing style) available to view and touch which can make a world of difference when deciding.

The only reason I could see wanting cards from one of these online companies is if you only want a small amount of cards as it is usually better for local print shops to run larger batches on the presses. (But even then you will probably be able to get 500 cards for something like 50 dollars on a minimum run)

The benefit to a local print shop isn't in the initial price of the cards. It's in the follow through and printing needs after business cards. Most print shops don't make money off business cards. The cards barely pay for the cost of the material and time involved. It's a cut throat business.

However, you get your business cards, and when you have additional printing needs, returning to them gets you better results (especially if you paid on time). The printers I know (several of them, in fact) all cherish customers who pay on time and will bend over backwards for them.

It also becomes easier going back to them. They have material already, and can usually get what you need faster.

It's good to do business with someone you can scream at, if necessary.

Crocodile tears are vastly more effective.

I prefer online to avoid interacting with some high schooler that has no clue about color management. My experience with retail is that it's typically excruciating. People get distracted, fail to accurately record details, are often doing retail and a filler and would rather get back to finishing their chemistry homework the minute I walk out the door. I have more faith in well respected online business' that pay attention to detail, like amazon.

I think your confusing a copy shop with an actual printing shop with actual presses and people who understand colour separation and bleed. I'm talking about professional printing shops, not Kinkos.

Although ironically, one of the printers tested (Moo or VistaPrint, hard to tell from the pic) didn't even print at the correct resolution.

He mentions in the comments that Moo is English and printing in the correct size for that market.

Having ordered business cards from Vistaprint and Overnight Prints, let me make a couple of observations:

* Vistaprint had decent print quality, but IMO their paper quality left something to be desired. The biggest issue with VP (again IMO) is that their business cards are standard-sized, they are slightly smaller. It makes the card stand out a bit, but you have to decide if it stands out in a good way or a bad way

* I've used Overnight Prints for the vast majority of business cards. I've only used the "Value Cards" products (basically printed on a laser printer" as opposed to the offset press printing of the Premium cards. They use a very thick stock, and I often get positive comments on the "feel" of the card stock. At first glance the print quality looks pretty good, but upon a closer look you can see that the cards were printed on a laser printer (I presume that the offset-printed cards look better).

* The biggest 'gotcha' with Overnight Prints (at least the Value cards) is the color consistency - that is to say, there is none. They don't pay attention to embedded color profiles, and every order I've made the colors come out different. I don't mind too much because I know that my clients aren't comparing colors and I figure most of my cards either get scanned/transcribed into electronic address books and then put away, or get tossed out. But if you're someone who obsesses over the color consistency of your printed material, definitely stay away from the Value Cards (again I don't know if things are better with the Premium Cards).

Mirror, in case HN or reddit breaks the non-WP Cache'd site: http://i.imgur.com/vokDd.jpg. (Again.)

Edit: Looks like it did indeed buckled.

*buckle.

Thanks a lot, I wouldn't have been able to look at this without your comment.

It always surprises me how many people don't know about Moo.com. Fast, fairly cheap, and really fantastic quality. And if quality isn't great, they'll reprint it.

A few years ago I was ordering Christmas cards for my company, and I accidentally had a typo. I contacted them to see if I could get a discount at least since I was ordering them all again, and they insisted on reprinting them for free and even expedited the shipping to me.

Compare that to OvernightPrints, when our business cards came back with streaks all over them, and after I called and emailed them several times, I never got a response. Of course I'm going to use Moo.com for everything now.

Plus moo has smaller sized cards which all the cool kids are using these days.

And you can use those smaller size ones to create pretty awesome custom cards: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vadavia/3348895753/ (my personal business cards)

I believe the smaller cards are no longer officially cool. But Moo does print top quality cards, for sure.

I would recommend against getting abnormally-sized cards like this. After collecting cards from a group of people, it's annoying to have these stragglers swimming around in your pocket that don't really fit with the rest. I'd rather have a standard sized card that is designed well.

Do you find you discriminate against those that have the oddly-sized cards, or do you pay them more attention? Think those that got the mini-cards were going for the latter effect.

I try not to, but I think subconsciously that slight inconvenience caused by weird cards has to register somewhere. I'm sure people perceive them differently, but to me an odd card is more centered on the giver than the receiver, even though the receiver is really the person it should be designed for.

In any case, if I want to follow up with someone I don't think a weird card would make me NOT follow up with them - it's more of a subtle thing.

Your local print shop might not be printing their own business cards. My dad owned a print shop and he has been outsourcing the printing of business cards for over 10 years. He makes a little profit on outsourced cards (@$5 per thousand) and no profit on in-house printed cards. The only cards he prints in-house are car dealerships that have mass bulk with only the salesman contact information changing. Now, he can help you pick the stock, ink and other options and will make sure the order/product is correct before you pay him, so there is some benefit to local.

Absolutley true, I know of at least two print shops who order many of their jobs from Vistaprint.

Seems like he's leaving money on the table by not linking those to the relevant affiliate programs.

Trading a few dollars in affiliate revenue for credibility can be well worth it, depending on the post's goals. Just look at how people react to Atwood's referral-laden product posts on Coding Horror, for example.

There's a huge side bar banner for Vistaprint.

@PrintingChoice

This is a great piece of marketing. It provides me with some very useful information while selling me on your value prop.

Brilliant.

I just ordered 1k business cards from Overnight Prints in preparation for RubyConf. I was impressed by the quality, given how cheap they were. They were thicker than I expected.

My one complaint is that you either pay a lot for shipping or get them fairly slowly. (I upgraded one level from the bottom and it took from Tuesday to the next Thursday.) Even that shipping was expensive--it was $8 shipping plus $4 "handling". Others may be just as bad though.

Overall, I was quite happy. I paid $40 with shipping and CA tax for 1,000 high quality, double-sided color business cards thanks to a half off coupon I found on retailmenot.com.

And if you're coming to RubyConf, find me and I'll give you one.

The quality comparisons here are quite helpful, but the pricing isn't that useful. If you're willing to do a little digging, you can find 30-50% off coupons for the big guys like PSPrint and VistaPrint. Not sure if this is also true for the smaller places like Moo. Also, the prices dive sharply at larger quantities.

We're currently using PSPrint for business cards, and would agree with this assessment: "flimsy, but otherwise nice". For our recent order with coupon, we were at final price of $130 for 10000. If you are in the Bay Area, you can pick up for free from their warehouse in Emeryville.

Woohoo go us! (dev at moo)

A recent client had Moo biz cards and the quality of the card itself was awesome and very thick. They had a photo on one side that looked great, but the side with their information was kind of blurry. Is that just from them not doing something right in the creation of the card or just from the type of card stock Moo uses?

There are a lot of things that can go wrong at various points in the process of putting the details in the ui and getting a printed card out the other end, and there will always be bad batches. I'm not sure that its a general problem with the paper stock though.

Did your client mention the problem to customer service? There's a chance that he/she could get the cards reprinted.

I received 50 cards from Moo this week. I love the shape and the paper quality and cutting are very good. They also upgraded my shipping for free, which was nice of them. However, the print quality is pretty poor--the text is visibly grainy. Might be my fault as I had to upload the whole card as a 600dpi image, but I'd expect that to be sufficient. I used the recycled paper option. I'd go with Moo in the future if I could be confident the print quality would be fixed.

Did you make sure the text in your image was not anti-aliased? Anti-aliasing is a hack for monitors, not printers.

Could you elaborate on the different size your cards have? As I understand, the size is perfectly normal by European standards, and might make American customers stand out. What I'm wondering is why you don't offer the US-sized cards to customers who may prefer them for reasons such as being able to fit it into a business card holder?

Reading the reddit thread[1], a lot of people scoffed at the size and chose other brands over yours simply due to the size. There might be some interesting things to be learnt and taught if you get some guys to pick their brains about what they think. At the very least from a PR point of view.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/e3i8j/guy_ordered_th...

Given this information, I don't see how the author recomended VistaPrint in any way.

It looks to me like it's Moo for quality and speed, Overnight for price, and everything else is significantly worse in every dimension.

the presentation looks confusing, but i think he means the graphs to convey that per card price was lowest with vistaprint

Right, I am puzzled too, especially since that according to his graph it was actually overnight prints that was the cheapest with better quality than vistaprint. I don't see how with these results the author can recommend vistaprint unless there is a mistake somewhere.

that price is for the min number of cards, per card price would look different

Just got my new cards from zazzle today. Used them before and was happy but wish I had this info. Next time will try moo.

Question: what do others think about a large business card size. I like that because i inevitably jot something on the card when i give it to someone. The last example was that I was talking to a dogrun acquaintance about vyatta (ie the router project) and gave my card with the word 'vyatta' on it.

I have a minimal amount of information - name, email, google voice number as well as a small qr_code barcode which links to my online profile.

I think the oversized card (called a 'calling card' I believe) enables you to have a nice a mount of room for a graphic and room to write something.

The card from Moo isn't oversized. It's the only company in the group based in England, where that's the standard size.

Oversizing your business card might make it stand out, but some peoople might find it annoying, like television commercials that are extremely loud compared to the main program.

If it doesn't fit in the standard card slot in my wallet, I'll likely (politely) give it back and ask for an e-mail. I hate toting around oversized cards, and just feel wasteful throwing them in my pocket to be tossed later.

thanks - good point

Worth noting that Overnight Prints very frequently has coupons for significant savings: http://www.retailmenot.com/view/overnightprints.com

Currently it's 50% off premium biz cards. I think they're very hard to beat at that price.

Just want to re-emphasize the discounts. Check retailmenot.com etc.

I often order 250 cards from Overnight Prints for about $15 inc shipping. The quality is only bettered by Moo (great company but expensive).

The final recommendation based on cost is Vistaprint, when their price was $25 compared to Overnight's $9?

that's for 250 cards from vistaprint in comparison to 25 cards from overnight's

And the cards are visibly terrible. That suggestion made me really question this review.

Vistaprint was 250 cards for $24.25, for a per-card price of $0.097. Overnight was 25 cards for $8.81, for a per-card price of $0.352.

On a per-card basis, Overnight is 3.6x as expensive as Vistaprint.

Ah, thanks.

It's a shame there isn't a graph showing the per-card price since that's the obvious question after seeing that Overnight Prints was only $8.81 to VistaPrint's $24.25

I started out with Vistaprint once, after clicking on a Google ad saying '250 card 5 euros' or something like that. Designed business card based on their templates, put it through their web order forms, turned out I had to add a bunch of options and preparation costs and shipping costs, and the whole thing turned into 25 euros or something. By that time I had spend hours on getting the business card just right for their template format, so I just went with them anyway. Other printers had the same I found out - I never did find heavy paper, ad-free cards including shipping for less than 20 euros or so.

YMMV.

Funky and very useful website :) I had some cards printed out by VistaPrint a while back (using one of the free business card package fliers from an Amazon parcel) and was relatively impressed - having a stack of business cards with my name on them felt very professional to my just-graduated-looking-for-work self.

However, you'd think the creator of such a nicely designed site would spell check their copy: in the footer, 'compareproducts' has no space between words, and there's a misspelled 'annoucnements' on the front page :/ Also, the 'DIY Printing' link in the menu bar 404s.

I have no relation to this company, but I've always been very happy with my cards from 4by6 http://www.4by6.com/ (not covered in review)

I saw a link to them in the reddit thread, but I was completely confounded by the fact that they don't show image samples of the different business cards. I see that they send out samples (at least to people from the US), but the approach makes no sense to me.

http://www.deeprint.co.uk do this, too.

Avery 8871, they look good and you can print a few cards when you need them (and change them when you want).

I've recently been ordering from Clubflyers. I got a batch of 4x6 cards and business cards. The price was better than I could find elsewhere and they did a great job. The cheap printing is glossy only though.

One of the winners in the shootout was Moo.

I went up to the top level page and searched on two sided, 50 count, whatever's cheapest business cards... and got four hits. All of them for Moo.

Hmm.

Moo is the only one who lets you print just 50 cards, with the exception of ONP who hasn't updated in the price search yet. If you search for other quantities you'll see plenty of others. :)

Anyone know of a great print shop in San Francisco?

was going to go with moo but wanted the more traditional business card size. just went to h&h imaging at 16th/alabama, really great service, options, price. http://www.yelp.com/biz/h-and-h-imaging-san-francisco

Great, thanks for the heads up. :)

Edit: Oh, wow I work on 16th and Harrison. This is perfect.

I'm just astonished at how much blatant link bait is getting voted up on HN these days. It's starting to look like Digg.

Even if it has genuinely interesting and informative content?

It's just not interesting and informative enough.

I've never done business cards through Printrunner, but their Matte-finish postcards are super high quality

Been very happy with cards, shirts, and service ordered from Zazzle!

I'm glad that Vistaprint got the drubbing it deserves.

  "Error establishing a database connection"

I've always assumed what you get is going to be about the same anywhere so price is the only comparison, but its great to see just how much worse the quality of vistaprint is.

Off topic but when reading this article I couldn't help thinking about the famous business card scene from American Psycho.

Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark!

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