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Topic: OvernightPrints.com
| Author | Message |
| maphop | Posted – 5/30/2008 12:39:51 PM | show profile There was a thread about OvernightPrints.com under the Design heading but since I doubt many writers and publicists look at the Design section, I'm pushing it up higher on the board. I've just had a miserable - genuinely awful - experience with this company and I'm curious as to whether anyone else would like to share their experiences? I know from threads on other boards and through simple Google and Yahoo searches that the kinds of trouble I've experienced are not uncommon (some of the stories are even worse than mine and I thought mine took the cake; wrong color ink, printing the front side artwork on both sides of a two-sided business card and then refusing a refund and instead offering me a discount on future printing...as if) and, after a month of debate with their "customer retention" department, having the customer service individual refuse to give me either their last name or the name of the company president. Anyone else have a better - or worse - experience than I have? |
| eriksherman | Posted – 5/30/2008 1:00:57 PM | show profile | email poster I did a quick Google search with the terms overnightprints.com and CEO and got the following: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/332/RipOff0332496.htm The post claims to give the name and correct address for the company's CEO. ------ Free writer resources: http://www.eriksherman.com/WriterBiz |
| snuffleupagus | Posted – 5/30/2008 1:28:43 PM | show profile Sounds pretty bad. However, I can say that I am a satisfied customer. I bought glossy full-color business cards in 07 and received them without a problem. And I was referred by a friend who was also happy with her purchase. |
| Astera | Posted – 5/30/2008 1:59:07 PM | show profile I had a great experience with Overnight Prints--my graphic designer husband uploaded a design, and my cards came back very quickly. They looked great! My husband then ordered some cards, but his didn't turn out as well--the trim and the bleed were off. However, when he called the company, they were very apologetic and right away, they sent new cards that were perfect. Both of these experiences were in 2007, however. I hope that service and quality has not gone so completely downhill since then. I'm sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience. |
| Letterbox | Posted – 5/30/2008 3:41:12 PM | show profile I've never had any problems either. I think when it comes to gang runs and rock bottom prices, it's a crap shoot. If you're job is put in the right place on the sheet with other jobs with similar color, you're lucky. If not, well... |
| maphop | Posted – 5/30/2008 8:26:30 PM | show profile Thanks, Eric, for the effort. I also ran some checks and came up with a different (and perhaps more current) name for a president, a woman in Santa Ana. Where did I get it? The Better Business Bureau for their region in CA (they also have a facility in Kentucky) which not only listed the presidents name but THREE HUNDRED COMPLAINTS! It would appear that if you have a single color card, single-sided and a fairly basic color - how about black? - and you're not in a hurry, you're in luck. If it's two-sided, is a color match, features a bleed or a cut corner, give it up. Of the three hundred formal filings with the BBB, most of them were for missing the mark on print spec or delivery date and then refusing to give a refund. On one board for small business owners, the "host" shut the thread down at seventy-seven postings. My error in not doing my due diligence before ordering. |
| Grateful Deadline | Posted – 5/30/2008 10:59:40 PM | show profile This has nothing to do with your issue, but I just want to thank you, maphop, for the mention of the BBB office in Santa Ana. I'm in a tangle right now with a company that has 18,000 complaints against it, and I had forgotten all about the possibility of the BBB's intervention. Thank you so much, and best wishes on resolving your overnightprints.com problem. |
| writesonwater | Posted – 5/31/2008 12:00:29 AM | show profile I have a friend who has printed several projects with overnightprints and has been pleased. I have used vistaprint.com for many projects and been very pleased. THe back side of a postcard/invite recently printed too light to read, and as soon as we complained they were on it like a duck on a junebug and rushed us a fix. |
| Brena | Posted – 6/1/2008 12:10:43 AM | show profile I've been ordering business cards from them for a few years, so has my husband. |
| maphop | Posted – 6/1/2008 8:41:25 AM | show profile These have to be the most positive comments I've heard or seen yet so I'm curious; were your jobs primarily one-color business cards or postcards? Short of screwing up a color match (did any of you have a color match?) it's pretty hard to screw up a single color item but it appears to be the more "custom" orders that they just can't seem to get right. As I was trolling for the president of the company's name, I found one small business board where the host of the board shut it down after seventy-seven entries, almost all of them with folks looking (belatedly) for refunds or satisfaction but I suspect they were for more complex projects. Of course, I never really thought of a two-sided business card as complex before... I think what alarms me the most is that, knowing it was for a specific project or date, they offer to rerun the order (AFTER the needs date) or give you a discount on a new project order but refuse to refund on a job done so horribly wrong. Of the 300 BBB complaints filed (and those are just for their CA facility since I didn't even go to check their KY BBB records) it's almost exclusively about people wanting their money back. Due diligence...I'll know better next time. |
| ManhattanMatt | Posted – 6/2/2008 9:12:14 PM | show profile You get what you pay for. When you're looking to get by on the cheap, don't complain when CHEAP is what you get. |
| Letterbox | Posted – 6/2/2008 9:29:54 PM | show profile Do they even do one color jobs? All of my jobs are 4-color, double sided. Postcards, business cards, greeting cards and a double sided 4/4 flyer. I upload all my own work that I prep as opposed to use one of their templates. That might be the key. They advertise to everybody--including non designers that assemble work in Word. If you trust them to do the work, you might run into problems. They gang run by the gross so have thousands of individual jobs. Their prepress department is probably inundated with tons of work that's not properly set up. If you know how to design and prep the file yourself and to their specs, you will probably do okay. |
| writesonwater | Posted – 6/3/2008 1:36:56 AM | show profile | email poster Matt, the thing with cheap is -- in a world of shrinking ad dollars and media jobs and also of $4 gas -- a lot of people have to do cheap. That may not be what top-quality, top-dollar firms want to hear, but living in denial leads to overspending and penury. Providing affordable alternatives is big business, too, and there are some examples of cheap things that are good. I would put Crocs shoes in that category, for example. |
| TeuscherTruffe | Posted – 6/4/2008 7:06:17 AM | show profile | email poster I've used them multiple times, for 4 color and 2 color projects, and have always been very pleased. The one time someone I referred wasn't as happy (I'd warned her the design she liked was too close to the edge) they were speedy and kind about reprinting the order free of charge, even though it was truly not their fault. Your experience sounds like dealing with VistaPrint, which had to be the worst printing experience of my life. Their cards were so shoddy: cut crooked and small, colors not even close to matching, on inferior stock. Reprinting the order was even worse. But Overnight Prints? Always good to me. |
| Astera | Posted – 6/4/2008 2:23:55 PM | show profile I posted previously about my positive experience with Overnight Prints. For my order, my husband uploaded a design of his creation, and because he's a designer, he was able to do all the specs correctly. It was a 4-color job, but no color matching. I did get the nice rounded-corner business cards, and the cutting and printing all looked good, and the colors looked nice. I got the cards quickly, too. My husband really liked the way my cards turned out, so he designed some for himself. This was a more complicated design with a bleed and a special trim. His first batch of cards were printed crooked and trimmed unevenly, but when he complained, Overnight Prints re-ran his order and the cards came back looking great. I don't think he had any big hassles in getting the make-good. If you're using Overnight Prints for sensitive, deadline-oriented projects, I don't know if they are the best choice. Sure, they are cheap, but they trade on volume, so your job isn't necessarily going to get the QC check that it would from a smaller printer. Also, 300 complaints on the California BBB site does not seem like a lot to me. Yes, it's unfortunate that anyone has to complain or battle to get their money back. But like I said, this is a company that trades on volume. They probably get thousands of orders a day. I'm not sure how long they've been in business, but it's been a while. So, 300 complaints out of thousands and thousands of orders does not seem that significant to me. ------ www.adventuresofastera.blogspot.com |
| Letterbox | Posted – 6/4/2008 4:29:04 PM | show profile I totally agree with Astera. I'm sure Overnight has earned some of it's bad feedback but printing is one of those areas that has a high margin of user error. Even experienced designers make mistakes spec-ing print. If you don't have the right equipment, like color calibrated monitors and decent publishing software (Front Page doesn't count), the results can be mixed. In my past experience dealing with ad production, low rez files was the most common problem. Advertisers always submit 72 dpi photo files and expect them to print sharp. |
