A GThing Science Project

I recently had the pleasure of placing an order through PrintPlace.com. If by "pleasure" you mean "hassle" and by "placing an order" you mean "trying to place an order several times but failing." For some reason they really just didn't want to take my money. After a week of dealing with their incompetent staff I just went somewhere else.

I stuck it out for A WEEK which is more then I'd imagine anyone else would give them to get their crap together.

Today I got an email from them. "Thank you for your recent order! Please fill out this survey!"

Don't mind if I do! Here's what I wrote when it asked me why I wouldn't be recommending PrintPlace to my friends:

There are a few reasons I am not likely to recommend printplace to a friend:

Your site sucks in Safari. It's very buggy and kept deleting my orders before I could pay for them. You're a print shop that works with graphic designers. Surely a healthy number of those designers have Macs and Safari? Have you checked your analytics lately? I did start using Firefox but one of your reps told me at one point only Internet Explorer worked well. Ouch!

Your site completely broke for like an hour on my 5th attempt to process my order. I accidently hit the "submit coupon code" button instead of submit order. It's at the bottom of all the other options on the order form so I just hit it while half looking thinking it was the submit order button. It actually took down your entire order processing capability. Pretty embarrassing for you guys. You're running on ASP .NET though, so it's no wonder.

It is not easy to enter all the orders either because there is no quantity option. For example, I can't just say 1000 business cards with these settings x4. There is also no way to combine shipping so I have to pay a separate shipping fee for each set of business cards. Maybe you should get passionate about learning how to use boxes?

I called your customer support because I couldn't process my order. I kept getting an AVS mismatch despite verifying my address and being able to use the same card with the same address on several other sites. Support sent me some forms to fill out and told me I would get a call back. By the next week I gave up on hearing from anybody and went and tried to process the order again. I was met with yet another brilliant AVS mismatch.

So the second guy I talked to - Issac I think his name was. Said he would contact billing and call the bank and try to put the order through. He did finally call me back the next afternoon and said they couldn't put the order through because the bank would not confirm or deny that our address was correct (what?!?).

I've done Internet retail so I know the risks of overriding an AVS mismatch and just running the card (which you can do, you know). Two seconds of logic looking at my situation would reveal that I was ordering personalized business cards with the name and address of the card holder on them. So of all the things you could do with a stolen CC#, why in pluperfect hell would you go order business cards for the card holder? Of course it was a legit order!

This is why I like dealing with PEOPLE WITH BRAINS and not PROCEDURES.

So throughout this time I had to keep recreating my order every time, or tell the order to someone over the phone or whatever. It still wouldn't save my cart even though I was using Firefox now and everyone assured me that's what the problem was. I guess maybe I should go buy a Windows computer so I can use your website next time.

After about a week of trying to place an order through you guys for 4000 business cards, I gave up and went over to gotprint.com who not only beat your price (on better paper with combined shipping!) but gladly excepted the money I was trying to give them without any problems. I couldn't force feed you guys money if I wanted to.

So for a place that is "passionate about printing", it might do you some good to get passionate about accepting your customer's money and making sure your website doesn't suck so bad.

So I filled out their little survey and hit submit. Guess what I saw:

Well I'm not surprised. Anyway, if you need to exchange money for goods and printing services, check out gotprint.com. They were cheaper and appear to offer a superior product. I don't know if they have retarded people working for them or not because I never had to call them and find out!