Why do many Vistaprint customers leave bad reviews? If you’re looking to print business cards, brochures, postcards, or promo items, you’ve probably seen Vistaprint show up in your search results.

That’s with good reason. As a printing services provider for small businesses, Vistaprint has seen some explosive growth in recent years. They may have started their business giving away business cards for free, but that early altruism has yielded $289.9 million in revenue from printed materials in 2016.

When you move that much product, problems are bound to pop up. Even though Vistaprint offers design templates for each of its products, problems and mistakes still occur. (Just don’t complain about the price, because we can save you 50% here!) 

First, Most Reviews for Vistaprint Are Positive

Before we talk about things that went wrong in customer reviews for Vistaprint, we have to mention that most reviews are positive. Also, many complaints,  (like slow shipping or low-resolution images) could have been avoided by properly using the free design templates and by checking their shipping speeds.

Even though most Vistaprint customers write positive reviews, about 14% are negative. Because they process thousands of orders each day, that’s a lot of bad reviews! Let’s find out what customers complain about, and maybe it will help you with your own order.

Top 10 Vistaprint Complaints:

Here are the top 10 Vistaprint customer complaints from bad reviews, and how to avoid them yourself.

1. My Business Cards Aren’t Legible:

Customer review: “The business cards I received were of such poor resolution that my contact information was not legible.” – Matan of Santa Ana, CA

Imagine you put a lot of work into designing the perfect business card. You place your order and wait for a preview to arrive–only to realize you can’t read it!

This is one of the most common Vistaprint complaints out there. That’s because people don’t always consider how a design will look on a 3.5-inch-by-2-inch card.

If you have small type in your logo, for example, keep that in mind when you scale it. It’s better to showcase something a little too big than something too small.

You’ll also want to make sure you go with white paper stock, unless you have planned ahead for what your design will look like printed on darker paper, like their brown Kraft paper stock.

This complaint is most common with customers who upload their own designs, so make sure your image is 300+ dpi and the text is clear!

2. My Colors Don’t Look How They Looked Online:

Color is one of the hardest things to visualize in the printing world. That’s because your computer doesn’t mix colors the same way ink does during a printing job.

On-screen, your colors are in RGB. They’re made up of light-emitting pixels of red (R), green (G), and blue (B) mixed up in different amounts.

In the printing world, colors are in CMYK. Printers create each hue by overlaying dots of cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K).

Some colors look roughly the same across RGB and CMYK, but light blue, green, and orange can change dramatically.

For the best results, use an online color converter to get the CMYK values you want. Make sure your final design is in CMYK, not RGB.

3. My Border Is Off-Center

Customer review: “Whoever stretched the canvas over the frame did not center them and it looked like a 3 year old did the work!” – John of New Castle PA

This is a common problem with custom designs. If your design goes all the way to the edge of the paper, you’ll need to design with bleeds to get it spaced right.

Most printers will include measurements for the bleed, trim, and margin. You need to meet these for your product to print correctly.

Here’s a quick primer:

• Bleed is how far your design should extend off the page. You won’t see this in your final product.
• Trim is where the printer will cut your design. Anything outside of the trim line will be cut off.
• Margin is the safe zone. All of your important elements need to be inside the margin.

It seems that a number of negative reviews could have been prevented if the customers had properly used the free design templates provided for each product.

4. The Paper Is Too Flimsy for What I Need:

Customer complaint: “The quality of the invitations was very cheap! Thin floppy paper was of the worst quality!” – Margaret of Tacoma, WA read more