I've used Shutterfly, an online service that prints jpegs that have been uploaded into various formats, for a couple of years now, and for the most part I've been pleased. The products - a small poster of shots from my trip to Belgium, and calendars for 2008 and 2009 showing views of the area where I live - are of good quality. The colors are true and bright, the stock on which they're printed is sturdy, and the overall effect is very nice. The problem I have with this service is the complicated procedure required to place orders or re-order products.
Two steps are required to complete an order: purchase of a pre-paid plan (or putting money in the bank) and ordering particular products (charged against the money in the bank). These steps aren't clear on the web page. As a result, I've had to contact them directly to make sure that what I was doing was what I wanted to do. Well, this time I'm even less happy about having to do that. It seems that I duplicated my request to purchase a pre-paid plan, and I didn't specify which product I wanted. After about half an hour on the phone waiting and trying to understand the woman with the heavy Indian accent, I was transferred to Michael who assured me that he cancelled the duplicate request and who walked me through ordering more copies of this coming year's calendar. He also showed me a few tips about how to determine what funds I had left and how many calendars I could still order with those funds. Great! I double checked that Shutterfly had only one of my two orders documented and the amount of money left in the account was appropriately small. Good. Then I went to my bank's web page, logged in and... both charges were still listed there. As of two minutes ago, after checking four more times, I still see both amounts charged to my account. Something is rotten in the state of Shutterfly!
As of this moment, I am NOT a happy camper. I've written several emails to them with no response. I may need to channel this energy fueled by exasperation into a phone call or two or three until I get my funds back in my bank account. This is NOT the end of this story; at the same time, it IS the reminder that just when I think I get how to use the internet to my advantage, I realize how very wrong I can be.
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2 comments:
Have you tried any of the other services like Snapfish?
I've seen a Snapfish calendar published by someone else, and I wasn't thrilled with the quality of the stock on which it was printed. Maybe next time around I'll search a little more extensively, even locally, to see who else might produce a good quality calendar.
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