Plus Shipping Costs

For Christmas I gave various different family members a calendar of my photos (ever to my surprise this always goes down well). To create my 2013 calendar I used Vistaprint. They are very good - all I have to do is upload the photos onto their website, choose the exact format I want and the delivery address. However, their pricing strategy is annoying.

The headline figure to print one calendar is £7.

I wanted 7, which cost about £4 per calendar. So far, so good. They encouraged me to buy in bulk.

The bad news...

These prices did not include shipping costs. Or VAT. But by the time I had discovered this, I had already invested too much time and effort on the Vistaprint website to bother going elsewhere. So I paid up the additional £20. Yes, £20.

Conclusion: Vistaprint cleverly induced me to use their product with a low headline price, but I finished the transaction in a bitter state of mind; reducing the likelihood that I would use Vistaprint again. Keeping customers can be hard when you follow the surcharge strategy.