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Simply to Impress Review: Custom Photo Cards and Invitations |
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| Solid, classic selection and good design tool, high-quality printing and packaging make this a strong choice; very responsive customer service | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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With a strong focus on presentation and packaging, Simply to Impress surprised us with the quality of its cards and the responsiveness of its customer support staff. Though we were initially a little hesitant, the service definitely earned its place as one of our favorites for custom photo cards.
Shopping and Selection Simply to Impress offers a fairly wide selection of paper products, including invitations, thank you cards, holiday cards and birth announcements. The company does not produce full wedding invitations, but does offer a large inventory of bridal shower and engagement party invitations, save the date cards and wedding announcements to choose from. We also noticed a strong focus on products for parents and kids, including birth announcements, birthday party invitations and thank you notes geared for children. In general, designs are attractive and modern, and include many photo options. Simply to Impress produces a wide range of designs with space for several photos. Organizationally, the site is split into categories, which works pretty well but isn't perfect. We couldn't find a few things in the tabs across the top that we later stumbled upon in the sidebar. Within the categories, filters at the side allow users to narrow in on the card they want by specifying a number of photos, card shape, and one or more dominant colors. Design Tool Simply to Impress offers a pretty standard design tool. Though not quite as smooth as some, the tool loads quickly and uploads pictures easily. It does a good job remembering all your projects if you're designing more than one card at a time, and keeps uploaded photos available to all card projects. Simply to Impress has all the basic design features, including fairly intuitive drag and drop editing for words and pictures. While you can drag pictures to reposition them, you must use the site's zoom tool to move in and crop rather than our preferred method of clicking and pulling at the image's corner to resize it. You can move blocks of text around, edit all the text fields, and change font and color to make a design work with your pictures. Though most elements, like blocks of text, are moveable, not all can be adjusted. Graphics and other design features are often fixed, which makes Simply to Impress's designs a little less adaptable than some of the sites we tested. Some photos may not work with a given template, depending on where the subjects are in the frame and the relative light or darkness of the areas underneath text boxes. Those working with just one favorite photo may find their options a little curtailed by this common design tool flaw. Proofing If you'd like assistance customizing your card, you can request further custom design work from a professional designer with Simply to Impress for a customization fee of $25. The designer will provide you with a digital proof of your customizations within 48 hours, and you can then request further tweaks. If you'd just like to see a physical proof of your own customizations, you can order a proof to be mailed to you for $5. Simply to Impress does not offer a separate sample service, but instead suggests that you design your card and order a physical proof if you'd like to see a sample. Delivery Simply to Impress offers three shipping options within the United States, three for shipping to Canada, and two international options. All shipping prices are flat rate, and apply no matter how many cards you order. The turnaround times we list here include two days of processing time. If you need your cards even sooner, you can select Rush Printing Service for an additional $9.99, which will subtract one day from your delivery time. With Rush Printing Service and Overnight delivery within the United States, you could have your order within 2 business days.
We chose Standard shipping, and our package from Simply to Impress arrived via FedEx two business days after we placed our order, a very quick turnaround. The packaging from Simply to Impress was, well, impressive. When we opened the plain white cardboard box, we found an elaborately printed green box, complete with the Simply to Impress logo. Inside the box were our cards, along with a note from Simply to Impress about our reordering options. Even the inside of this box was printed with a festive fireworks design. Paper Quality Simply to Impress offers four paper options for all of its cards, with a fifth paper available for some designs.
We ordered our Simply to Impress cards on the matte card stock. The card stock was on the lighter end of the range we saw in our testing, but the card still felt substantial. It did curl slightly, rather than sitting perfectly flat, but the paper texture worked well, both for printing our photograph and design and for writing. Printing Quality Our Simply to Impress cards were printed on both the front and the back for no extra charge, and the color and quality looked good. We noticed that our family picture came out a little more green on the Simply to Impress cards than it had on any of the others we'd ordered with the same photo file. This is probably a result of their printer's color profiles, and while it stands out amid a collection of cards made from the same picture, most people probably wouldn't notice the effect if they'd just ordered from Simply to Impress. It's certainly not a major flaw. Aside from looking just a touch too green, the quality of the photo printing on our Simply to Impress card was among the best we've seen, with very high resolution and good contrast. Text also looked crisp and accurate. The design we chose came out looking just like it had in the previews, and is attractive and polished in person, without smudges or other printing flaws. All Simply to Impress cards are printed on a digital offset printer. Customer Service Phone and live chat support are available from Simply to Impress Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. CST, or you can submit a question via email with their contact form. When we mistakenly ordered a square card and got in touch with Simply to Impress customer service via their web chat, we were initially impressed with the quality of the attention we received. The agent was efficient and friendly, and she seemed well-informed. She even offered to modify our order by changing the template to make the card a 5x7 inch rectangle with no change in the price per card. We ended the interaction on a positive note. A day later, however, we received an email from the same customer service representative asking for permission to charge our card a $25 customization fee for changing the design to a rectangular shape. To their credit, when we explained this concern to Simply to Impress, they had no problem letting us cancel the order and put in a new one with a rectangular template. Although we did finally get this wrinkle ironed out, we were a little put off by having a fee tagged on after the fact, rather than having it explained up front by the agent. However, support representatives were very responsive by both chat and email, and we appreciated having the problem fixed so quickly. Pricing While not quite as upscale an option as Minted, Simply to Impress is near the top of the price range for the cards we ordered. We did notice a lot of nice extras with our order, from the impressive packaging to free printing on the back and attractive design options and responsive customer service. Simply to Impress currently offers a 20% discount to NextAdvisor visitors who click through to their site from any NextAdvisor link, so remember to take advantage of this great deal. The site has a relatively high minimum order size of 25 cards for all products except invitations, which carry a minimum order of 15. Simply to Impress offers increasing discounts for bulk orders up to 250 cards. This chart contains pricing information for the least expensive 5 by 7 inch flat card printed on card stock from this site. Different sizes and options may have different pricing. Click here for more information about how we compared prices.
Conclusion With a more classic selection than our other top-rated options, Simply to Impress earns points for its comparatively low prices, stylish packaging and responsive customer service. Ultimately, we were very happy with the cards we ordered from this site. Go to Simply to Impress | Compare to Other Custom Photo Card Sites |
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