If you are looking to print business cards for your business then be careful about using services that offer “free business cards”.

There are two things to point out to you about these so called “free business cards” and the first is to be careful of companies like Vistaprint! We needed business cards in one of my businesses and our manager at the time recommended Vistaprint tome. My manager told me that the cards are free, so I thought why not and agreed to let her go ahead and order some “Free” cards – well we did pay for them because we wanted to add some extra services.

The cards arrived, but and a BIG BUT – my business card started to get charged with £9.95 per month for some kind of subscription service, which I am still not sure what this is.

When we contacted Vistaprint, which was not an easy thing to do in the first place, as they seem to make it incredibly difficult for customers to make direct contact, they agreed to cancel the subscription and did originally offer to refund the money already paid out. However, nothing of the sort happened and I felt that I was simply told a lie, I also feel that this was simply a delay tactic so that they could then take yet more £9.95 payments. Vistaprint never did cancel the direct debit and when we tried to make contact again we found it impossible to do so – they also never repaid the monies taken from my bank that were never knowingly agreed to in the first place!

The only way to cancel this was to contact our bank directly, who stopped any future payments, however, we were left out of pocket and no refund was made. What apparently happens is that when you register for the free cards, if you want to upgrade the business cards, if for example, you want to have then delivered more quickly, then you pay for this using a credit card. Vistprint then automatically subscribe you to this £9.95 per month charge and you only find out when you get your next bank or credit card statement.

To me this is a shoddy practice and to be blunt - it is a “Scam” – if you type in “Vistaprint scam” to a search engine you will see many websites listed telling you not to use Vistaprint and quite frankly I agree with this. I would certainly never recommend a company like this and would never ever use them again!

The secondary reason for not using “Free Business Cards” is that when you give them out to other business people they look “Free” and people get to know the designs used by these companies – so you look “Cheap” in front of other business people. It is much better to have your own corporate ID and logo on your own business card design, which in most cases does not usually cost the earth to produce when you use a reputable printing company.