Printingdirect rocks

We use Printingdirect.com for our printing. I have been reminded recently how good they are by an unfortunate foray into another printing company's world.

You might notice we won an award sponsored by Sage (the Sage Business Awards). As well as fame and honour, that prize also got £1,000 of Sage products. Now we don't use Sage software (we don't, frankly, think it is very good. QuickBooks is, in our opinion, a much better product than Sage Line 50, or whatever they call their SME package these days). So we dithered for ages deciding how we could spend our free money - then Sage kindly pointed out that they also do printing (mainly for customised invoices and stuff, that are compatible with Sage software). So we asked to please do us a bunch of feedback cards and flyers up to the value of £1,000. That was back in October 06.

There then followed a painful, six-week-long process of proofing and re-proofing and me chasing and chasing, and then the items arrived. The feedback card had a typo on it (my name was spelt wrong!); and the flyer was printed on horrid, flimsy, shiny paper.

Sage offered to reprint everything, and it eventually arrived some time in December, a good two months after we ordered it.

Was this just because they were doing it for "free" (not really free of course, they got plenty of publicity from sponsoring those awards)? Or is their service always like that?

It contrasts starkly with printingdirect. We just received some new letterhead from them, and the process was as follows:

- Log on to website
- Find last order of letterhead
- Click "Re-order"
- Arrives 5 days later

Total management time required? About 2 minutes. Total management time required to manage that Sage order? About 4hrs.