Friday, March 04, 2011

Review: ColorfulImages.com

I was a little perturbed when I discovered that they will not allow reviews to be posted at their site for merchandise or products purchased. How come I didn't notice that before, when I ordered from them?

Here I will review two things: first the merchant then the products themselves. I will not be silenced!

The Merchant

I was actually pretty pleased with their service overall, outside of the lack of product reviews. I have placed two orders and both have since arrived in proper working order. If I had to voice two serious complaints, it would be the length of shipping time and the order status feature on the website. Let me explain.

Their website says, "Standard Delivery: 10-14 business days from the date we receive your order in most cases." The convenient out-clause is "in most cases." Then when they finally get around to shipping the order, they have this written on the email, "Please allow up to 2 weeks for standard delivery." So which is it? Two weeks from the day you order or two weeks from the day they ship? Let's look at how my last orders went.

My first order was made on 10/25/10. It wasn't shipped until 11/1/10 and it didn't arrive until 11/16/10.

My second order was made on 2/8/11. It wasn't shipped until 2/15/11 and arrived 2/18/11, I believe. I'm not certain on the arrival but I think it was fairly quickly once it was shipped.

The second problem is the totally useless Order Status feature on the website. I cannot fathom why they even bothered with it. You certainly cannot check the status of your order. Within a few days of both of my orders, I attempted to try to check on the status. I entered the required information on the form only to have it tell me that there was no such order. ??? Confused I emailed them about it. The reply, though timely (it was the next day), was upsetting. They said that the order status is only valid once it has been shipped. Yet, they email you when they ship it so I'm not sure I understand the whole point of the order status. It is entirely useless. If I get an email that it has been shipped, then why do I need to check the status? I already know the status.

Now on the subject of customer service, it is great. I sent them another question and like before, I got an answer back the next day. The subject of the matter was pricing. My catalog was significantly cheaper than their website price. Since I ordered online, I requested that the price be adjusted to equal that of the catalog and to my delight, they agreed. I cannot say anything bad about their customer service. That elated me.

All in all, I would definitely order from them again. I just wouldn't do it if I needed a gift in a hurry!

My Big Beef Product

Most of my orders have been just fine and I've been very pleased. Let me start with the one that I really am not happy with.

Our Family Personalized Address Stamp (item # 377508)
This is cute, so don't get me wrong. I like what it is. There are two main problems with it though.
  1. The address line font is absolutely too small.
  2. The margin for the stamp is absolutely too big.
Let's address these two problems individually. First is the address line font. When you are using a self-inking stamp, one rule of thumb is font size. It is never a good idea to make a self-inking stamp with tiny fonts. 99% of the time, they turn out completely illegible. That is the case with this one. The family is huge, the name is large but the important part, the actual address, is almost totally useless.

Let's do the measurements. The address line font is less than 1 mm wide. Can you believe that? They are right about 2 mm tall. Those are some tiny fonts! To test this in terms of computers, I went to my handy dandy word processor and printed some fonts in various sizes to match. The closest I can get is using New Times Roman in bold at 6 pts. A printer has trouble with fonts this small. Imagine a self-inking stamp!

The second problem is more of just an annoyance rather than rendering it pretty much useless as the first one did. The margins are huge, in relationship to the overall size. That makes it full of wasted space, space where they could have easily enlarged the address font size, but elected not to. Measuring from the outer frame to the widest part of the font is 1.5 cm. Now add that on all four sides. When I stamped a legal envelope, it was nearly 1/3 of the way inside the envelope. It looked incredibly stupid!

I must reiterate that this is only an annoyance. An easy fix for this was marking the edges of the frame where the stamp would land. Now all I have to do is line up my marks and press... HARD.

I also have to press it twice, so I do one stamp on a scratch sheet to dampen the stamp then I press on the envelope. It's really a pain and I am sick to death that I wasted my money on this stamp.

Other Products

My sister collects ladybug things. That said, I did a few orders with ladybugs and were very cute.

I got the ladybug magnet set, ladybug personalized mug and the ladybug sticky notes. The cup is adorable and more importantly, correct! All were very nice. I am very pleased with them. One thing I must mention however is that the sticky notes are very thin pads. It does say in the description that it's 30 sheets. Your standard stack on a sticky note pad is 100, now tear off 2/3 of those sheets on that standard pad. Your result is about the size of these pads. Still though, they're cute and they did clearly state the number of sheets you're getting.

The only other thing I've ordered are the mutt shots address labels, which are cute for dog lovers. I can't say how they turned out because I ordered them for my daughter. She said she was happy with them and loved them, so I guess that's your review!

I am considering buying the ladybug nightlight, but I'm not sure. I sure wish I had seen that before! I'm not sure I want more shipping. I may wait until I get something else.

So that's my review! Questions? Post them in the comments.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I will not purchase another thing from Colorful Images. Two years in a row now they have messed up my order for address labels at x-mas time. And yes, the shipping time is very lengthy.