Alternative to cardstore.com?

December 5, 2007 8:38 PM

What is the best alternative to cardstore.com for custom photo cards and addressing capabilities? The Christmas joy of our friends and family depends on you!

For the past three years we have been making our Christmas cards on cardstore.com. The quality is good and all of our addresses are imported there from a spreadsheet with customizable fields. I usually had them stamp, address, and send the cards out (and before you say "oh how impersonal!", people universally love our cards, especially the funny ones - we follow a funny card/historic card cycle).

I don't want to use something else because I had everything set up nicely, but this year I'm getting errors when trying to upload images and the whole site just seems wonky. I haven't changed anything on my end. I've always used Macs to access the site and nothing is different about my network. I tried both Firefox and Safari and tried uploading different images. Nothing works.

I'm going to contact their help line to see what's up, but maybe there is another, better service that I'm overlooking. Can you recommend any card service that:

1) Lets me upload a custom image for the front.
2) Lets me customize the interior (ideally would let me upload a inner photo, but if not, would let me alter both sides of the interior).
3) Stamps, addresses, and mails cards without my intervention.
4) Lets me upload info directly from a spreadsheet to populate the address database (this is the big pain since we have a long list of people).

Preferable you have first-hand knowledge of the quality of the cards and service. I'm used to these things going out like clockwork with cardstore.

Please help us or else there will be a new Rankin-Bass special... "The Year Without Stef's Christmas Card".

posted by stefnet to computers & internet (2 comments total)

I know winkflash.com lets you do the first two options - I just got back the cards I created for the holidays and they turned out quite nicely.

As for #3 and #4 - do you have any local kids you can bribe to do some labeling?
posted by cajo at 6:49 AM on December 6, 2007

Answering my own question a bit, but I welcome any other responses for next year...

I ended up going with Zazzle this year. It let me easily customize all sides of the card. I'll just do the labeling and stamps myself. No big deal.

It also seems like Cardstore is magically working again, so I may continue to use them in the future. Zazzle actually met my design needs better this year as the inside graphic was important as well (we're recreating a local company's Christmas card from many years ago), whereas Cardstore only lets you put text inside.
posted by stefnet at 8:27 AM on December 6, 2007