Online Printers for Greeting Cards and Invitations

Here's our experience with online printers for high-quality greeting cards and invitations based on selection, cost, ease of use and card quality. What started out as an article to recommend online printers has become a cautionary tale. Bottom line, expect to maybe save some money over a local printer but give yourself plenty of time for the online printer to fail and fail again.

Minted

With maybe the nicest, most up-to-date designs and largest selection overall, Minted has probably the biggest selection plus great card quality and outstanding design leave no doubt that Minted is one of the Best Online Printers. But they come with maybe the highest prices. And although you can pay wedding invitation prices for cards here, if your invite isn't for a wedding, Minted will refused to remove their logo from their envelope AND your invite.

Mixbook

Mixbook was our choice based on much better pricing than Minted or Paperless Post with solid designs. Then we had the experience of four fails out of four attempts to print the order correctly. The user interface for adjusting your card message or design leaves some things to be desired but is workable. You may find yourself having to add extra text elements to get the typography the way you like or eyeballing alignment on some small text changes. We're waiting on some invitations from them now so I promise we'll update this upon receipt. Their price is compelling and they offer real gold foil on some of their designs (we were never able to receive our order with the gold foil detail from Mixbook – see the updates below. Thus zero stars for card quality.).

Update on our Mixbook experience: We received the cards in a timely fashion and they look good but they're missing a rose gold foil detail. This prompted us to discover that Mixbook doesn't have a support phone number on their website. So used the online chat and were promptly promised a new set of cards to be sent out on Monday. We called on Saturday about the invitations so this seemed great. It's Monday and we hadn't heard from Mixbook. Found their phone number on the original email confirmation and called support and got their voicemail with a message saying that their mailbox was full. Called back as a new customer and got someone on the line. Our new cards will go out today we're told. Dropped half a star in the ease-of-use rating.

Another update on our Mixbook Experience: So unfortunately Mixbook was never able to complete our order correctly. Each time they rushed it out to us again and again missing the rose gold foil detail. Four times in all. We tried calling Mixbook but their custom support voicemail was full. We choose "new customer" in their phone tree and once talked to someone. They rushed the order out incorrectly again. Subsequent attempts at phone contact all went to voicemail. We tried to contact them via Twitter and were told to email them. We did and received the order from Mixbook incorrectly again. Finally we decided to work with a local printer and requested a full refund from Mixbook over chat. They agreed and we're waiting for the refund.

Zazzle

The amazing prices and selection on Zazzle add them to a list of the best online printers. In fact their selection is so large, it can be a little hard to find what you want at times. The design quality may not hit the level of Minted but by their prices are excellent. Really excellent with the sales they seem to run daily. But beware, if your design requires expert cutting you might want to leave yourself time to send them back for another run. Zazzle has always stood behind their products and fixed any issues but the issues seem to rise more often than with other online card makers.

Roll Your Own Card or Invite Design

In another category, if you're just looking for fresh designs and you'll roll your own design to the printer, you can of course hire an independent designer or take a look at the designs on:

• Creative Market
• Graphic River
• Inkd
• Etsy

Of course you may need your own vector design software, yes, Illustrator to set them up unless you go with Etsy on Canva. Many designers on Etsy are happy to setup your card or invitation to your design specifications.

Check out our digital resources page for our recommendation on the highest quality and most reliable printer for business cards.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska from unsplash