Pros & Cons
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- Same-day service.
- Excellent card-design interface.
- Good print quality.
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- Fewer cardstock and shape options than the competition.
Staples Print & Marketing Services Specs
| Cheapest Shipping | $0 |
| Same-Day Pickup | |
| Starting Price for 100 Cards | $9.99 |
Even though the world is slowly moving on from paper, businesspeople still need business cards. And if you need your business cards today, you have one good, inexpensive option: Staples Print & Marketing Services lets you order and pick them up on the same day at a local Staples store. The online business card printer has one of the best design tools we've tested, and it delivers good-quality cards, too. You don't get all the fancy options that the shipped card services like MOO and Vistaprint offer, and some of Staples' prices are a tad higher than the competition's, but same-day service is a big plus.
Pricing and Starting Up
A reasonable $9.99 gets you 250 cards, and for just $14.99, you get a generous 500 business cards or two-sided printing on 250 cards from Staples. If you order by 2 p.m, you can pick your business cards up in-store on the same day for no extra charge. The only cheaper options are GotPrint, which starts at $8.30 for 100 cards; and PSPrint, which starts at $8.06 for 50 cards on glossy C1S 14-pt. stock. If you buy 500 cards from GotPrint, your per-card cost is less than 2 cents! That compares with 4 cents for Vistaprint, 3.3 cents at PSPrint, a whopping 25 cents for MOO, and 3 cents at Staples.
Staples doesn't offer unusual shapes for business cards, not even the square format offered by most competitors. Forget rounded corners, slimline shapes, special or recycled cardstocks, and particularly MOO's NFC card option. Staples' raised print option raises the price to $49.99 for 250 cards, and the Executive option, printed on 80 lb. card stock, increases it to $34.99. Ultra Thick cards start at $45.99 for 50, which is pricey, compared with PSPrint's 120 lb. Ultra cards, which cost $36.50 for the same count. Vistaprint's top-end 16 pt. Soft Touch cards cost $36 for 250.
Other Print Services From Staples
Staples Print & Marketing Services offers a lot more than business card printing. The company can also produce manuals, banners, brochures, postcards, labels, name tags, and calendars. Non-paper custom-printed products are also available, including apparel, drinkware, USB thumb drives, headphones, and phone accessories, though many of the options aren't available for in-store pickup. The company offers direct mail services, as well.
Unlike GotPrint, PSPrint, and Vistaprint, Staples doesn't offer professional design services, so you have to hire someone or do your own designing.
Designing Your Cards
Staples lets you upload a card design in JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, or PNG format, with the latter recommended. You can even send the design straight from your Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive cloud storage.
If you design your cards on the Staples website, you can choose from a well-categorized range of templates ranging from Agriculture to Marketing to Wedding Planning. The templates are among the more stylish I've seen among online business card services, with only MOO's being even more cutting-edge.
The card design interface is among the best I've tested. It's simple and clear, with just four left-sidebar choices, for Add Text, Add Image, Add Icon, and Format. You can move text or image boxes around wherever you want, but lines show you the safe zone, trim line, and bleed area. If you have an image or color that you want to run all the way to the edge of the card, you overlap the bleed area. You can hide this if you prefer, and download a PDF of your creation for closer inspection at any time.
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The icon selection is generous, with well-stocked categories for Animals, Sports, Nature, Business and a dozen more. You can add your own images either by uploading them or grabbing them from your Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive online storage. You can even drag and drop images from a File Explorer window onto the Staples uploader panel. Unfortunately, there's not a QR code generator like those offered by MOO and Vistaprint.
As with Vistaprint, when you move a text or image box around in the Staples designer, guidelines appear to help you perfectly line them up with other content on the card. This minor-seeming detail is a real differentiator, as competing services like GotPrint and PSPrint leave you to line up the boxes by eyeball.
The Format menu simply offers color options available for the card theme chosen. In most cases, there are only a couple of choices, but if you're dead set on having a black background with white text, this is where you make that selection. Undo and Redo arrows are conveniences found in most services' designers, but are indeed welcome here.
The last steps in finishing your order are to choose the delivery method, paper type, and quantity options. You can choose Standard or Premium in Matte or Gloss surface for your cardstock. For my card template, the Ultra Thick option was unavailable, but some card designs allow that one. Quantity choices are 250, 500, and 1000. Store Pickup adds nothing to the purchase price, but the lowest-cost shipping option is $9.95 for ground shipping that takes two weeks. Vistaprint economy shipping costs about half that, at $4.99 for 8-day Economy shipping.
Clockwise from top left: MOO, Vistaprint, Staples, GotPrint, PSPrint. Click to enlarge.
Pickup and Print Quality
Soon after placing my order and specifying pickup at a nearby Staples location, I received an email and a phone call from the local staff saying that they didn't have the paper stock I'd selected, even though the site made it appear to be available for local pickup. The rep told me that the order with my chosen cardstock would be available two business days later, or I could switch to glossy cardstock to get same day pickup. Not a huge inconvenience, but a slight disappointment nevertheless.
When I went to pick up the cards, after a short wait in line the staff handed me the box of test business cards. Staples print job on my test set was excellent, with the navy blue of a logo very dark and filled in. The print quality is superior to that of GotPrint and PSPrint, though Vistaprint does a better job with the logo colors. The text on the Staples cards is ever so slightly raised and glossy, which does make it sharp, but some customers may not want that appearance. The cardstock on my test cards is also somewhat thinner than Vistaprint's entry-level order.
Business Cards Now!
If you need your business cards immediately, Staples is your best bet. Furthermore, the service's design tools are excellent, and the print quality is very good. If you can wait a bit longer, however, you'll get slightly better quality and more options if you order from PCMag's online business card printing service Editors' Choice, Vistaprint.
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Final Thoughts
Staples Print & Marketing Services
If you need your cards today, Staples is a good option, with excellent online design tools and printing quality.