Every now and then it's much easier to pay a little more for convenience. This week it was greeting cards on the list of things that I needed urgently. I initially thought that I'd take a PDF to one of the local print shops and have them create the cards for me. I spent a lot of time messing around with various MS Word and Photoshop templates ultimately didn't trust that what I'd produced was what a printer would need. I looked for an Avery template for cards, but none seemed to be quite what I wanted. I didn't have time to get a proof to ensure my templates were right. (I briefly wished that I had MS Publisher--which I know does exactly this kind of thing very well.) So I opted for an online service that would allow me to upload individual images for each part of the card (instead of making print-ready PDF artwork with crop marks). The process of finding a printer took as much time as I'd spent on the templates. And then it took me as much time again to test each of the three services I found to see if they'd do what I wanted. Hours and hours and hours of time. Not "wasted" but not necessarily efficiently used either.

My printing requirements were as follows: I needed 50 5x7" greeting cards with full colour front, printed greeting on the inside, and image credit printed on the back of the card. My delivery requirements were equally limiting: had to be shipped from within Canada and needed to arrive within the week. I would have liked to have no printer branding on the card, but this did not seem to be an option for any of the print on demand (POD) services that I reviewed. All put some kind of company mark on the back of the card. I suppose I could cover over this with a sticker, but I'd prefer just paying an extra dollar or two to have no mark added.

I looked at the following services (links go to their greeting card options):

• Cafe Press Canada
• Vista Print Canada
• Zazzle Canada

Each of these companies is the Canadian division of a larger company. There were other print shops in Canada that I could have used, and there were other POD print shops that were not located in Canada. You may have other suggestions that could have met my requirements. I'd be delighted if you left them in the comments. For example, I've also been very pleased with Moo.com. But they didn't meet (1) my size requirement for the greeting card or (2) ship from within Canada.

From these three companies I set up a sample card using the company's Web-based system. I opted to create images for the inside text as well as I'm a little bit fussy about fonts. Even though the instructions said not to change the compression of the images, I ended up spending multiple hours fighting with the online tools and ended up having to reduce my files to get under 2M per image. I found Vista Print had the most options, but it also hung the most and I never made it to the end of the card creation process. Cafe Press doesn't print on the back of the card, so they were out too...which left Zazzle. Even though I had problems with Zazzle freezing my browser while trying to upload photos, they were fine once I'd reduced the size of the image.

Although Zazzle has free shipping to mid-December, I opted to go with their FedEx shipping (add $11) because of my time constraints. I completed the cards last night and I expect to have them by Monday or Tuesday of next week. My total bill was $125 for 50 cards ($2.50 per card, includes an envelope). I typically spend $5/card on "art cards" so this was a reasonable price. Yes, I could have gotten something cheaper if I'd spent the time to go to a "real" printer instead of a POD print company; however, the convience was worth the price. Hopefully the cards show up on time and are of a reasonable quality.

If you've got other experiences with POD companies, I'd love to hear them.