Yikes, stay away from VistaPrint for business cards

[aphex]

They had a good deal on business cards with a trialpay offer so I figured 500 full color cards for $4.99 was a great deal for a business I had been thinking about starting. All in all it came to like $8-9 shipped and I got a free copy of PlayOn with it ($40 program). Well I received them about two weeks ago, and the cards are actually much nicer than I expected.

Anyway, today I get a voicemail from Ameriprise Financial saying he had my business card in front of him (He read the name and my info on the phone) and that I had entered a drawing and won a free $25 giftcard . I had a friend who used to work for Ameriprise, so I know its a ploy to get you into their office to sign up for their service.

What I find odd is that I've yet to give a single card out to ANYONE and the company name is new (I came up with it a day or two before ordering) as is my home phone number, so either VistaPrint just sold my info to them, or actually sent them one of my cards. Either way, its annoying.

So I go poking around on their website and come across their Privacy and Security policy - http://www.vistaprint.com/cust...vacy-and-security.aspx

Use and Disclosure of Information:
We use the information that we collect about you to maintain, improve, and administer our Website, operate our business, provide products and services that you request, administer your account, inform you about products and services that might be of interest to you, and personalize your online experience.
In order to carry out certain business functions, such as order fulfillment, e-mail delivery, or marketing, we sometimes hire other companies to perform services on our behalf. We may disclose Personal Information that we collect about you to these companies to enable them to perform these services, but they are required to safeguard the Personal Information and are not authorized to use it for any other purpose than completing their contractual requirements to VistaPrint. For example, as a part of the normal process of completing your purchase, VistaPrint may provide your Personal Information to a third party payment processor, such as Bibit B.V., depending on your chosen method of payment. Please be aware that, because of the limitations of the systems used by some financial institutions, the statement you receive from your credit card or financial institution may show the name of a third party payment processor, such as Bibit B.V., instead of or in addition to the VistaPrint name. In addition, we may share the Personal Information we collect with other companies with whom we have joint marketing arrangements.
If you check the applicable box on registration or in updating your account, VistaPrint may also share Personal Information about you such as your name, telephone number, e-mail address, and/or mailing address with carefully selected third-party organizations such as retailers or direct marketers to enable those organizations to inform you about products or services that might be of interest to you. If you do not wish to have your Personal Information shared with these organizations, simply do not check the applicable box on the registration form or on the ?Account Update? page on our Website

In my account, I indeed had opted out when I registered from getting any third party offers (and my account shows this when I log in), but it seems they don't care anyway.

Just a word of warning, stay away from VistaPrint.

 

[SunnyD]

Hahaha.. my wife made this mistake once.

 

[FDF12389]

Originally posted by: SunnyD
Hahaha.. my wife made this mistake once.

So did my brother

 

[ViviTheMage]

yikes, thanks for the heads up

 

[LilPima]

That stinks dude, sorry

 

[Kaido]

That's pretty shady, but we've been pretty happy with our VistaPrint cards for the last two or three years. They come out great and are cheap. I already get marketing spam anyway, so a little more won't hurt

 

[DrPizza]

We've placed multiple orders with VistaPrint & have actually spent a couple hundred there over the last couple years. "VistaPrint" is not on anything that they've made for us. And, I've had absolutely no problems with spam due to them. We've been quite pleased with everything we've received from them.

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: DrPizza
We've placed multiple orders with VistaPrint & have actually spent a couple hundred there over the last couple years. "VistaPrint" is not on anything that they've made for us. And, I've had absolutely no problems with spam due to them. We've been quite pleased with everything we've received from them.

Same here, we used them for engagement party invites, our "rehearsal" dinner invites, and several other parties. No problem with solicitation or spam that I know of.

Now if I can just figure out how those "auto insurance renewal" fuckers got my cell # (no, I never gave vista print my cell #).

 

[Crono]

I hate companies that sell your information to other companies, but don't make it very very clear that they will do so.
That said, I haven't had any problems ordering from Vista Print before (ordered black t-shirts from them in the past).
Thank you for the heads up.

 

[Newbian]

So how is this different then anytime you sign up for anything online?

 

[biggestmuff]

So, someone called you?