Amazon Prints helps you save money on photo cards by being the least expensive service on the market. You won’t have as many envelope or card options as other services and finding the winter holiday selection is tricky. However, the free shipping and low cost cards can definitely make up for the limitations.
Whenever you spend $15 dollars or more on an order, shipping is free. The smallest number of cards you can purchase is 25 and even with the least expensive paper choice, you will always get free shipping. You can also pay $13.99 for express shipping if you need to receive your order quickly. Just keep in mind that your order still needs to get processed for a couple days before it can ship. There is no large quantity discount, but considering how cheap the order is to begin with, this doesn’t change things much. This service did charge tax for our order. As a note, the tax cost will change depending on the state you live in.
This service only gave us one card option: 120 lb cardstock. It is much sturdier than many of the other cards we purchased and isn’t likely to get bent or creased in the mail. Our testers noted that the envelope was nothing special but was nicer than some of the others we received. As far as print quality goes, the images came out a little grainy, which isn’t unusual for cardstock but the coloring was accurate and pleasant-looking. The small text on the bottom of the card printed clearly, as well. The card we selected is double sided and features a gold and white striped design that compliments the gold lettering on the front. Amazon Prints’ logo doesn’t appear anywhere so it won’t distract from your creation.
The biggest problem I had with Amazon Prints was locating the winter holiday cards. If you attempt to open the photo card section the only winter photo cards you’ll find are Christmas tree ornaments. Additionally, clicking on the holiday section only shows Easter and Spring cards. If you attempt to type Christmas into the search bar you’ll come up empty handed.
To get to the library of Christmas cards from the Amazon Prints home page, click on “Design Your Own” under the “Cards” section on the left. When the next page opens, click on the Amazon Prints logo in the top middle of the screen and then select “Designs for any occasion”. It’s a bit of a hassle that has something to do with a backend linking error and we hope Amazon will correct this soon. While this is annoying and played a role in making Amazon Prints rank lower in our evaluation, the nice designs and cheap cost of the cards still makes this a good service to use.
When we finally found the Winter Holiday cards, we discovered a nice selection of designs and graphics to choose from. Upon selecting a design, I found the interface easy to use and navigate. Amazon Prints warned me when my images were too low resolution to print well and made the creation process easy. You cannot choose to have different colored envelopes or envelope linings. You also won’t be able to print recipient’s addresses on the cards or have Amazon mail them for you.
Unless Amazon Prints’ other holiday cards are hiding in a similar fashion to the winter holiday ones, we didn’t find that it covered as many holidays as other services. We did find a host of Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving and New Years cards. As far as special occasions go there were plenty of wedding, save the date, birth announcement, graduation and birthday cards to choose from. Fortunately, these cards were easy enough to find from the start.
You cannot order these photo cards for same day pickup as this service is not tied to a physical store. If you need your cards in a hurry and want them cheap, consider purchasing from Walmart Photo. To narrow your search when looking through Amazon Prints’ library of cards you can add a photo quantity filter, and photo orientation filter, which in this case doubles as a size filter. It did take a little longer than most of the other services - 7 business days - for our order to arrive, so account for that when planning your delivery.
Amazon Prints offers the cheapest photo cards of any service we tested. Since the company provides free shipping for orders over $15 you will never have to pay shipping when ordering a pack of cards. The image quality wasn’t the best but it definitely wasn’t terrible either. Our cards had decent coloring, but since the only paper options is cardstock the images don’t appear as crisp as other services’ cards.
