Well its the end of the financial year again and we are busy ensuring all invoices etc have been entered into the accounts. We would prefer to be assisting customer with there plastic cards orders however unfortunately government regulations and forms beckon.

Hopefully the year end will not disrupt our working practices too much and we will be up running at full steam shortly.

Lets hope that in the new financial year the economy picks up for all our customers, we wish you all the best of luck (good management goes a long way!)

We have been producing passes for a show for a number of years now, they are a great customer to work with. Anyway, they have recently placed there annual order for plastic cards. The design changed a lot of some of the cards this year and in our opinion they look very professional yet modern. We produced the postal proofs as we do with all new designs and they confirmed that the cards looked great. They are gold passes after all, so really do need to look the part.

We receive a lovely email from the customer in question today which said “Just to say thank you for the passes that I received this morning”.

We would just like to say that you are more than welcome, we hope your event goes well and to speak with you next year.

When customers send us their artwork for plastic cards, unlike other plastic card printing companies, we check the artwork to ensure it is to the correct specification and that it will print ok.

If the customers artwork isn’t to the correct specification we either tell the customer this and ask them to send it to the correct specification or if we are able to fix the artwork, we do so free of charge, but we also advise the customer of this – just so they know.

Obviously, it takes time and resources for us to fix customers artwork, please see our artwork specifications

We have recently found that the majority of people who ask us to send a sample pack of cards, want the samples to look at the cards for ideas for designs.

Unfortunately, our sample packs don’t include many cards as the idea of them is to show the quality and finish of the cards.

So to assist both our customers and potential customers we have created this website which shows many different design examples for all the different card types that we produce.

We hope our customers and potential customers find this this website useful.

We intend to add more images to the website when we get a chance, but we don;t want to add too many as it may easily overwhelm anyone looking through it, we need to find a good balance.

Recently a customer placed an order for 500 frosted cards with blue, white and holoprint ink. We all though that this particular design looked wonderful and without any prompt the customer very nicely emailed the following to us:

“Just received my order from you and everything was perfect even though I have only had dealing’s with your company through e-mail I found your service very professional and efficient and I look forward to using your service’s in the near future.”

Its great to receive feedback and to to hear that they are a satisfied customer.

As always we welcome any feedback positive or negative – we always look to improve things where we can.

Hi all,

I just wanted to let you all know that we can produce plastic cards with holes or slots incorporated into them.

Customers find this useful when the plastic cards need to be hung up, for example some clubs will use them in the clock rooms. Often two sets of cards will be produced, one to give the customer and one to hang over the coat (both cards also have a sequential number printed on them to identify the customer and link the number to the coat).

Other customers use them as badges & use a clip to allow them to be attached to clothes.

We can offer holes and slot on all the full colour solid plastic cards.

Bye for now

We have been using good checkout for over a year to process payment for plastic cards orders. There has been teething troubles and we still don’t consider this the easiest online payment method however due to our adwords account we have benefited from free transaction processing.

However form the beginning of May 2009 the free transaction processing is being abolished and quite an extensive tier of pricing is being implement.

We like to offer our customers as many payment options as possible however the new charges google are planning to implement may rule this option out for us.

We have always thought it unfair to charge customer a surcharge for paying by credit cards however I guess if someone insists on paying via google checkout after May we may have to look at a surcharge.

Just a quick couple of tips for those of you with signature panels / write on strips, who seem to be having trouble actually writing on the strip. The following are reasons we know of:

Reason the pen may not work on the strip: Grease off fingers may cause a layer between the write on panel/signature panel and the pen – basically meaning than the ink can not stick to the strip.
How to resolve the issue: Try to handle the plastic cards with non greasy hands, you may need to wash your hands and try another card.

Reason the pen may not work on the strip: The pen you are using on the strips may have fibers on the end of it from use on laser/photocopied paper. Fiber build up can prevent the ink being released from the pen and/or the pen nib skidding across the signature panel.
How to resolve the issue: Wipe the nib of the pen with a clean cloth and try again

Reason the pen may not work on the strip: Perhaps its not a signature strip / write on panel at all! Maybe the customer never opted for one to be applied to their plastic cards – shame on you!
How to resolve the issue: Order plastic cards with strips in place next time!

Sorry I know that last one may not be very useful but just wanted to make sure you actually consider that this is a possibility!

We offer a sample pack free of charge to customer who have received a quote for plastic cards and wish to place an order.

We feel it is important for customers to be able to assess the quality of the plastic cards before they place an order. In additional some trade customers need samples to show there customers – in which case we are more then happy to post out unbranded sample cards.

The sample pack also ensures that the customer selects the right product for their needs. For example quotes may have been provided for the 420 micron plastic cards and on receiving the sample pack customers often decide that the 680 micron plastic cards are more suitable, as it is thicker and provides a more professional image.

We have found recently that we are receiving more and more request from people who simply want samples. These people do not seems to be interested in receiving a quote. We are thinking that people who are just looking for samples are merely looking for design ideas and are phoning a number of companies in the industry looking for ideas/free sample cards. In these cases we are apprehensive to post samples out as they do take time and money to prepare. In addition to this how can the customer know that they wish to place an order with us if they don’t know our prices! Quite often they do not even know how many cards they wish to order or simply don’t want to place an order at all, they are just looking for anything free that they can get there hands on!

Our website does show many photos and even video clips of previous designs we have printed and we are obviously fine for customers to peruse our website at there leisure.

It may unfortunately come down to charging for sample packs, not to make any additional money, just to cover the cost of them. We really don’t want to go down this route however the expense of producing sample packs is high and the return from producing and posting them is relatively low. One option may be for us to charge a nominal amount and refund this should an order be placed.

We are looking to update our website with more photos to help potential customers.

Any ideas to help this situation would be appreciated.

We can apply signature strips to plastic cards, these provide a useful tool so that members can sign the card. This is a good way for organisations to verify a members identity and also could provide the member a sense of belonging and ownership.

Signature strips are applied to the plastic cards using heat and pressure. This allows them to be written on with a ball point pen.

The signature strips can also be used to write additional useful information on, for example:

Membership number

Membership category

Date of Birth

Expiry date etc

We often refer to the signature strips as “write on panels / signature strips” as it is exactly the same product and material used for both, basically they are one and the same thing.

Customers will quite often have 2 or 3 strips on their cards to space out all the required information. This is fine and most of the time there is no additional cost for this. If you have any particular requirements please run them past us and we will happily provide a quotation.