On Tuesday, July 21, I ordered 2 T-shirts for myself from VistaPrint.cz and 1 mug for my brother’s birthday. Payment was possible only in advance, either by bank transfer, by card or via PayPal. That alone gave me pause, because I still have it in my head that a shop like that isn’t trustworthy, but probably the very next day I understood the reason. 2 items were shipped that same day, the 3rd T-shirt only the following day: https://cl.ly/c4Ee . On July 22 I called the customer hotline of VistaPrint, which fortunately had a Czech number and was fully in Czech. To give you some context, this company apparently has its headquarters in the Netherlands and otherwise operates in many, mostly large, European countries, but also on other continents (from this I know that they also have a warehouse in the USA, because the lady on the hotline apologized that she didn’t know when my order would arrive, since there had been a fire in the Dutch warehouse, and that in the worst case the T-shirts would ship from America.).
That’s probably why it couldn’t be sent cash on delivery, since it travels across half of Europe. I told the lady that the mug was urgent and that it needed to be here by August 27 at the latest, and she said she would send the T-shirts separately within the 5 days I had paid for in shipping, and the mug even faster at their own expense – it was supposed to arrive in 3 days. I don’t know whether she got it mixed up, for example because she misunderstood me, because when I was ordering more goods today, there were already more shipping options; the express option cost a whopping CZK 405, but it guarantees delivery within 2, at most 3 days.
The slowest is Economy, which estimates delivery within about 17 days of ordering. They sent my first T-shirt by Express at their own expense – they printed it on July 22, and on July 24 I already had it at home, so I would like to thank VistaPrint for a truly accommodating and costly gesture that I didn’t even expect, because we hadn’t agreed on it. The mug was supposed to be here on July 24, but on July 24 the UPS.com website showed that only the delivery date had changed, to July 27.
The T-shirt went with GLS, which also delivered it in 5 business days, that is, today, July 27. So I paid for one shipment at CZK 180 and got 3 shipments, one of them worth CZK 405. The mug has 2 photos, but the second one shows my brother, so I won’t be showing it to you – he hates it when I talk about him online or post his photo anywhere. One T-shirt has been washed and isn’t 100% dry yet. Preshrunk cotton feels rougher to the touch, while ring-spun cotton is truly as light as a feather.