With their wide collection of customisable, personalised gifts available that range from mugs and coasters to tote bags, tee shirts and cushions, Printcious is a great solution if you are looking for gifts for special occasions such as wedding anniversaries, baby showers, birthdays, and more.

Their name short for Printing Of Your Precious Gifts, Printcious is a B2C (business to consumer) platform where customers can easily tailor their own customised gifts by opting for the product design, picture and text that they want.

Ordering From Printcious

I recently had the opportunity to test out Printcious’ services, ordering a variety of goods from their website.

The price range of the different products that are available on the Printcious website range from S$8 to S$50 depending on what you pick.

A Lot of Choices

When I had first headed to the Printcious website, I have to admit that I had a rather hard time choosing what items I should buy, basically because of the sheer variety of items that were available. So it took me a while to zoom in on the products that I had wanted.

But that said, the layout of the various products on the site is quite clear, with headings and sub-headings categorising the products available, so I did not have any trouble figuring out how the website works.

As well, too, for people who want to customise gifts for say, their partners, parents or children, but do not know where to begin, there are also separate sub-headings for that, where Printcious will suggest the types of products that a typical person of that age or gender may like as a gift.

Providing this feature is quite good in terms of catering to clueless gift-givers, to help them generate some form of ideas and inspiration.

My Picks

Nonetheless, after spending roughly a couple of weeks pouring over what I should get simply because everything had looked so promising, I eventually zeroed in on the following products.

• Sweet Rose Magnet – Oval
• Pine Apple Throw Pillow
• Butterfly and Flower Magic Mug – Black
• Aloha Throw Pillow
• Blue Pink Flamingo Coaster
• Hot Pink Love Colour Mug – Yellow

The order process for all of the products is almost identical and that’s a good thing because it makes everything quite seamless and fuss-free in terms of using the website and placing your orders.

This is because once you have gotten the hang of how things work, you will not need to think about the process anymore and can then simply focus on what you want to order and making the designs.

I eventually placed my order on 27 February.

The Order Process

Personally, I ordered a couple of products before I had figured out how the order process worked and I made a couple of mistakes at the beginning in terms of what was involved and what I needed to do, but after I had figured out the whole system, everything then became simple from that point onwards.

Below, I am going to describe how the ordering process works:

First, to kick off each order, you would choose the generic product that you want to buy i.e. a throw pillow.

Then you can decide whether you want to customise your product yourself or else to pick from one of Printcious’ ready made templates.

As my design skills are not the best, I went for the pre-designed templates to make things easier for myself. Besides, I thought the template designs were quite good already too.

With these templates as a guide, you can then upload your own photos and add some words of your liking, to your gift.

The throw pillow that I ordered is a gift for a good friend, so I added the words “Friends Forever” to it, as a token of our friendship.

As well, you can also add a background colour but I quickly realised that this may or may not show up depending on the template that you have chosen. So if you want your own background colour, it is best to go with the blank template customisation rather than picking a pre-designed template.

Printcious will also prompt you too, if you have forgotten to customise your item . For example, if you did not input your photos and/or your own words, you need not be worried about an incomplete order being processed and going through – the system is apparently quite smart.

Once you have finished customising your products, you simply add the completed order to your cart, and you can then continue shopping or else you can check out if you are finished.

For those who need to have more than one computer session to decide on their order, Printcious urges you to sign up as a member on their website – so that you are able to save your order in their system, without losing anything.

At first, I didn’t sign up as a member and when I went back to the Printcious website on my MacBook, I found that my order cart was empty. So I was afraid I had lost everything and that I would need to waste time to redo my order again.

But upon being prompted again by the Printcious website, I signed up for the free membership, and then suddenly all of my orders reappeared. I was so relieved – Somehow the cookies for my order had still managed to be saved in the system, and this is a good thing.

Reviewing Orders And Making Payment

With a large icon representing your shopping cart at the top right corner of the Printcious website, it is also quite easy to check out and make payment.

Just before checkout, you have the chance to review through your order to verify that everything is indeed correct. I did this, and fortunately there were no problems.

But I noted that if there are problems, it is quite easy to go back, with the click of a single button, in order to make amendments.

As well, if there is a product that you no longer wish to buy, you can simply delete this from your order by pressing the trash can icon on the right hand side of each row. This is fuss-free and simple to use.

However to make sure that you have not made any mistakes and that you do not end up removing the wrong item from your shopping cart, the system will verify with you, that you indeed want to delete the particular product concerned.

Then you only need to fill in your basic details such as your name, postal address and contact number and then make payment. There are several different ways of making payment online, and these include Paypal and credit cards.

Order Confirmation

Once you have paid up, you will immediately receive a confirmation email with your order.

The shipping costs are free of charge with orders of S$80 and above.

Upon the completion of my order, I subsequently received an SMS message from “lalamove” which is apparently the company handling the delivery with a URL link that would supposedly enable me to track the progress of my order in real time.

Delivery And Receiving

My order arrived on Monday 4 March. So this meant that it took five days to reach my place, which I thought was quite speedy. The package came from Malaysia by courier.

And when I opened the packages, I thought that the items that I ordered were also packed very well, especially in terms of the mugs.

The two mugs had been wrapped in styrofoam before being placed in cardboard boxes. I thought this was good protection, preventing the mugs from getting cracked during the transportation process.

The three cushions had been wrapped in plastic and then placed into a nylon bag to be delivered.

The magnet was put into a plastic bag which was then put into a cardboard box. This little box was then inserted into one of the mugs, adding an extra layer of protection.

And as for the coaster, this was put into a clear plastic bag and then placed into a mug.

Product Appearance and Quality

In terms of the appearance and quality of the printed products, I would say that this had been good enough for me, most probably because I had tried to choose higher resolution photos for my items.

But then again, with smartphones being able to take high quality photos these days that are comparable to compact cameras, having ample good quality photos in their storage, would probably not be an issue for most people.

Overall Thoughts

As a whole, I would say that I am quite happy with my overall experience at using Printcious to create and customise my gifts. It is a fuss-free and very convenient way to customise a gift for family and friends, for those who are strapped for time.

For more information, go to https://www.printcious.com/sg.