All started with a URL with a deal from Vistaprint.de I got inside a box from an Amazon purchase. The deal was pretty nice: Order cards and get a free Etui for your cards. Great, right? Wrong!

Ordered my cards, making my way with the scrambled e-commerce thing VistaPrint.de have -If you are a GoDaddy user you know what is like- avoiding complementary articles they offered all the time. Must say I succumb to the temptations and added a T-Shirt with logo and slogan. So far, so good. Selected the payment and delivery method. Pay… and what a surprise when reading the email with the confirmation (which arrived 1/2 hour later)… The only reason why I bought from VistaPrint is not included in my order… Yes, you are guessing right: The Etui.

Back to vistaprint.de freighting site, check my order again, there was also not Etui. I thought -Okay I’ll send an email to the customer service, explaining the situation, how hard can be dropping an Etui on my order anyways? Wrote the email and pressed Send. Got a confirmation, Vistaprint have received my email and will answer as soon as possible. All must be good now, right? Nope.

Spend all 14 days waiting for my answer from Vistaprint, but they don’t answer. Instead I got a considerable amount of offers -read spam- from Vistaprint the whole time.

Yesterday my order arrived; I open the box and found inside: my cards and the t-shirt, of course no sign of the Etui. Was not very happy with the quality of my cards and the t-shirt is really crappy. But I thought: Well what can I do?.

But… Today! I received the answer of my email from Vistaprint support… Exactly one day after my order arrived! Perfect timing don’t you think? In the email they told me they have looked my order and certainly the Etui was not there and also they could not send it now. The next paragraph of the email was to tell me how I should use the Vistapring scary e-comerce system the right way. That was the last drop.

I also have to say that I had an exchange with their PR team via twitter, but went silent when I sent the order number via direct message so this happens.

Finally I’m sending back to Vistaprint my complete order and I’m actively looking for alternatives to print my cards and maybe I get a t-shirt too… but I’ll run away from free Etuis.

This post is not to blame Vistaprint for their bad User Experience and Support. I know out there are many Vistaprints and the users are suffering from bad User Experiences. In this time of economic crisis, is better treat the Users as what they are: The core of your business, without users you certainly will not have business. Vistaprint certainly loose a user today, and forever.

The development process is expensive than hardware, so the development flaws tend to be solved dropping more hardware to the pile. That’s not the right way.

To get to a good web application many things must be in the right place, first you have to stick to standards, good practices and design patterns, you don’t need to reinvent the well once again.

I know, I’s the libraries stupid, but along with easy to use libraries you need some others tools like good IDE and a good debugger to solve the problems you get when your application is moving away from what your framework is designed for.

I miss my times of application development (for the desktop) at that times we got our IDE with all tools in the place, today we have to choose from Eclipse, Aptana, Zend Studio, Coda, Textmate, etc. And no one of these have all the features we need.

Is just me in this position or this things are a common place out there? What happen in the Enterprise development teams? I have nothing against the rapid web development but feel something missing with the web development today, some things have to change, or maybe not.

What are your thoughts about this matter, are using Ruby or PHP or Phyton or C++ or ASP.NET… what frameworks… what IDE… what tools… are you using design patterns in your applications, standards maybe?