mundell.org The personal weblog of Carrick Mundell

Carrick –

We are very sorry that you have not been pleased with your experience with QOOP. We have a ton of happy customers and we want you to be one of them. And we always appreciate feedback, but we would like to address some of your points�

- We will refund your money due to your unhappiness with the experience.
- As for the production and shipping time - You ordered your book on the evening of September 1st – it entered the production process on Friday the 2nd. But that was Labor Day weekend. As our website and FAQ say we need 3-5 days to produce the book (I think we need that stated in more places on the web site). Your book shipped on Wednesday the 7th which is the 3rd business day after your order. And you chose DHL ground which can take 5 days to cross the country. So with the holiday and weekend and ground shipping 12 days sounds about right to your location.
- Unfortunately some of your photos from this set http://www.flickr.com/photos/carrick/sets/811557/ were rather dark as you know – did the photos titled Kite Flying or Sun Protection print better?
- We print at 600 dpi and we are surprised that you are seeing grainy output and apologize for that. Your average resolution on the page size you chose was about 260 – but that still should have looked good. We could have been having a print quality issue at the time of printing that was not caught by Quality Control. We actually print for artists, architectural firms, and other very picky firms and they have been very pleased – we really feel that trying to print some of your brighter photos might give you a more pleasing result. And if they resolutions are mixed (not sure if they are) then perhaps 4 per page would be a better option. But again we are sorry that you did not like how the photos came out.
- The booklet comment – this is a perfect bound book, I am not too sure what you meant there. We do sell saddle stitched booklets – which are stapled, for less money. At 34 pages (17 pieces of paper) it is a thin book – but we use the same process to make our books that book stores use to make their perfect bound stock
- As for the paper – we print on high end Xerox paper, but we are looking at a glossier stock and appreciate the feedback.
- We will be bringing out individual photo selection soon and that will help you choose photos to print.
- And we are working on new page layouts – input is welcome on what you think we should offer please forward that to us if you can.

And yes we are in beta and trying to improve the service every day – hopefully you will come around to being a happy customer and feel that it was worth the money. Thank you for the feedback and please contact us at service@qoop.com if you have any further thoughts.

And single prints appear to be in the cards if you see the blogs at Flickr.

- Bill
- QOOP

Posted by Bill - QOOP on 13 September 2005 @ 1pm

Bill, thanks for your long reply. I will consider trying QOOP again. I think some helpful hints on your order pages regarding image resolution, brightness and contrast, and print size would be helpful to newcomers.

For my order, I compared the perfect bound book to the saddle stitched booklet and the booklet turned out more expensive by about $4.00. In my blog entry above I misused the term “booklet.”

The two, four, and six per page layouts don’t look very good when you have a mix of landscape and portrait photos. They would be a good choice if your photos were all one or the other and you didn’t mind the reduced print size.

Regarding layout, I think some basic border options would be nice. I would also center the descriptions printed below each photo.

Posted by Carrick on 13 September 2005 @ 1pm

Carrick –

I will pass all your comments on to the design team.

FYI the perfect bound book is more expensive than the saddle stitch (stapled), I am not sure what you saw there

On the 2-4-6 comment, thank you. Actually we think you would be surprised how well they come out (we were). Do you think we should have an option to perfect resolution – so offer an option to print the photo at the size where we get the full 600 dpi (we are considering this)

And border options are coming… Oh and we will fix that centering thing by offering an option – lots of folks asking for.

Thank you again for your comments

- Bill
QOOP

Posted by Bill - QOOP on 13 September 2005 @ 3pm

Bill, thanks again. I must disagree that the perfect bound book is always more expensive than the saddle stitch. I just stepped through the order options, selecting the same set in both formats, and the perfect bound came to $18.39 while the saddle stitch came to $22.59. The saddle stitch version needed two pages added so maybe that hiked up the price, but $4.20 is quite a difference.

I think offering print sizes based on resolution is a great idea. I’ve seen that done on other online digital photo printing sites.

Posted by Carrick on 13 September 2005 @ 3pm

Despite all the engineers we apparently are math challenged - have to go think about that, it let us set a lower price point at the low end but is having an unintended consequence at higher page counts (where most convert to perfect bound)

Thanks

- Bill

Posted by Bill - QOOP on 13 September 2005 @ 5pm

[...] Qoop will print your Flickr photos in a book or make you a full size poster. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty neat. They also seem incredibly transparent - they actually respond to blog posts! I’d love to talk to them about what they’re trying to create there, and what services they can offer for businesses. If you’re reading this, Quoopers, get in touch! [...]

Posted by Mashable* » Blog Archive » I Love Qoop! on 14 September 2005 @ 5pm

Pete -

Thank you for the nice comment.

Feel free to send us a note at sales@qoop.com with what you are looking for.

We have very cool stuff coming out soon - this is just a small start

- Bill
QOOP

Posted by Bill - QOOP on 15 September 2005 @ 4pm