Today is the day! It’s finally time for Comic Frontier 12! If you don’t know what that is, it is an anime/game convention held here in Jakarta. Aspiring illustrators from the city and across the country all gather to open a booth and sell their creations. You can find a variety of illustrations there, whether fanart or original, ranging from the Japanese pop-culture, to American/Western one and even Indonesian aesthetics—a.k.a. “kearifan lokal.” If you follow my Instagram, you might’ve known that I opened a booth at Comic Frontier 11 last year and this year I’m going to do the same. For this opportunity I’ve decided to come up with a few new designs. However, I’m really bleeding money at the moment and it feels quite impossible to come up with a budget for this shindig. Luckily, Gogoprint Indonesia contacted me a few months back for a chance to collaborate. I thought it would be a good idea to show you a little bit of my preparation for this convention.
The first thing I did, obviously, was plan out what I want to sell and design them accordingly. I was starting to run really low on business cards as well, so I thought it was a great chance to shake things up—you can see my old one here. The items I wanted to get printed consist of name card, postcard—both of them double-sided—and stickers. After the design process is done, it was time to place my order. This is where it gets a little bit tricky.
A few things to note before placing an order
One, make sure you have your file ready in PDF format—JPEG and any other bitmap files will cost you extra. If you want to print something on both sides, make sure to keep each design in separate files. Two, Gogoprint offers a selection of preferred sizes and quantities, but you can always change these according to your needs—the price will adjust quickly. Their prices, by the way, vary according to your preferred time of delivery—the later it is, the cheaper will your order be. Three, you can place an order before your designs are ready, but make sure to upload them before the deadline that they set for you—otherwise, your order will not be processed. This will allow you to gauge just how much everything will cost you beforehand.
A few things I find somewhat unfortunate
One, they don’t exactly offer a wide variety of papers—mostly art carton—and, unfortunately, you can’t really request one, if you want to. Two, their customer service is often very slow and not open 24 hours—as printing services normally are. Their mode of contact are often in chat form on their website or through phone—their email address is not to be found anywhere and contact forms are only available when their chat is offline. It is very difficult to get a hold of them, especially when you are really busy. Three, because they are focused on catering to corporate and promotional needs, they don’t really offer non-paper-based products, like pins, keychains, tote bags, etc., so if you want to have those printed, you’d have to go elsewhere.
My Overall Experience
Upon ordering, I found their website to be rather easy to use. It’s pretty straight forward, you can choose a lot of things to your preference. The chat option for the customer service was quite useful, although it wasn’t quick enough at times—in fact, a lot of times it just makes me wait for ages even though I was the first in line. Uploading the designs were really quick and easy, although it still left some questions unanswered—which I had provided the information above for you. The delivery time I chose was around a week after my order time—which was the cheapest option. However, during those 7-8 days I wasn’t really informed of the process. The day before my products were supposed to arrive at my address, I got so anxious that I had to ask their customer service about my order—in which they informed me that it would be sent out later that afternoon, to arrive the next day.
When I knew my order had arrived, I was excited to finally see the result. However, when I saw it, I was crestfallen—one of the items was badly damaged. As you can see above, this is the state in which my stickers have arrived on my doorstep. They were folded and awfully creased in a lot of places. Needless to say, I cannot possibly put these up for sale—despite the fact that I’ve already included them on my catalogue. However, when I contacted the customer service, they were barely helpful and unable to replace the damaged product. They mainly felt it was the courier’s fault—just FYI, they don’t cut up stickers into smaller pieces, but just send you the whole goddamn A3 version of it, despite the fact that their website makes it seem like you can choose between that and an A4 size. In the end, all they were willing to do was reimburse me in store credit. It was a major disappointment, to be honest. Thankfully, the name card and the postcard both looked great, so at least I still have those going for me.
So Why Did I Write This?
Truth be told, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to write this review to begin with. But a deal is a deal and I’m not one to easily forget that. One of my friends advised me not to recommend Gogoprint, if my experience with them was so bad. So this is just me trying to lay out what I went through. Yes, the sticker sI ordered from them were delivered in a terrible state. It may not have costed me any actual money—since the order was made on the coupon they gifted me—but there’s a potential financial loss from the damage they incurred. And yes, they might not even have the decency to offer damage control—except for store credit, which means virtually nothing to a hurt customer. But, to be fair, the other half of that order—the name card and postcards—all came in perfect condition. I’m still quite satisfied and grateful about those.
All in all, I really wouldn’t recommend you using their services—if not for the unreliable quality of their products, then at least for the lousy customer support. It’s understandable that places like this might have to deal with tall orders and difficult customers, but I just can’t get over the various mistakes they make while talking about the services they actually offer—misleading me into believing so many things, most of which just aren’t true, apparently. If this had been my own money, I would’ve been absolutely enraged, to be honest. But, of course, that’s just one person’s experience, so don’t just take my word for it—please read this with a grain of salt and cross reference it with other people’s experiences if need be. Thank you for reading!
This post is brought to you by Gogoprint Indonesia. All opinions expressed are obviously 100% my own.
Today is the day! It’s finally time for Comic Frontier 12! If you don’t know what that is, it is an anime/game convention held here in Jakarta. Aspiring illustrators from the city and across the country all gather to open a booth and sell their creations. You can find a variety of illustrations there, whether fanart or original, ranging from the Japanese pop-culture, to American/Western one and even Indonesian aesthetics—a.k.a. “kearifan lokal.” If you follow my Instagram, you might’ve known that I opened a booth at Comic Frontier 11 last year and this year I’m going to do the same. For this opportunity I’ve decided to come up with a few new designs. However, I’m really bleeding money at the moment and it feels quite impossible to come up with a budget for this shindig. Luckily, Gogoprint Indonesia contacted me a few months back for a chance to collaborate. I thought it would be a good idea to show you a little bit of my preparation for this convention.
The first thing I did, obviously, was plan out what I want to sell and design them accordingly. I was starting to run really low on business cards as well, so I thought it was a great chance to shake things up—you can see my old one here. The items I wanted to get printed consist of name card, postcard—both of them double-sided—and stickers. After the design process is done, it was time to place my order. This is where it gets a little bit tricky.
A few things to note before placing an order
One, make sure you have your file ready in PDF format—JPEG and any other bitmap files will cost you extra. If you want to print something on both sides, make sure to keep each design in separate files. Two, Gogoprint offers a selection of preferred sizes and quantities, but you can always change these according to your needs—the price will adjust quickly. Their prices, by the way, vary according to your preferred time of delivery—the later it is, the cheaper will your order be. Three, you can place an order before your designs are ready, but make sure to upload them before the deadline that they set for you—otherwise, your order will not be processed. This will allow you to gauge just how much everything will cost you beforehand.
A few things I find somewhat unfortunate
One, they don’t exactly offer a wide variety of papers—mostly art carton—and, unfortunately, you can’t really request one, if you want to. Two, their customer service is often very slow and not open 24 hours—as printing services normally are. Their mode of contact are often in chat form on their website or through phone—their email address is not to be found anywhere and contact forms are only available when their chat is offline. It is very difficult to get a hold of them, especially when you are really busy. Three, because they are focused on catering to corporate and promotional needs, they don’t really offer non-paper-based products, like pins, keychains, tote bags, etc., so if you want to have those printed, you’d have to go elsewhere.
My Overall Experience
Upon ordering, I found their website to be rather easy to use. It’s pretty straight forward, you can choose a lot of things to your preference. The chat option for the customer service was quite useful, although it wasn’t quick enough at times—in fact, a lot of times it just makes me wait for ages even though I was the first in line. Uploading the designs were really quick and easy, although it still left some questions unanswered—which I had provided the information above for you. The delivery time I chose was around a week after my order time—which was the cheapest option. However, during those 7-8 days I wasn’t really informed of the process. The day before my products were supposed to arrive at my address, I got so anxious that I had to ask their customer service about my order—in which they informed me that it would be sent out later that afternoon, to arrive the next day.
When I knew my order had arrived, I was excited to finally see the result. However, when I saw it, I was crestfallen—one of the items was badly damaged. As you can see above, this is the state in which my stickers have arrived on my doorstep. They were folded and awfully creased in a lot of places. Needless to say, I cannot possibly put these up for sale—despite the fact that I’ve already included them on my catalogue. However, when I contacted the customer service, they were barely helpful and unable to replace the damaged product. They mainly felt it was the courier’s fault—just FYI, they don’t cut up stickers into smaller pieces, but just send you the whole goddamn A3 version of it, despite the fact that their website makes it seem like you can choose between that and an A4 size. In the end, all they were willing to do was reimburse me in store credit. It was a major disappointment, to be honest. Thankfully, the name card and the postcard both looked great, so at least I still have those going for me.
So Why Did I Write This?
Truth be told, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to write this review to begin with. But a deal is a deal and I’m not one to easily forget that. One of my friends advised me not to recommend Gogoprint, if my experience with them was so bad. So this is just me trying to lay out what I went through. Yes, the sticker sI ordered from them were delivered in a terrible state. It may not have costed me any actual money—since the order was made on the coupon they gifted me—but there’s a potential financial loss from the damage they incurred. And yes, they might not even have the decency to offer damage control—except for store credit, which means virtually nothing to a hurt customer. But, to be fair, the other half of that order—the name card and postcards—all came in perfect condition. I’m still quite satisfied and grateful about those.
All in all, I really wouldn’t recommend you using their services—if not for the unreliable quality of their products, then at least for the lousy customer support. It’s understandable that places like this might have to deal with tall orders and difficult customers, but I just can’t get over the various mistakes they make while talking about the services they actually offer—misleading me into believing so many things, most of which just aren’t true, apparently. If this had been my own money, I would’ve been absolutely enraged, to be honest. But, of course, that’s just one person’s experience, so don’t just take my word for it—please read this with a grain of salt and cross reference it with other people’s experiences if need be. Thank you for reading!
This post is brought to you by Gogoprint Indonesia. All opinions expressed are obviously 100% my own.