I wrote recently about my experience creating a photo book with Shutterfly and MyPublisher. I chose MyPublisher to create the books but the process failed miserably when I tried to actually order the books. I wanted 5 copies of the same book. The checkout process wasn’t unusual but at the end the application tries to upload all of the images and the book layout to MyPublisher’s server. Well, it didn’t work. At first it said it couldn’t connect to the server. I clicked retry several times with no change so I stopped and restarted the application. When the application restarted it asked if I wanted to continue uploading. I’d click yes and watch as nothing happened. So, I attempted to contact their technical support.

Here’s something I should have checked beforehand. There is no way to contact anyone in MyPublisher customer service by phone. There are no phone numbers on their site. All contact with support is via email. Shutterfly tries to do all of their support by email too but they at least publish a toll number if you prefer. So, I explained my problem in an email and waited.

The next day I received what was obviously a form letter with some appalling suggestions. They were: turn off anti-virus software; disconnect the cable modem from the router and connect directly to the internet; try turning off spyware; and add MyPublisher to Trusted Sites in Internet Explorer. These are all terrible suggestions for two reasons: 1) Each one reduces my security, particularly the router and anti-virus suggestions and 2) They have nothing to do with the actual problem. The anti-virus suggestion would only be an issue if their software is doing something virus-like in which case my virus software would have told me about it; the router suggestion would only apply if the software was using bizarre ports or hosting a server; the trusted sites suggestion implies that MyPublisher.com needs to do things to my computer that I may not approve of; and the spyware suggestion is just plain ridiculous — MyPublisher must have a different definition of what spyware is than the rest of the world.

Against my better judgement I tried them just so that I could write back to their tech support and honestly say they didn’t work. So I did. In that second email I also asked a couple of very simple, direct questions: Has my credit card been charged? How do I cancel my order in progress? Can I just try again with a whole new order without worrying about being billed for my first order which failed to upload?

And they replied with another form letter! This time they suggested that I must have at least 512MB of memory (I do); that I should logoff and back onto my internet service; that I shouldn’t use dial-up (I’m not); that I should use lower quality images (what?!). And they did not answer a single one of my questions. They didn’t even attempt to!

I wrote them back to tell them to cancel my order and never heard from them again. It’s the worst customer service experience I’ve had in years. Maybe your luck with them will be better. Perhaps if I tried again the upload process would work. But, on principle, I’m refusing to use their service because of how abysmal the support was.

So I turned to Shutterfly. As I mentioned before, this involved uploading all of my photos to their service and using their online book designer. The only real drawback to Shutterfly’s designer is the limited layout choices. But the designer itself is very easy to use. It only took me a couple of hours to recreate my book at Shutterfly. More importantly, ordering worked flawlessly. The 32 page book came to about $33 + tax and shipping. I had Shutterfly send copies directly to relatives and a copy to myself, five in total. I received an email the next day saying the books were printed and shipping!

When the book arrives, I’ll post some pictures of it and a my thoughts on the quality of the printing and binding of the book itself.

Update: Part 3, the final post in this series