VistaPrint.com Launches Co-Branded e-Printing Services; Co-brand Partners Can Provide Members with Completely Free, High-quality, Full-color Business Cards

Business Wire, Dec 12, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 12, 2000

VistaPrint.com(TM), the price-performance leader for electronic design, ordering and printing of full-color business and personal materials, today announced that its revolutionary, free full-color business cards are now available through a co-branded platform to Web sites. With the launch of this new co-branded printing service, VistaPrint.com enables participating Web sites to expand their service offering to customers, while gaining the benefits of a powerful customer acquisition, customer retention and branding tool. Co-branded sites can be designed and deployed within seven business days.

VistaPrint.com's very successful free business card offer is now available for other sites as a co-branded service option. "By providing its partners with this powerful viral marketing tool, VistaPrint.com enables them to offer a high-quality, tangible product to acquire or retain customers at a very low cost," said Robert Keane, founder, president and CEO of VistaPrint.com. "Our new co-branding capabilities have many technical design features available for our partners to select on an a la carte basis, making it very simple to customize the co-branded site to meet our partners' needs."

Customer Acquisition Tool

Free business cards are an easy, fun and cost-effective customer acquisition tool. Having launched its free business card offer in May 2000, VistaPrint.com has already acquired 85,000 paying customers and more than 200,000 registered users, without spending a lot of money on advertising. Web sites utilizing VistaPrint.com's co-branding capabilities can now offer users the opportunity to customize their own free business cards with personalized logos, fonts and design formats as a free promotion to acquire customers.

Customer Retention Tool

Many Web sites are interested in offering free business cards as a means of retaining existing customers. Web sites often need to spend a lot of money attracting customers, and are always on the look out for new and innovative ways to retain them. For example, Web sites that offer free e-mail, Web hosting or fax services may offer their customers free business cards. VistaPrint.com's new co-branding capabilities enable these sites to pre-populate some fields on the business card, "locking in" such vital information as the e-mail address, URL or fax number provided by that site--thereby keeping those members committed to using their services.

Branding Opportunity

In exchange for the free business cards, Web sites can opt to print their own logo, URL or branding message on the back side of their members' cards--a key, controlled and cost-effective branding opportunity that leverages the power of an innovative viral marketing strategy. This is an extremely powerful branding tool--if the site gives away 100,000 sets of 250 business cards, their message reaches 25,000,000 people.

Dedicated to marketing the talents of freelancers, consultants and independent professionals (IPs), HeadHunter.Net's Sologig.com is the first site to implement VistaPrint.com's full-color business cards completely free as an incentive for members to join this new online community.

About VistaPrint.com

VistaPrint.com is the price-performance leader for short-run, full-color printing. VistaPrint.com provides full-color design and printing services via the Internet at cost savings of up to 90 percent. VistaPrint.com is perfect for small- to mid-sized businesses needing easy-to-use design tools, convenient ordering and quick turnaround on short-run, high-quality printing services at extremely low costs. VistaPrint.com offers custom-designed and printed business cards, letterhead, mailing labels, postcards, folded cards, invitations and holiday cards. Some orders can be received in as few as three business days. To design and order an unlimited supply of free, full-color, high-quality business cards with no limit on re-ordering, go to www.VistaPrint.com. Headquartered in Waltham, Mass., VistaPrint.com has offices in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. In addition to the more than 85,000 paying customers and more than 200,000 registered users in the U.S., VistaPrint.com has more than 140,000 registered customers in Europe. For more information call 781-890-8434 or visit www.VistaPrint.com.