Controversies
Rewards program
In the US, Vistaprint was accused of enrolling customers into Vertrue's paid-membership reward plan without the customer's agreement. Credit card details were passed on to Vertrue (formerly Memberworks Incorporated) by Vistaprint, and charges were then made on those credit cards by Vertrue allegedly without the owner's consent. Numerous complaints were received by ConsumerAffairs.com and The Better Business Bureau by consumers objecting to these charges including the complaints of still being charged after canceling and that more than a year after cancelling membership, the charges began again.
Vistaprint's partnerships in the United Kingdom have attracted criticism. Critics have stated that Vistaprint's customers are enrolled without their knowledge in a reward voucher operated by an associated company, VPrewards.com, at a cost of GB£9.95 a month, and that no information is provided to customers subsequently. Additionally, it is up to the customers to detect the fact that they have been enrolled as members and to cancel unwanted membership.
In August 2008, four class-action lawsuits were filed against Vistaprint. The four complaints alleged that the defendants were in violation of the Electronic Funds Transfer Act (which protects from unauthorized charges) and the federal Electronic Communications and Privacy Act (which prohibits the unlawful access of financial information) for charging relatively small amounts from customers accounts "hoping that consumers just won't notice."
On November 30, 2009, the company announced that it had terminated its contract with an affiliate of Vertrue Inc., effective December 20, 2009, and that, it had ended all membership rewards or similar programs.
ASA investigations
In 2011, following complaints from UK customers, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) investigated pricing irregularities on Vistaprint's UK website and leaflet distributions. The ASA also upheld a complaint that Vistaprint was misleading customers in its £40 worth of printing for a £10 spend promotion.
Discriminatory mix-ups
In 2018, a recently married gay couple sued Vistaprint after they received anti-gay pamphlets, "Understanding Temptation: Fight the good fight of the faith", instead of the wedding programs they had ordered. Vistaprint CEO, Trynka Shineman, said that the wedding programs and the flyers were printed at the same time, and that the wrong shipping label was put on the boxes by a third-party partner. Vistaprint resolved the matter with the couple and the lawsuit was dropped, with an apology to the couple and donations to LGBTQ organizations.
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In June 2020, two fundraisers for Black Lives Matter found that their order for Black Lives Matter posters also came with All Lives Matter posters. In an interview with Buzzfeed News the customer said "this felt like very, very clear attempts to undermine our message and undermine the message we’re trying to put out". A Vistaprint representative said that an internal investigation "found that it was an error in the automated packaging process which combined two separate customer orders." In response, the customers said that they are skeptical of the explanation, especially since the LGBTQ incident in 2018 made this seem less like a one-off.
Security Lapse
In November 2019, security researcher Oliver Hough discovered an exposed database on the internet belonging to Vistaprint. The company quietly took the database offline after TechCrunch reached out to inform them about the discovery. Robert Crosland, a spokesperson for Vistaprint, said in a statement that the exposure affected customers in the US, the UK and Ireland.
