Ideal 4912 Text Stamp 3/4" x 1-7/8"

[10/1/2013: SEE UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM]Where do I start....My fiancee and I made up Save-the-Dates for our wedding, and wanted a nice return address stamp to stamp on the envelopes, so I ordered this stamp.I ordered this stamp on September 2.Supposedly when you order this stamp you're supposed to get an email from the company asking you for the information you want printed on your stamp. When I ordered mine, that never happened.So after waiting for a while, I did some digging and went into the seller's profile and found some instructions on how you can send in either the text you want on your stamp, or an image file if you want to design your own. I'm a graphic designer, so obviously I wanted to design my own. I found the stamp dimensions somewhere in the seller's documentation and got to work.After completing the design, I had a vector-based Adobe Illustrator .AI file and exported a vector-based .EPS file, a 300-dpi .PDF file, a 300-dpi .TIFF file and just for good measure, a 300-dpi .JPG file. I do this kind of work professionally and have a very robust automated digital archiving system, and all of these files went into that automated system, which creates four copies of each file on four different drives... keep this in mind. It'll become pertinent in a second.When I went to submit the image of the stamp for fabrication, the seller directs you to some ConstantContact web form to submit your information (which should have been red flag #1). A couple of days after submitting my design on the web form, I got an email with a proof of the stamp, asking me for final approval for the stamp to be fabricated. The proof was tiny, low-resolution .PDF of tiny text in one corner of a full 8.5x11 image. At first glance it looked fine, but I was worried about the low resolution and emailed back the company to ask about the resolution.Within seconds of sending that email though, my eye caught something. I had to squint to see it because the proof they sent was so tiny, but on closer inspection I could see that the "v" in "Avenue" had been changed to a "u" - similarly shaped letters, so it was even more difficult to spot. Now you're probably thinking, "they didn't change it, you probably just screwed up when you submitted your design." Remember those five different file types I created with the image, and that automated archiving system? I went back to my original files and yes, I had spelled everything correctly. This company introduced the typo.Was this simply an innocent mistake? Well, first of all, the stamp should have been manufactured directly from the image I sent them, so there is no innocent reason they should have been messing with anything to begin with. Second, the file I sent was simply an image, with the text rasterized, meaning the text COULD NOT BE EDITED. What this means is that the company created a brand-new file, designed it to look like mine, and introduced the typo. Third, if you look on your keyboard, the "v" and the "u" are not close to each other. They are, however, very similar-looking letters that, on a quick glance, could easily be mistaken for one another.Did this company intentionally insert a hard-to-spot typo into my design so I'd buy a second stamp from them when my flawed one arrived? I can't say for certain, but it sure appears that way.Now, when I caught the typo I emailed back the company (this was about 45 seconds after I sent my first email responding to the proof, concerned about the low resolution of the proof). After waiting another day (apparently the company is a one-woman shop in India; the woman sends emails using a fake name and broken English) they company got back to me with no explanation for the inserted typo simply saying they'd send a new proof.After waiting another day, I got another proof, this time correct. I immediately emailed back my approval. This was on September 5, three days after I originally ordered the stamp. There was then complete silence for four days until the morning of September 9, when I emailed the company to ask when my stamp would arrive. The company emailed me back several hours later saying the stamp would ship that day. Silence for two more days until I got an automated email from Amazon saying the seller had shipped the stamp via USPS, with a tracking number. Lo and behold, the shipper lied; the stamp did not ship on Sept. 9, but not until 7:30PM local time on the 10th.Today is Saturday, Sept. 14, almost two full weeks after I placed my order, and I still do not have my stamp. My fiancee and I were trying to mail out our Save-the-Dates this past week, and instead of being in our friends' and families' hands, they are in envelopes, addressed and ready go, sitting on our dining room table waiting for this stamp to arrive.Don't make the mistake I did. Don't put yourself through this hassle. Buy your stamp from a more reputable company.UPDATE, 10/01/2013: IT JUST GETS WORSESo very quickly after I posted the above review, the woman behind this company emailed me to try to get it taken down (funny how that works... after she has my money and while I'm waiting for my purchase to show up she's completely absent, non-responsive and dismissive, then when I post a negative review publicly all of a sudden she's quick as lightning to respond and apologetic). She offered to make a new stamp (which makes sense, since I'm sure these things cost fifty cents to make) and send it to me. Fine.Turns out the day after I posted the review above, my original stamp finally showed up in the mail. And this was amazing: Not only did this "company" stall for weeks shipping the stamp and then lie about it, SHE SCREWED UP THE STAMP **AND** SENT A SMALLER ONE THAN I'D ORDERED! My original design was designed specifically for the dimensions of the stamp I ordered, and included a border around my fiance's and my names and address. A little bit about how these stamps are constructed: The whole body of the stamp, the plastic housing and the ink reservoir, is a generic, mass-produced plastic item that are probably bought by the thousand for ten or fifteen cents each. The only part of the stamp that is custom made is a little rubber pad that is made with your design and then is stuck onto an adhesive pad on the bottom of the stamp. When the stamp finally showed up, the rubber pad on the bottom (the part that actually does the inking) looked like it had been hacked at with a pair of scissors, and someone had chopped off all but one corner of the border that my design had included, which when you used the stamp on a piece of paper, showed up as a random blob off on one side. The rubber pad had been hacked at with scissors so that it could be fit onto a smaller stamp body than the one I had ordered.I emailed the woman to complain about this, and then (again without any admission of mistake or any explanation for either the hacked-apart pad or the smaller stamp body than I'd ordered) a few days later I got THREE stamps in the mail: one of the small ones with a similarly scissor-attacked rubber pad (which she clearly had made before I complained about the first one... which shows that it was intentional and not a random mistake) and then TWO of the correct size, correctly-made stamps.So the upshot? If you're willing to fight over email with someone for three weeks over repeated shortcuts and failings and are okay with getting your stamp close to a month after you order it, you may be able to get a bunch of copies of your stamp, some of which work and some of which don't. Or you can just buy a stamp from a reputable vendor.I know which one I'm going to do in the future.

This is just what our small library needed. Easy to use, prints very clearly. We like that it's red, so we can stamp over our black library ownership stamps and all is very legible and obvious that it's a withdrawn item. Not needing messy ink pads is a real plus.

I ordered this with some reservation because I was ordering it without providing my address... After placing the order, I received an email address asking me what I wanted on the stamp. I had a choice of font, font color, font size, alignment (Justification) and three lines of text. I responded to the email and received the stamp very quickly. It was very easy and convenient.Here's a copy/paste of the email I received with the subject line indicating it was an order from an amazon seller:Dear Valued Customer,Good day. Thank you for purchasing our custom Stamp(s). Please send thetext that you would like us to put on the stamp [via Amazon email] andsend us the files as attachment (PDF or WORD format) so we may processyour order. Or you may choose to just type it in as a reply to this email.Fonts:Arial (Default, if none specified)Times New RomanComic Sansand more. Font size: We normally use size 12 pt depending on the font and amount oftext. If no size is provided, we will use our default size or size thefont according to allowable space at our discretion.Justification:LeftRightCentered (Default, if none specified)Ink colors:Black (Default, if none specified)Red,blue,Green,Purple,Pink,Orange and BrownText:Line 1:Line 2:Line 3:PLEASE NOTE: AMAZON WILL SEND YOU AN AUTOMATIC EMAIL SAYING YOUR ORDERHAD BEEN SHIPPED AS AN ATTACHMENT. WE APOLOGIZED FOR CONFUSION BUT YOURORDER WILL NOT SHIP UNTIL THIS INFORMATION IS RECEIVED. ONCE AGAIN, WEAPOLOGIZED FOR THE CONFUSION.We will begin processing your order once all the information is received.We appreciate your business. Have a wonderful day.Thank you,

The stamper itself deserves 5 stars. It seems to be high quality, and is easy to use and align on the corner of envelopes. My only issue is that once you purchase the stamper, the company sends you an email asking what you want, not an order form. I selected the font I wanted, typed it out and hit send. Seemed easy enough, but I should have guessed that I wouldn't get the font I sent. When I received the email that had the proof I was at work and assumed that maybe the font was changed because it was on my phone. That was not the case, but I figured it was too late to change once I got home. I guess the moral of this is to type out the name of the font you want or attach a file that won't change when sent.In the end I got a decent stamper for a good price that I will use until it dies.

Nice compact stamp, about 3/4 the size of my old one, but still the perfect size for return addresses. Nice clean printing. Arrived pre-inked so it was ready for use. There were no instructions on re-inking, but from the "features" highlighted on the box it appears they intend to sell you a new "cartridge" rather than re-ink the existing one. My old stamp had two holes in the back of the cartridge with instructions to put 10 drops of ink in each one. I suspect you could just put a few drops in each corner of the front side of the cartridge to re-ink this one.As others have written, the merchant will send an email asking what you want on it. I wasn't asked about fonts, or styles as others have mentioned so I gave my name and address, and asked for "centered" and "first line slightly larger font", and that's exactly what I got. I'm a happy stamper. I thought about asking for comic-sans since that's such a pretty font.

Half the price to get a "for deposit only" stamp made than from my bank. Great quality, stamps well. Have only had it a few weeks so can't comment on longevity, but it is the same make as the others I have at the office, so unlikely it is poorer quality. Very happy. Will order all my stamps this way.

I receved exactly what I had ordered, love it.