WinkFlash

I ordered 40 photos in 4x6 size. The final bill was $3.60, and I had to wait until checkout to see the shipping price.

The shipping was called "Expedited Priority Mail Shipping" and cost $8.00. Although the shipping price was high, I ordered anyway. I never received tracking info or a notification of shipment. However, my item arrived in the mail about 5 business days later in a thin white envelope with 5 USPS forever stamps on it.

This means they spent less than $3.00 to ship the item, and it was not expedited. I got ripped off on the shipping price and feel that the company was not honest about shipping.

I would not recommend buying from this company. $8.00 dollars for slow shipping was outrageous, not to mention that the photos would have been ruined if the envelope got wet by rain or other weather.

I just discovered they lost all of the pictures we took of my daughter's first few years of life. I think we have some of them printed but everything else is irretrievably lost.

I'm devastated. We'd had pics backed up on both a computer (that got infected with malware that damaged many pic files a few years ago) and a separate back up drive that was corrupted about a year ago... so no more back ups. I went to Winkflash, hoping I could download a few photos from there, and was told "sorry, your pictures were all lost when the old owners went bankrupt...

how about store credit for Winkflash?" I don't understand why I received no notification that this website was going out of business so I could secure my photos.

And I remember first calling them, before ever uploading my pics about 10 years ago, and the customer service rep telling me that "for sure, the company would be in touch with me if they were to ever go out of business so you can retrieve your pictures..." Yeah right!! I'm so mad.

I have used winkflash for about 8 years, but am so disgusted with the total, disregard for customer service and turtle-slow, user unfriendly website, I am ready to go to another photo developing service. Last week I uploaded and ordered pictures from July to December.

When done, I had 445 photos in my cart. It took FOREVER! Since I prefer to not use credit cards, I opted for the Pay Pal option which was even slower, and didn't work. I emailed customer service and received a standard, unhelpful reply to us a credit card or empty the cart and start over.

To add insult to injury, shipping was $50+. I used my credit card but will be checking out Snapfish, Tiny Prints, persnickety prints, and others tomorrow to see which is the better option, and begin uploading January.

This is the first review I have ever written, but feel compelled to write it down because of

winkflash's poor customer service. I made a picture book that took me hours to make since I needed a chinese friend to help me write notes in Chinese.

We got it done and sent it off to get it printed. I received it within a week and it was incomplete. I email them(there is no number to call!) and told them about what had happened and asked if they could reprint it and sent it for me. Instead of doing that, they told me to remake it and then they would reprint it and sent it to me free of charge.

It took hours to make! I again, got together with my friend and made the whole book and sent it off asking if they could send it overnight since I was going to send it with a friend to China. I never heard back until the day it was supposed to arrive at my house saying that unfortunately they couldn't do that and offered me a $35 dollar coupon instead or they can still send me the book. I felt like they could have done a much better job fixing their mistakes and helping me out!

I have never had to deal with their customer service before and have never had other issues with their orders in the past.

Lidia Brodine

I have been on hold with Winkflash now for over 6 hours, and have been next in line for over two hours. We completed two very long detailed photo books with lots of narrative, tried to purchase them, got a price, but could not get a link to insert credit card number to buy them. I have received nothing but busy signals when I have been trying to call Winkflash since Monday morning. It is now Friday afternoon. I called a neighboring business who has been getting many calls like mine. They, like me, suspect Winkflash may be going out of business. Although I am still on hold and started out as number 4, I am now next in line. I suspect that no one is there, and each next in line person finally dropped off after no one answered the phone, and the succeeding person was moved up. My persistence has only resulted in my spending now 6 hours on hold. Unfortunately, there is no way to recover all the work that has gone into the photo books we created on Winkflash. If only Winkflash would announce that they have gone out of business.

I have emailed them each day this week, and have never received a response.