In this post, you will find the major features of Mixbook, a website where you can design a variety of items such as albums, cards, calendars, home decor, and more. In addition, you will learn how actual users of the online design platform felt about their products and services. You can also see the trend of people’s interest in the platform over the past 5 years.
What You Can Design
The website allows you to design items. In this section, I will list the types of items that can be customized by you on their website.
Photo Books
One thing I liked about their service is that you can design your photo books using their templates for free. As long as your photo book design stays online, it will not cost you. You only have to pay when you print out a self-designed photo book. I found it is a very reasonable service that lets users design and edit their albums as many as they can. You can customize your albums and pick the best one to print out. Their pre-designed templates make it easy to start. They have many themes for important occasions. As of November 22nd in 2019, there were the following themes for photo books.
- Everyday (141)
- Family (152)
- Kids (72)
- Seasonal (54)
- Holiday (10)
- Romance (16)
- Year in Review (21)
- Wedding Photo Books (51)
- Wedding Guest Books (20)
- Travel Photo Books (58)
- Baby Photo Books (30)
- Sports (13)
- Yearbooks (48)
- Professional / Business (21)
I believe that these themes (459 in total) would meet most of your needs. You can just pick one of the many themes and put your photos on a theme you select.
Cards
There can be many special occasions when you want to send a card to friends and other important people. You want to invite them or simply share some great news with them. I believe custom-designed cards can make people remember longer about the event. It can be your wedding, your kid’s birthday, or the year-end party. Mixbook maintains thousands of designs. What’s also convenient is that you can choose a variety of fonts and colors that meet your needs. And, Mixbook takes care addresses of both your recipient and return envelopes.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
To name several special occasion you can consider to use custom-designed cards,
- Thanksgiving cards
- New Year’s cards and invitation
- Halloween cards
- Wedding announcements and thank you cards
- Baby shower cards
- Baptism and christening invitations
- Business invitations
- Sympathy invitations
- Graduation announcements
- Many more
The examples above are a really small part of the large collections Mixbook has for cards. There are many more pre-designed cards for many different events and occasions.
Calenders
The calendars made by you can be a great gift to your friends and colleagues. Being able to design your calendars means that you can add your events or anniversaries throughout the calendar. There are more than 100 customizable calenders on Mixbook.
Home Decor
You can also customize decorative items to brighten up your home with your photos of baby and family members. The items you can customize include:
- Canvas prints:
- Metal prints
- Acrylic prints
- Poster prints
I think it is a great decoration idea to use your photos to remember a special event or a beautiful moment. The frame you will receive will have a finished backing and mounting hardware so that you can just hang it on the wall. In addition to the photo, you can select one of the four frame options – unframed, white, black and espresso. Try this page to see how it will look with a different frame option.
How Actual Buyers Think About Mixbook?
When you consider to buy a product or to use a service, you will wonder what experiences other buyers had. Investigating the reviews of other users can lead to a better decision, and it is a wise thing to do as a consumer. If people are dissatisfied with it, they will complain about it and won’t recommend it. If they are happy, they will leave positive comments and share their great experiences. If we can compile and analyze those reviews, we can have an assurance about the product.
That’s what I am going to do for you. I used more than 13,000 reviews people left on TrustPilot and summarized those data to generate easy-to-understand graphs and charts. Those visuals will allow you to understand the overall sentiments the customers had toward the photo service. They are also extremely easy to understand.
Mixbook Positive Word Cloud
In a word cloud, some words will appear bigger because those specific words were more frequently used among customers. So, the bigger the more frequent, thus, if those big words are positive, it proves that most of the customers had a positive experience. Have a look at the word cloud of Mixbook.
The word cloud above should have given you a good impression of the digital platform. The most frequent word that actual customers used in their reviews was “great”. Other big words are also positive – “love”, quality”, “easy”, “excellent”, “beautiful”, and many more. Just by looking at the word cloud, we can learn that most of the people were satisfied with their product.
What’s noticeable is the words related to the ease of use. Editing your albums or calenders online could be difficult if the service is poorly designed. But, from the word cloud, it seems that many people found it “easy” to use Mixbook and were happy with the “quality”.
Customer Sentiments
The word cloud tells you what descriptive words people used for the product. There is another angle we can use to understand the Mixbook customer reviews. That is by categorizing the reviews into a type of 10 sentiments. While I used the review titles for the word cloud above, I used the review contents for the sentiment analysis. The result is the graph below.
I was able to run my sentiment analysis code to find out what specific sentiments people had over the product. As we could guess from the word cloud, most of the review contents were positive. Of course, people shared some negative thoughts. I haven’t seen any review that is all positive. Despite the negative reviews, overall, people wrote positive comments for Mixbook.
Trend
Another type of analysis I often use for a product review is using Google Trend. It is an extremely helpful service by Google that gives you a historical Google search trend. The idea is that if a product or a company can maintain or can increase its search volume over many years, it supports the quality of the product. If a product is bad, people won’t show their interest and eventually will never search for the product anymore. Then, how is the trend of Mixbook?
The trendline above shows a consistent level of interest over the past 5 years. There were 5 spikes around Christmas seasons and another one is being made. It will be interesting to see how this Christmas season plays out for the digital platform.
Please note that this is the trend from the United States. If we break down by state, we can see which country has shown most of the interest in Mixbook. It turns out it was Utah followed by North Dakota, Idaho, South Dakota, and Iowa.
Good Things To Know
In this section, I will share useful information to share with you.
Can we use Dropbox to upload images?
Smart question! It could be convenient if you can directly upload images from your Dropbox. Unfortunately, Mixbook does not support Dropbox, thus you will have to use your local drive.
Can we collaborate on a project?
Another smart question! Yes, you can work together to, for example, make an album. Mixbook says that you can invite as many as 30 people per day per project. To participate in a project, they should create their accounts. When they finish creating it, you can go to your project and simply click the Collaborate button next to the project title. To add multiple people, you can use email addresses with a comma separator.
What are the best image formats?
Mixbook supports jpg, png, and heic. Although those formats can be uploaded, Mixbook recommends using jpg or heic formats because they are faster than png. Since png images are large in file size, it can cause slowness even when you have a good Internet speed. Mixbook explains that an image size should be 4MB at 300 dpi for a best print quality. As of November 2019, Mixbook can accept as large as 15mb.
Can we get a discount for bulk orders?
Yes, Mixbook offers a discount for large orders. You can use their digital form to ask for a quote for your bulk orders.
Does Mixbook accept a return due to spelling errors?
When we order hard prints, there could be spelling mistakes if we don’t proofread carefully. Mixbook currently does not accept a return due to spelling errors. If you want to return for other reasons such as print error or damage to your product, you can consult with the firm using their LiveChat or send an email to hello@mixbook.com.
Conclusion
As I researched Mixbook, I found that most of the customers were happy with their online services and features. In addition, my Google Trend analysis supported the fact that the product has been loved by people consistently over the past 5 years. If you are looking for a great way to decorate your home or keep beautiful memories with albums, I would recommend Mixbook.
