How many visiting cards should you actually order?

The arithmetic that actually matters

The right question is not cost per card, it is cost per card you will actually hand out before the details change.

If you attend two events a month and give out twenty cards at each, that is 480 a year. Ordering 1,500 to save 37% means holding three years of stock — and across three years a phone number, an office, a title or a logo will change with near certainty. The unused cards were not a saving.

A reasonable rule

Order roughly nine months of realistic use. Long enough to reach a sensible price break, short enough that a change does not strand a drawer full of stock.

For a business whose details genuinely never change — an established firm at an owned premises — bulk makes sense. For anyone growing or moving, it does not.

The specifications this applies to

For reference, here is how it works out on the products this comes up on most often.

• Standard Visiting Cards — 89 × 51 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2 per unit with a minimum of 100.

Ordering

Every file is checked automatically before printing, so a mistake in any of this is caught while it can still be corrected rather than after a run is on paper.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India — two working days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands — and prices include GST, so the figure on the product page is the figure charged. Add a GSTIN at checkout and the invoice carries it for input credit.

Measuring whether it worked

Print is often written off as unmeasurable, which is only true if you make no effort. A distinct phone number, a QR pointing at a URL you control, or a code the customer has to mention all turn a print run into something you can count.

Do that once and the next order becomes a decision rather than a guess — you will know which piece produced enquiries and which produced nothing but a bill.