Today I bring you a world first - a review of my experiences using the new M&S Personalised greetings card service.

I ordered two cards on Friday, one to be delivered to a Nottingham address, the other to Francis Towers in Brentford.

Verdict on the user interface: fairly friendly and straightforward, although I found I couldn't select a £ symbol when entering my personalised text. A $ yes, but not a £. So that was a bit odd, I wonder if it's connected to the fact that the service uses a software platform from Canadian firm PNI Digital Media.

The choice of font is also restricted to whatever the design team have considered to be an appropriate typeface for that particular card. It might be a nice idea to also include a faux handwriting font as an option on all of them.

As previously noted, you have to set up a new account within the separate Personalised website. It says "but you can still use the same email and password as on your existing M&S account", however the password for Personalised has to be at least seven characters, whereas my existing M&S one is only six. A small niggle, but a niggle nonetheless.

Thanks to the current postal problems it has taken a few days for the cards to arrive, even though they were printed on the day of order (Nottingham turned up on Tuesday, Brentford yesterday). That wasn't a surprise, what was surprising was that for each order two identical cards turned up. Hopefully someone has fixed that little glitch by now, otherwise it could prove expensive.

I was also intrigued to see an Exeter postmark on the cards (print supplier Tigerprint is in Bradford), along with an actual stamp as opposed to a frank.

Some complaints: I selected "Mr & Mrs" in the address I set up for my parents, but this detail was absent from the envelope that turned up so the card appeared to be addressed to my dad alone. That would have been annoying if it had been for a real occasion such as a wedding anniversary.

And I'm afraid that even my aged parents with their less than pin-sharp vision remarked that they were disappointed with the print quality. Upon closer inspection (using that old Scangraphic linen tester), it seems that the entire card has been turned into some sort of jpeg. So the text is not outlines and the line-art elements don't have a nice crisp edge. There's a scattering of stray toner pixels in the background areas that contributes to a displeasing overall sense of fuzziness.

I would have expected some of the more obvious glitches detailed above to have become apparent during the set up and testing phase of this service, particularly the "Mr & Mrs" thing. It just goes to show that even a relatively straightforward web-to-print setup can be anything but simple.

Marks out of ten for Marks': five.

Let's just say a few things require fixing before anyone tries to send Stuart Rose a personalised congratulations card.