Succeeding with web-to-print

Online storefronts, internet orders, web-to-print: the age of e-retailing has been a bonanza… for some outfits at least. Take three-year-old Vistaprint – mega-scale gang printing of miniscule online orders is the recipe to its massive success. But just because the model works for the Dutch-headquartered, NASDAQ-listed e-business juggernaut does not mean it is a silver bullet for the rest of the industry.

Vistaprint’s vast clientele orders online. They would not know nor care where product is printed (Vistaprint has a large facility at Derrimut in Melbourne’s outer west). Phone orders are strictly avoided. The production site is off limits to most customers. Print is ganged to keep costs down. Vistaprint’s worldwide average job order is around $US34. These ‘loss leaders’ bring customers online in anticipation of an upsell involving print or merchandise, from postcards to stubby holders to t-shirts and every kind of photo gift. Product is sent to the customer by a menu of delivery services priced to suit every requirement. As W2P experiences go, it’s the benchmark.

The average commercial printer is unlikely to be a paid-up member of the Vistaprint fan club. Many ProPrint readers will see the company as a scourge on margins. But there’s a school of thought that says Vistaprint is really only taking a share of the market that most commercial printers don’t actually want – tiny jobs with a low value and a high annoyance factor. Some might say the best strategy is, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’.

For some, this might work. Australia’s largest printing franchise, Snap, has offered online ordering for more than 10 years, feeding work to its network of nearly 180 franchises in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and China. This network got a whole lot bigger in August as Snap signed a strategic alliance with US-based Allegra Network, which has more than 550 sites in North America and the UK, and Print Three, which operates from 46 locations in Canada.

Raeleen Hooper, Snap’s general manager of sales & marketing, says Snap’s W2P solution is called My Online Orders and is powered by EFI Digital Storefront. The deal was announced in March, and EFI and Snap have worked closely to customise the platform. “At the same time, we made sure we were not creating a fully customised independent solution that requires dedicated infrastructure and support to develop and sustain. Doing this allows us to move forward with the technology and with EFI, while continuing to provide the solution using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.”

Online orders are intended to be seamless, from customer click to final print. EFI and Snap partnered to develop customisations including MIS integration modules to ensure an effective handshake between My Online Orders, existing MIS systems and Snap-specific site templates, to decrease configuration times for Snap centres and provide standardisation across the network.

“We also know that clients who utilise the W2P application develop into a long-term clients and form strong relationships with their local Snap Centre,” says Hooper.

But she also points out one of the headline issues around web-to-print – the technology alone will not guarantee orders. Just like traditional print sales, there needs to be thinking behind it.

“Without a clear strategy for implementation, marketing, sales and process, just having a W2P solution will not automatically guarantee sales,” says Hooper.

A personalised service

W2P is easy and convenient, yes. But Theo Pettaras, managing director of Sydney company Digitalpress says it must never come at the expense of customer relations: “People still want the personalised service.”

Digitalpress, with a staff of 14, focuses on short runs of premium B3 and B4 digital print from its digital presses, which include a Kodak Nexpress SE3000, a Konica Minolta 65HC and an Océ Colorwave 600 wide-format printer. Digital makes up 80% of the total pie, with the offset balance outsourced to litho suppliers.

The eight-year-old Surry Hills company produces what Pettaras calls “value-added digital”, with embellishments such as dimensional printing, spot varnishing and high glossing, much of it inline. Its bindery also incorporates post-press kit such as a laminating machine and a digital foiler. Earlier this year, Digitalpress added a cloud-based web-to-print system supplied by Chameleon Group. It came after a number of false starts with web-to-print, and Pettaras has become somewhat of an expert on what not to do with W2P. One advantage is removing touchpoints in the ordering, quoting and production process.

“We have a seamless workflow that allows customers to obtain 24/7 quotes that are linked to our MIS. They can upload art which is preflighted and loaded onto presses, ready to print,” Pettaras tells ProPrint.

The company’s array of print and finishing equipment means there are a lot of options for customers to choose from. The new online ordering portal provides instant quotes for many of these products, but there’s a point at which complex bespoke work requires a more personal touch.

Pettaras, like Snap’s Hooper, says that web-to-print is just a sales channel – online ordering may be a drawcard, but the onus is on print providers to promote it to their customers. For a number of years, Digitalpress has been growing its reach through search engine optimisation, or SEO. This is the technique used to boost the visibility of a website or page in a search engine’s normal, unpaid search results. The more customers who find Digitalpress when they search Google for a print supplier, the more work is fed to the company’s digital machines.

The right business model

At Picton Press in Perth, W2P received a significant boost this year when the 23-year-old company installed an EFI Pace MIS to complement its two new Kodak Nexpress machines, an SX2700 and SX3900, and loaded it with the MIS’ online ordering module, Digital StoreFront. Picton’s general manager, Graham Jamieson, says: “With the tight integration, we’ll be able to send W2P jobs to production with minimal human touchpoints.”

He reflects that W2P “has, to some extent, been seen as a saviour in the marketplace to combat the constant threat of the internet to our industry. However, it really is just confirmation that print has a role to play alongside other media supply streams. W2P is the only way that the modern print company can remove touch points from their workflow.

“Customisation for corporate customers is another big factor for us. To be able to present a corporation with separate log-ins for staff at different levels, approval levels and monthly budgets is a massive value-add for our customers and allows us to be more than just a basic printer to our customers.”

There are two schools of thought for web-to-print. The Vistaprint model – business-to-consumer – is markedly different to setting up a web portal for regular customers, which is a business-to-business approach. Both might use web-to-print software, but they are two totally different strategies. Printers would do well to know which camp they are in and have a business model to match before sinking money into a software platform with the vain hope it will open the floodgates to orders from the ether.

For Gold Coast-based trade supplier IBS Design Resources, its web-to-print model is very much B2B. As well as printing business cards for the trade, IBS also supplies a web-to-print platform, Edit & Print, through its partnership with developer 44 Gallons Technology.

The print company’s owner, Scott Siganto, says: “As a vendor, we do not push W2P as a cure for poor sales but more as a tool to allow our affiliates to improve their customers’ experience, build loyalty and provide the opportunity to upsell. W2P gives customers a better ordering experience and 24/7 access to their collateral and your services. Swing the tool correctly and it will increase sales and streamline the order process.”

Edit & Print is a customised W2P portal integrated with an in-house-developed MIS to a Kodak Prinergy CTP workflow and two KBA Genius waterless UV presses. The hub operation offers small printers a “clean skin” solution for their own customers – the web-to-print system links a printer to its customers, while the work can be fed back to the trade suppliers’ Gold Coast factory.

IBS has just released its new website in beta and has received great feedback, according to Siganto. New features include a redesign, with a client dashboard for live order status and tracking, mobile friendliness, quicker ordering flow, and wholesale/retail quote options.

Web-to-print automates print orders by putting the workload back onto the customer. Every time a customers devotes time to choose their product, pick the specs and decide on volumes, resources are spared at the print company. This should, at least in theory, equate to better margins. This has led to more functionality to put the onus back on the customer, even design and DTP.

Belgian online software developer Chili has brought its acclaimed document editor Chili Publisher to Australia via local agency Workflowz. The company is working with Workflowz managing director Alan Dixon to build its Australian installed base.

Dominion Print Group, a 60-year-old Sydney commercial print house, signed for Chili Publisher during the show. Managing director Kelvin Gage said the software would provide further integration for his Tharstern MIS.

A one-stop shop

W2P works well in a McPrint environment, but generally speaking, has it been over-hyped? Maybe the real problem is that printers think a W2P storefront will turn them into Amazon or eBay, when in fact it is more likely to be a sales channel for business customers. Debbie Ludwig, marketing manager of software developer PentNet, says: “For some reason, many printers think W2P is about business-to-consumer but PentNet’s most successful customers are the ones offering our W2P to their large customers, with the portal skinned and looking like their customers’ sites.

“We’ve found that large end-users, such as franchises or large customers with multiple branches or sites, love using W2P to order all their own printed products from the one printer. Our successful, canny printers [such as Kosdown in Melbourne] use a W2P to get new business and upsell to their existing clients.”

Seamless ordering wowed visitors at the PentNet stand at PacPrint, where managing director Peter Ludwig demonstrated Online StoreFront, a W2P concept integrating Quote & Print MIS technology with an automatic feed to HP Indigo printing, and delivery by Couriers Please. PentNet also brought visitors up-to-date on iPad-based quoting. Debbie Ludwig says: “It is significant that there’s no manual intervention in the process from ordering to printing to distribution.”

Dave Minnick, director of the W2P solutions group at EFI, believes the hype has focused undeservedly on the supposed magic of standalone web pages. Yet these can actually challenge the workflow and create more work for the same amount of business, he tells ProPrint.

“A carefully integrated W2P solution can have a positive and sustained impact on sales. First, because that’s what print buyers are looking for – a way to do their job more easily and more efficiently. And, like the millions of us who go to sites like Amazon.com, they’ve experienced that level of functionality on the web and they expect it from their service providers. The percentage of print business conducted over the web is growing at an amazing rate. And printers that do it right – those who leverage advanced integration and automation – will see a huge increase in client loyalty and sales.”

Peter Brittliff, marketing manager at Fuji Xerox Australia, says some W2P platforms, like Fuji Xerox’s XMPie solution, also have functionalities that enable businesses to execute a multichannel lead-generation campaign. Personalised emails, targeted SMS messages, even videos, can all be sent via these W2P applications.

Web-to-print, with all its whizz bang functionality, is still just a sales approach. Anyone who thinks setting up a web presence will drive bumper orders might need a reality check – there are thought to be hundreds of millions of websites in the world, and billions of web pages. A printer’s new e-commerce portal is just one more drop in this ocean of content.

This is where marketing comes in. To promote its W2P capabilities, Picton Press has enlisted an external agency to manage its SEO as well as social marketing, which Jamieson sees as a significant channel for print buyers who make decisions online. “It also targets those smaller business who do their own marketing on social media. They see our messaging and are hopefully directed to make a purchase online.”

Britliff believes that with SEO, printers should tailor their advertising to address target industries and market segments, rather than use a scattergun approach. “If your core business is printing books and custom magazines, for example, you would want to be tailoring your search terms and AdWords spend around phrases like ‘self-publishing’ or ‘bespoke marketing’ rather than general publishing or printing terms.”

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