Online retailing has been a blessing for everyone from the behemoths of Amazon and eBay to tiny mail-order businesses, which have found a new lease on life thought electronic ordering. Major printing groups and print management companies have well-established online portals for their blue-chip customers. So is web-to-print (W2P) an exercise in scale for the muscular end of the industry, or can a small guy get in on the ground floor?
Systems integrator Bruce Manderson runs Fuse IT, a Brisbane outfit that packages transactional print programs, including those of local vendor Online Print Solutions (OPS), into Oracle and SAP-based IT systems. Fuse IT’s clients are in the printing industry, mainly print management companies, that want links with customers and other providers.
Upstream customers include large corporations, such as Flight Centre’s 1,600 stores, Queensland Rail’s 600 outlets, and OneSteel, with an effective user base of 3,000 Australia-wide. OPS also sells direct, but Fuse IT comes in where there is that demand for higher-end integration.
The workflow is simple and effective. The client logs into the OPS system, orders the print, and goes through the checkout. The order drops into the Fuse IT portal, which updates the printing company’s MIS. The job order is ticketed, a PDF is downloaded and the job is printed, invoiced, and docketed for delivery. Customers generally don’t know they are using the Fuse IT engine, which is a ‘white label’ solution that carries the print company’s branding.
Manderson finds print management companies are a natural fit for online ordering, but what about SMEs? Following some quick maths, Manderson says that for a print company to claim a grubstake in W2P would require a minimal outlay of $20,000 for some base ordering software from a developer like OPS, another $20,000 to integrate the product into its workflow, and a few thousand more for a server. “You would want to be somewhere in the area of a $3 million-a-year business to consider it,” he says.
In Manderson’s experience, small sheetfed operations don’t tend to have ambitious IT budgets, but that is not to say you need to be huge to offer some kind of W2P interface. Buying the off-the-shelf system is one thing; it starts to get curly when it comes to plugging W2P into a management information system (MIS). Some 10% of Fuse IT’s customers integrate their W2P with their MIS; the rest “struggle with that extra step”.
Photographer Michael Warshall is founder and director of Picpress, a Melbourne photography business with a reputation for professional quality. At the Melbourne leg of Visual Impact Image Expo in September, it won a GASAA Printovation Award for reproducing the work of an Australian adventure photographer.
Picpress operates a W2P model for photobooks through allied business NuLab. Warshall doesn’t believe web ordering is necessarily a big man’s game. That said, NuLab has the benefit of scale: it is a strategic alliance of several photographers.
The online photobook market might be the domain of Harvey Norman and Officeworks, but Warshall is convinced that SMEs can provide a quality dimension that the chain giants can’t match. In fact, the McPrint market may have seeded the ground for smaller outfits. Where the big brands have established a market appetite for these services, there is a gap opening up for ‘pro-sumers’ who want a premium services. Warshall’s company has spent the past 12 months wooing this burgeoning B2C market.
Integration plays a major role. PicPress stayed away from off-the-shelf W2P products. Its ordering system is based on a DigiLabs engine from the US, coupled with in-house shopping cart software. Photobooks are printed on an HP Indigo 5500 and finished and bound in-house.
“The customer downloads the software, which links them to the print engine 24/7. The software itself is simple click-and-drag for designing books, postcards, basically anything. The software automatically converts that into a PDF file, which is print-ready when it arrives here, and goes to print,” says Warshall.
West Australians Suzanne and Tyler Crosbie approached W2P photobooks from a different angle, but they’ve also seen success. In fact, their business, My Reflections, was shortlisted in the Telstra WA Business Awards last year. Neither were professional photographers; Suzanne worked in account management for a printing company and for a wedding album maker, Tyler is an IT programmer. In 2006, when photobooks were emerging, they founded My Reflections in Rockingham, with a staff of three (a customer service rep is on the payroll), selling their house to raise capital.
Tyler wrote his own layout and W2P software, dodging the burden of shelling out for pricey alternatives. Their micro-business rested on keeping overheads low, says Suzanne.
My Reflections says its B2C market comprises both ‘pro-sumers’ and home consumers. The greatest challenge has been competing with the price points on offer from groups like Harvey Norman and Big W, says Suzanne.
“We emphasise quality, but that’s hard to convey online. So even though we’re number one or two on Google with our keywords [My Reflections], we find most of our business comes from referrals.”
Unlike B2C chains that ask customers to upload original files using programs like Snapfish, the Crosbies’ Photobook Designer software is more like Momento and AlbumWorks, in which customers download the software and perform layouts offline using templates. They can add embellishments via .png files, any text they want, then preview their work, hit ‘order’, and the finished artwork uploads to My Reflections’ server as PDFs.
For a time, there were plans to license the software and for ancillary services like digitising analogue originals (old prints and slides), says Suzanne.
Files are printed on an HP Indigo 7200, which replaced a Xerox, giving the Crosbies the quality to differentiate their service. Finished and bound photobooks are dispatched by Air Express to anywhere in Australia.
Vendors’ offerings
EFI and Ricoh jointly offer two W2P options, says Ricoh Australia software manager Damien Robins. EFI Digital StoreFront is used by more than 3,000 printing sites worldwide. The latest version was previewed at Graph Expo in Chicago in September, where it received a “Must See ’Em” award. It will be available in ANZ in the fourth quarter of this year. There is also EFI PrintSmith Site, a W2P module of EFI’s MIS product.
Kodak’s StoreFront W2P solutions encompass static orders, reprint orders, template orders, upload and pre-flight, combining multiple PDFs to build documents, printer driver to web support, VDP orders and building, cross-media, marketing, personalised URLs, online proofing and digital asset management, says Kodak’s Michael Smedley.
Konica Minolta has several W2P offerings, chiefly POD Serve inside its Printgroove system, says product manager Grant Thomas. KM also offers an expanding range of third-party solutions. There’s Kodak StoreFront as well as locally developed Pent Net. This latter partnership was actually forged after Konica Minolta client Metropolitan South Institute of TAFE was looking to sign a $600,000 deal but the digital vendor didn’t have the requisite software, says Pent Net managing director Peter Ludwig. Pent Net also feeds orders to a Bizhub PRO 6501 at South Australian digital business Adelaide Copy.
UK developer RedTie’s offerings comprise RedTie Template and RedTie Quotation. RTT is the entry-level solution that facilitates ordering of marketing collateral and printed materials online. RTQ offers rapid quoting and jobs upload, as well as online artwork and job tracking, says RedTie’s Selena Tombs.
HP’s Shane Lucas, says the vendor has a number of accredited partners that provide HP certified solutions in web ordering, impositions, job tracking, and cross-media marketing.
Fuji Xerox’s answer to the web-to-print question is uStore, from subsidiary XMPie. The application for variable and static documents allows printers, creatives and corporates to set up branded, e-commerce enabled, online stores without involving programmers. XMPie uStore enables online document ordering and customisation in the form of branded stores for multiple internal or external customers, tailoring preferences and parameters to fit clients.
Online Print Solutions (OPS) offers a scalable package incorporating several modules. OrderDesk is a web-to-print module and, as an online ordering hub, forms the core of the platform. NexJob Module enables submission of jobs created by users offline. Group Canvas is a collaborative space, and depending on rules, users are authorised to edit text, images or page layouts directly onto the page using the OPS design interface. Vweb, a cross-media solution, lets users blend VDP, web (PURLs) and email to build dynamic marketing campaigns.
Case study: E-Bisprint
Print manager E-Bisprint uses sophisticated W2P ordering technology. The 21-year-old print operation, which is based on the NSW Central Coast, has begun marketing its technologies, with an Asian bank indicating an interest in a suite of its patented e-commerce products.
Among a host of corporate clients, the company manages the print needs of a number of NSW public sector bodies. E-Bisprint also provides click-and-drag access for the Best Western hotel group to handle printing of its highly regionalised and fast-changing breakfast and mini-bar menus. For clients in the finance sector, it offers e-book editions of annual reports, generated from the same files used for printed reports. The bonus with e-books is access to rich media such as video, YouTube or links back to the client’s website.
“That’s where the future is, in the e-publishing space, and it’s going to eliminate a hell of a lot of print. We have to keep reinventing ourselves as the print market declines,” says Freeman, adding that his company is also developing ‘m-commerce’ tools for mobile internet.
Keeping E-Bisprint ticking over is a state-of-the-art W2P configuration developed over many years by a corps of four IT specialists. Streamline Online evolved in-house and is not sourced from any of the majors. It features the regular templates a print company would expect to find in a workflow vendor’s W2P package, including ordering and track-and-trace. “It’s virtually a one-stop portal for running the client’s account.”
Given the IT input, Freeman believes “a bit of scale” is a fundamental component of any company seeking to go W2P. “To provide an end-to-end solution, clients require quite a bit of customisation,” he says, rather than the narrower template choices offered at the ‘pro-sumer’ level. And, in his view, that generally means a W2P system above and beyond what’s on offer from pre-press vendors.
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