Late last year I was called in by one of my customers: “We want to be able to order online and have digital asset management (DAM).”
Great. Time to start looking at web to print systems again. Kill me now.
I’ve been down this road three times before, all done in anticipation rather than in response to a client’s request. All three times were failures.
The first system was hellishly complicated and expensive. Getting a template up was hours and hours of work. We tried but the front and back end experience was so bad we never even showed it to a client. What was worse was that we were stuck in a twelve month contract for a system we couldn’t use. Lesson learned.
Our second go was with Pressero, the US based SAAS system. It’s very reasonably priced and has a great range of standard features that the other systems charged a fortune for. And no contract – don’t want it anymore? Cancel it.
The thing I liked best with this system was that it had no local agent. So many times I would find a great US or UK system charging a few hundred a month, only to find they had an exclusive Australian agent who was charging a $10,000-$20,000 “installation” fee. Spare me – the only justification I could find for the local agent fees was that the other guys were charging them too, so why not? It’s just another Australia Tax.
But again, template creation was troublesome – you had to essentially recreate every job from PDFs using Acrobat and a proprietary online tool. While we did get some prepress clients onto it in the end we gave it away as just too hard for actual print.
Our last effort was with PrintShopWeb. By this time we had largely given up on web to print and we only tried this as we had bought PrintShopMail as a step up from MS Word for our variable data. PrintShopMail is awesome – it increased our productivity by a factor of ten and still is a major part of our business, but its web-to-print system is the opposite.
It took them months to install and the thing looks like it was last touched by a developer in 2005. Page one of the help guide starts off by assuming you can code in HTML for the most basic of things. In an age of www.wix.com style web page creation, 2005 seems a long time ago.
While the PrintShopWeb template creation system isn’t too bad, doing something as simple as retrieving the artwork for an order was a major trial. And sending a job to an actual digital press was a nightmare. We gave up when we realised it couldn’t cope with italicised fonts.
I thought it must be me, but in a recent webcast on the US NAPL site a survey of printers found a large proportion had tried and failed with at least two web-to-print systems in the last eight years. It’s an interesting webcast and I would recommend you listen to it to get an idea of how people are succeeding and failing in the US with these things.
But the customer gets what the customer wants. I’ve spent the last two months shopping around for a new system that will do what I want. Next month I’ll take you through the candidates and introduce you to the winner.
Comment below to have your say on this story.
If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.
Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter
