Last month I told you about some of the problems I have had looking for a decent web-to-print system. Since that article appeared I have been contacted by several printers with similar experiences, some of whom couldn’t wait to hear until this issue to hear how my search ended. Well now it’s your turn.
The first system I trialed was the Australian made Pent Net As an MIS, Pent Net is pretty good – comprehensive, simple and well supported. The ordering system works and they’ve just introduced one of those cool bar code systems that help you track job costs and progress through the factory. If I had a bigger shop it would have appealed a lot more.
On the downside the W2P system needs work – template creation is similar to Pressero, a proprietary creation to manipulate PDFs, meaning every job needs to be created once in InDesign and a more tedious second time in Pent Net. I’ve been down that road and didn’t want to do it again, but to be fair Pent Net were more than willing to incorporate a more flexible designer like PrintUI, for extra cost.
Next I moved on to some SAAS systems offered by a mix of US and Australian based companies. There are too many to list here but check in on my blog and I will go through as many as I can.
One that was really good was Printer’s Presence, a US based system that had a companion MIS. It was a pretty complete budget solution but again template creation let it down.
Australian trade printer IBS have an online webstore solution Edit and Print that is quite cool. There’s an upfront fee of less than $3000 and monthly fees between $125 and $450, which are waived if you send more than a certain amount of print to IBS’s machines. It’s a neat package with good online design but I wasn’t allowed to trial the admin section. This is a surprisingly common thing amongst the software companies, and given the problems I’ve had before based on poor admin controls, I deemed any company that refused me access to a demo site as having something to hide.
CMYKhub has a completely free system for their printers, but up until now I’ve ruled it out as they had no online design function. However they have just announced a partnership with the interesting US site MyCreativeShop, which should make the whole thing a lot more attractive. It’s still limited by a rigid website design system, but considering the price (free), they can be forgiven for that. I can see myself using this system for some projects I have in mind for later in the year.
But the solution I ended up with was… Xmpie Storefront. I have a bit of Fuji Xerox gear and went to them to see that they could do. I sat through the Xmpie presentation knowing full well I was going to say no to a $50k investment, but when I told them my problems with previous system, my desire for a SAAS solution, and my reluctance to write another big cheque for a potentially dud system, they had an answer.
Xerox works in partnership with another company which offers Xmpie as a SAAS. They host it, setup the pages and sites. You create the artwork in InDesign, send it to them and they will worry about making the template work.
As far as costs go, setting up a site is around $2000 and each template is under $200. If you’re running twenty stores with fifty templates in each, you’d be better buying StoreFront and hiring your own staff to run it, but if you’re like me and only have a few clients who would benefit it’s an easy way in to what is really a premium product. And once you get to the point that it does make sense to own it yourself, the supplier works with Xerox and so will transfer all your data over to your new system hassle free.
So that’s where we’re at. I’m in the process of getting the first site up and running now and things seem to be working well. Here’s hoping it’s fourth time lucky.
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