Vistaprint has quietly dumped its Australian trade printing operation just months after it started, having failed to generate enough interest from printers to carry on.

The TradeAdvantage service was launched to much fanfare in September, with Vistaprint saying the offer would open new markets for zero investment to printers and that ‘margins could easily be 50 per cent or more up to 200 per cent’.

However, the online print giant’s entry into the trade scene came at a time of heavy investment by big trade printers CMYKhub, Whirlwind, LEP, and Hero Print and others, and by November it was offering $100 vouchers to new partners.

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Vistaprint ANZ and Japan vice president Paul Heath told ProPrint he is unable to comment on the program’s axing, but global company spokeswoman Sara Nash says there was not enough interest.

“Vistaprint’s core customer is the micro business, and while we have seen success with a similar trade program in North America, the level of interest in Australia did not warrant the resources necessary to keep the program going at this time,” she says.

However, Nash says the company has not given up entirely on trade printing, saying ‘we may revisit a modified program in the future’.

The company’s TradeAdvantage webpage now says ‘whilst we make some adjustments, we are currently not taking any new registrations to the program’.

The service enabled printers to resell more than 120 products including t-shirts, mugs and pens in runs as low as one, as well as the usual business cards and flyers. Kit allocated to the venture included manroland 700s and HP Indigos.

For Vistaprint the driver was to give itself a conduit to the face-to-face market through resellers, which it was not reaching through its online presence.

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