Progressive Melbourne-based trade printer Whirlwind Print is launching a suite of new customer web portals to making it easier for printers and designers to service their customers online, either with their own print production or sourced from trade printing.
The national launch at the Pullman Hotel in Melbourne and at the Cambridge in Sydney’s Surry Hills attracted a cross-section of print providers and design agencies keen to make the logistics of print buying, fulfilment and delivery to customers a smoother, more intuitive experience.
Whirlwind Print managing director Andrew Cester and sales director Gis Marven introduced Gavin Cockerill, director of UK graphics software developer Grafenia, which has partnered with Whirlwind to offer a uniquely Australian and customised version of its flagship print e-commerce products, w3client and w3shop.
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The systems fall under the banner of w3p, the next generation of web-to-print, featuring detailed design templates that printers and designers can upload speedily as part of their order or utilise templates online from cloud-based library TemplateCloud.
Cockerill explained to attendees that w3client enables print buyers and ad agencies to create customer specific templates from Adobe InDesign in as little as 10 minutes. Then receive orders complete with print ready PDFs.
“We’ve taken the technical skillset for building templates and simplified it, so any graphic designer can design templates from InDesign at a low cost and at a considerable time saving,” he said.
The w3client’s dashboard can be branded to any print provider, completely transparent of the trade printer and the ordering software itself is straightforward and will be available in HTML5 by year’s end, with online editing on iPads.
When all information on stock and quantities has been entered, complete with the artwork, the end-user is offered a spellcheck provision and a PDF preview, and branded online proofing if required.
Various payment gateways such as Paypal are pre-installed and customers can track the progress of their job via a status bar.
Cockerill also walked attendees through w3shop, which is aimed at SMEs and micro-businesses, which can order online using w3shop’s comprehensive library of over 18,000 design templates and photography from w3shop’s Fotolia image collection of over 14 million images, constructing their own design online.
“Templates vary from 99c to $80, but our experience globally has shown that this type of customer typically spends around $40 on a template,” he said.
There is even a provision for jobs to be automatically pre flighted via the backoffice, saving considerable time and resource for the printer.
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Cester tells ProPrint that Whirlwind’s partnership with Grafenia plc has produced ‘an Australianised product integrated with our database’ which will launch 16-year-old Whirlwind Print, based at Knoxfield in Melbourne’s south east, into a new era of print logistics.
He says the system has just gone live at Whirlwind, however there are over 1000 users of the system worldwide and growing, and there have already been several sales to undisclosed Australian print clients at launch.
Cockerill tells ProPrint that before the Australian launch through Whirlwind, Grafenia has enjoyed strong and positive feedback on its w3p suite from clients in the UK, Europe, US and New Zealand.
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