It is going to be increasingly difficult for printers without an active website to carve their way in months and years to come. The pandemic has accelerated the desire to do business online and has given buyers the confidence to do so. But it is not a case of build a website and the buyers will come. They are most unlikely to find that website for a start.
Any online print venture can only succeed if the website can be found, if orders placed through it are processed effectively and there is connectivity between the web store software and an MIS and production workflow to automate every step in the process.
Paul Warren and Kelvin Bell know this. The latter is managing director of Vpress, one of the leading applications for handling online print orders, the other’s company is called Making Websites Better. It does what it says on the tin. Earlier this year they combined to create CloudtoPrint, a low cost package of software and design to provide printers with a working website capable of transacting business for minimal outlay.
There is more to it than just the box. First, customers have to find you, says Warren. And they are unlikely to do so if the highlighted flagship product on the new website is a business card. While, once on your site, people may buy business cards, they are unlikely to find your business card printing services via Google. The top slots to fill the front page, and on to the second and third page, are taken by the giants roaming the online print jungle. And research proves that to be successful a business needs to be found on the first page of Google.
Consequently Warren argues that niche is best. For example, he says that comparatively few printers specialise in beer mat printing, so filling one of the ten slots on the home page for the ‘beer mat printers’ search term, is quite feasible. Other niche applications and terms will have the same result.
“You need to find what the search volume is for these key words,” says Warren. “If there are 20,000 people looking under a term and you assess how many companies can provide that product, it’s possible to estimate the advertising spend.”
Google thoughtfully provides the means to do this with its Google Trends tool. This analyses all the searches used on its websites to come up with figures to show the comparative popularity of each term – and to work out how much its Adwords can be sold for. For the popular terms, like ‘business cards’ the amount charged for a click through will wipe out any margin. Consequently, the aim of search engine optimisation is to find the term, or collection of terms, that best describes what the business offers and are precise enough to get you on the first page of Google without being sucked in to pay for Adwords.
That alone is not enough. Websites need multiple points of entry to give you any chance of being found, Warren argues. “You might go for a term like ‘Business cards in Watford’. That might be a niche, if people are searching in that way. “When we had a print business, we offered fully personalised desktop calendars. The calendars only generated 20% of our revenue, but it got people through the door.”
Google also assesses editorial content to rank businesses via its algorithms, favouring those that can provide words of advice in regularly updated blogs to help buyers or up to date news stories that help differentiate one business from the thousands of other similar companies. Too many printers have a flurry of content when the website is launched, only for this to run out of wind a few months later, leaving unimpressed visitors with news stories that have not been updated for several years. Not impressive.
The website has to convey the character of the business behind the URL. This does not mean lists of technology that mean nothing to the buyer, but it does mean some way of providing a price for print to allow insomniac buyers to calculate how much their job will cost, if only in general terms.
And with the smart phone rapidly becoming the way that a younger generation interacts with websites, mobile friendly is essential. Most of all, says Warren, success is about the customer service. “Customer experience needs to be better online than offline,” he says.
There needs to be points of entry from Facebook, Instagram and other social networks, so that a prospect can move seamlessly between the different environments and complete the purchase. There needs also to be multiple ways that the Google user can be directed to the website. “You need to give people a way to find you and then a reason to choose you,” he says. “And that is not dependent upon price; it’s about trust and reassurance.”
It can be about being alert to trends in the wider world and aligning with what people are searching for. Over the lockdown summer there was a big uplift in the numbers of people creating their own pub in the back garden. The garden bar can use a personalised back drop (“Dave’s Bar”, for example), some posters, beer mats and other collateral. A smart printer, says Warren, will have anticipated the need and will have configured the offer so that the business can be found and the online artwork created and orders placed.
It is also about transparency and being able to tell customers that their job is on the press, has passed to finishing, is now awaiting a pick up and is due to be delivered in a designated time slot. It is about giving people a better experience than they will find on Amazon.
The behind the scenes activity is in the hands of Vpress. This means enabling the personalisation and template editing that changes Dave’s Bar into Bob’s Boozer. It means giving the customer a digital proof that can be viewed on the mobile device that will be used to place the order. It means accepting payment by whatever method the customer prefers and it means being able to track the order through production to the customer’s door.
Within the print business, it means linking the receipt of the order to the MIS and production workflow so that the job moves seamlessly into production and it is logged within the system. Every time the job needs to be opened or touched by an operator, a part of the margin is chipped away, so automation for low margin jobs is essential.
There is job management functionality within the Coreprint engine that Vpress provides as its part of CloudtoPrint. There are also the API links into third party software that are needed to customise the application to the printer.
Bell cautions that getting the site 100% right from day one is not feasible. It is something that needs to be worked on, altered and improved. “There are 10,000 printed products on Vistaprint,” he says. It is not possible for an independent commercial printer to match that. “Start with ten products, but with lots of variable options in there,” he says. Just what those products are also needs consideration. There needs to be enough for the producer to gain the economies of scale to ensure efficiency in production. Like Warren, Bell says this rules out business cards. “With 28 cards to a sheet, the printer needs the order numbers to make it work,” he says.
And they can be non standard items. If business cards are overdone, Bell points to the opportunity for personalised or short runs of tote bags, printed using easily affordable DTG printers. “There is a huge market and opportunity for these,” he says.
The data from the MIS and workflow as well as Google will show which products are in demand, which are losing money. The website needs to reflect this. And the printer needs to be aware that as orders take off, the operation needs to scale in order to continue to offer the rapid turnaround that is a feature of all online transactions.
“Everything about online ordering is about convenience, and that means convenience for the end user. If he or she wants to place an order at 10pm, or at 5am before going to the gym, that needs to be possible,” Bell adds. “And the expectation is that that they can order it today and receive it tomorrow. We work in an industry where that is not always possible, but a three- or five-day turnaround is pretty close.
“The good thing about ecommerce is that the customer expects and is willing to pay up front.”
Ecommerce has taken off across the board during lockdowns. Where Vpress had to sell its services in 2019, now people are chasing us, says Bell. “Things are changing at a real pace.”
Five years ago, a printer could display his services and wares on a website like a static market tool with a phone number and online email form as the only interaction possible between buyer and printer. Pictures of production equipment took pride of place. Now if a visitor cannot complete an order and purchase online, he or she will move to a supplier that enables this. And these customers are not buying print: they are buying products where print is intrinsic in some way. FlyerAlarm, one of the biggest online printers in Europe, is also Germany’s largest outlet for toboggans – because they are sold and personalised through print.
The CloudtoPrint customer is not going to match the likes of FlyerAlarm. The tools will, however, allow a smaller printer to get in the game.
From the Automation section in the Sep/Oct 2021 issue of the magazine
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