In the beginning was the business card. Then came the birthday card. Now consumers and brands can choose anything that can be printed through any number of online portals, private websites or through ecommerce sites where print is an almost incidental part of the process. The variety of options for printers to exploit the growth of online decision making seems endless. The biggest risk is not taking part. The biggest mistake is creating an online portal and expecting consumers to find you and then place orders for simple print products like flyers, leaflets and indeed business cards. That opportunity has gone, says Ali Ridha Jaffar, an evangelist for online print buying and author of The Definitive Web2Print Sales Manual.
“It’s never too late to make that investment into web to print,” he says. “The opportunity is there to grow and to take work from an incumbent that does not offer web to print. If you are still in print today and you want to be in this industry for the foreseeable future you simply must embrace the tech-nology. If you don’t you must be prepared to lose your client.
“That said B2C is hard. It’s not about the technology, it’s about driving traffic to your website and driving traffic is expensive. It’s far better to look at your existing clients for opportunities.”
To a large extent B2C is sewn up with the behemoths like Vista, Solopress, Where The Trade Buys and others with the momentum and ability to attract casual buyers of print each with a limited annual spend.
The greater opportunity is with B2B customers where the offer is not simply about 500 flyers at the lowest price. The appeal is about convenience, says Jaffar. “Customers like the simplicity that web to print offers,” he says. “And printers need to understand that clients don’t know what they don’t know. The moment that someone comes in with an easier way to do things, the account is lost and there is no way that the other guy can get back in.”
He remembers winning business from Google where the internet search giant was not using internet technology to order training packs. Within a month of an initial meeting where he could demonstrate a dummy website to show exactly how his solution would work, that solution was live. The previous supplier had had the account for many years, but had not changed. “And since then there have been a lot of changes in the Google team, but they keep coming back to us because it’s about the technology. Marketing managers come and go, but technology goes on because each new manager is terrified of breaking a system that works.”
There are numerous similar examples. In a business with multiple offices, it’s about winning over one site and watching that site selling the technology to others, he says. “The managers fear that they will be disenfranchised by putting in web to print. This is not so. It gives them time to do their real job.”
Jaffar has worked with eProductivity Solutions, not because other systems are not good, but “because I wanted to put my clients in the hands of a global well established company that will not close down or offer technical support from the back bedroom. It’s your client in their hands. And web to print only strengthens those relationships. At the moment sales staff are just order administrators; they can instead bring added value to the client.” It is clearly not just clients that have not adopted web to print, printers also seem fearful that technology will unbalance existing relationships.
For Jaffar most of the deals are about existing products, functional print that is needed for the smooth running of businesses, print packs for training courses (which can be personalised to participants), print packs for events and exhibitions.
It has been possible to buy these printed items online for some years. The last couple of years, slowly in the lead up to lockdown and accelerating during the Covid period, have seen the need for more complex items to be bought online, starting with boxes to put items in for shipping to individuals buying gifts and more thorough much smaller, side hustle, web businesses.
Cartons have been a more complex choice for an online offer. It is buying a 3D item, which needs to be seen in some kind of visualisation to ensure that the artwork on the box can be scaled and moved to fit the box correctly.
Likewise the box will need to open and visualisation of how this works is necessary and some understanding of carton construction to make sure that the packaging is fit for purpose. The switch to software in the cloud helps. The necessary collection of templates can be stored on servers and made available to all users rather than each user trying to manage their own library of templates. These must not only cover the different styles of closure and opening for a carton: there are rigid boxes, windowed boxes, tubular boxes and more to consider.
That software can come from the existing web to print application providers, including ePS, or from those that are selling digital cutting tables which are the natural partner for short run boxes. Vivid, for example, provides Zipcore, which is configured as a design service that the users of its Veloblade technology can offer customers, rather than push them to outside designers. A blended approach, with standard carton types available to order through websites and more specialised or bespoke designs requiring a conversation and samples ahead of an order with subsequent reorders and tweaks to the core design made through a website.
Cloudlab might disagree. It created its PrintQ online design and ordering software a decade ago. PackQ followed in 2018. Channel manager Tim Gießmann says: “This a completely flexible packaging solution that allows a customer to create their very own box, unlimited by their own imagination.”
It connects seamlessly with standard online purchasing options, Shopify, Magneto, Woo and so on. In the UK, Transeo Media is the distributor, where managing director Neil Bather says: “A packaging solution is something that we have been looking for for a couple of years. PackQ fits quite nicely.”
First came PrintQ as an online ordering tool for web to print. Like others Cloudlab started with the humble business card, making this editable, and leading to flyers and multi section brochures before adding the third dimension to become PackQ. As with commercial print version, this is built on a template library. The artwork is laid on the box and viewed from all angles. An animation is generated to show how a box will close, according to die lines for creases and cutting.
Some users, says Gießmann, prefer to make the adjustments off line and can download the file for editing. “There are several ways to design the box online, using different images, spot colours and ideal for a smaller business that wants 50-100 boxes and doesn’t have the experience.”
It can be an extension of the standard system. He adds: ”We can add and combine different features so that users can create their own bespoke user experience, an upsell to design the box for the business cards for example.”
The latest development is to offer the technology as a headless version so it can be integrated seamlessly into an existing ecommerce website with links to existing shopping software and user interfaces so there is not need to force a redesign of a successful trading site.
The concept of adding print to an existing online trading site is at the heart of DesignO, an application which won an Intertech award for technology this year. It is the latest package from Design N Buy which developed its first application for the direct to garment market. “Over the years it has gradually developed into a web to print system for the commercial print market and can also do packaging and can also produce labels and packaging, textiles and photo products,” says company founder Nidhi Agrawal.
The latest version is DesignO, the most open web to print system to date. It makes extensive use of APIs to link to existing shopping applications, to MIS and print production workflows, or for third party businesses that do not have the ability to print, to the likes of Cloudprinter.
The use of APIs makes it effectively a plug and play solution for all types of online ordering. A company wanting to sell branded Tshirts can easily connect with a printer able to fulfil the order. A printer could set themselves up as a fulfilment hub for all sorts of Etsy or Pinterest style businesses each running DesignO and sending print ready orders to the central print hub. Agrawal lists the different web stores that are using the software to create personalised products: poker chips, sportswear, giant presentation cheques, promotional items, and companies that provide other ‘makers’ with the materials that can become something to sell online.
“We have been able to expand into verticals that we had never thought of,” she says. “There is increasing demand for personalised products of all types.” Print is very good a denoting individual ownership and identifying different brands. And this is driving a growing community of micro businesses to use print through ecommerce websites. Many of these started on the kitchen table during lockdown and now need the support of print providers.
The openness of the application makes connections to MIS to run back office functions straightforward. It also makes operation easy. “Anybody can download the program and be up and running within hours,” says Agrawal. “There is a very comprehensive set of professionally designed templates.” These cover labels and packaging as well as commercial print and garments. “The software will render the box in interactive 3D with artwork on the outside and inside of the box,” she adds.
There is support from the Indian head office, from offices around the world and from a network of distributors. As yet there is none in the UK. That must surely change, even though there are strong existing suppliers like Infigo or Vpress that are also pushing into packaging and third party applications.
It is a long way from the standard business card or A4 flyer. And it has greater value because of that. Online purchasing is not going away because lockdowns have ended. Consumers like the convenience so increasing volumes of print will be purchased online. It is a sales channel that printers ignore at their peril. “Most of the implementations of web to print that fail do so not because of the inadequacy of the software, but because people in the business are not ready for it,” says Agrawal. Jaffar would agree.
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