Weaving a wider web – Print21 magazine article

The interface between the internet and print is one of the most dynamic and potentially revolutionary challenges facing the industry today with some estimates suggesting that, in just a few years time, the majority of commercial print will be bought online. But while for many printers the web is a new frontier, the speed of change is such that already it has moved beyond the simple buying and selling of print. Simon Enticknap looks at the brave new world of ‘e’ everything.

I’m in the market for new business cards. The old ones I’ve had for a while have the wrong phone number listed on them – useful for handing out to people I never want to speak to again but otherwise fairly useless. Time to get some new ones.

In the past, this process would have entailed wandering around the neighbourhood looking for small notices pinned to power poles which offered something along the lines of 500 cards for $50 or whatever. These days, however, there is a much easier method, one which means that I don’t even have to leave the comfort of my chair. It’s called the internet and it requires less walking, more surfing.

So here we go. Type in ‘business cards’ into a well-known search engine and, bingo, the results are predictably huge. Lots of printers out there offering their services, some of them local too. Many of these sites are really quite sophisticated, offering much more than a fixed price/quantity and the ability to upload a pdf. These are fully-functioning shopfronts, allowing customers to chose sizes, colours, stock and finish (matt or gloss), and either design their own artwork or use a range of pre-prepared templates with spaces to enter personalised information. And it’s not just business cards either – letterheads, brochures, presentation folders – the list of available products continues to expand and, for the casual buyer, it is certainly easy to obtain and compare instant quotes. Payment is straightforward too via credit card and most offer delivery within two or three days of job submission. What could be simpler? For many purchasers of print, particularly those like myself who do it irregularly and in small quantities, this will be the way they shop in future – at least initially.

The other side of the coin, so to speak, is that for print businesses looking to find new customers, particularly in the retail market, having a full-blown web presence including online marketing and search engine optimisation is likely to be a top priority from now on. If it’s not, then where are they going to find their customers in future?

Of course, many in the industry will have heard of the online giant Vistaprint with its offers of free business cards (pay only for postage) and the reports of its fantastically fast growth rates (which may indeed turn out to be more fantasy than fact), but what’s interesting too is the number of local suppliers who are now offering online services. This is despite the fact that one of the commonly expressed gripes about the local printing industry is that it has stubbornly refused to embrace the whole idea of web-to-print (W2P) with the sort of wild-eyed enthusiasm that many think it deserves. Indeed, 15 years into the www revolution and many printers still have difficulty with building and maintaining any sort of relevant, meaningful web presence, let alone one which might actually make them some money.

Leave your comfort zone
So what’s going on here? To find out, I turned to Ricky Patten of software supplier, Databasics, a man who in an issue of Print21 last year urged printers to “get off their butts” and start investigating the benefits of web-to-print.

According to Patten, many printers are wary of establishing a full-blown web presence because it takes them out of their comfort zone and forces them into areas such as account management and marketing where they may be lacking the necessary skills.

“A lot of them shy away from the concept,” he says. “They don’t understand it so they shy away from it.”

But what about the plethora of shopfront sites plying their trade? Surely that’s an indication that printers do understand the dynamics of the web? Not so, says Patten. To really understand the W2P market, it’s important to recognise that it comprises two distinct sectors. Most obviously, there is the retail market which usually comprises a branded storefront, a list of stock items from which customers select what they want from a drop-down menu, add variable data such as personal details, see an online preview or download a proof, and typically pay in advance via credit card. Other options include uploading prepared artwork via pdf.

Establishing a web presence this way is not difficult – there are plenty of web designers out there happy to built you a functional e-store for a few hundred dollars. The problem with this market – as quickly becomes apparent when you start surfing for quotes – is that it is definitely a buyers market and the buyer, as usually happens in these circumstances, quickly defaults to the lowest price available. In effect, it is the same old model of low value, cut-rate commodity printing that has bedevilled the industry for aeons. That’s not to say there isn’t money to be made out of it – plenty of printers have made a living this way over the years – but simply competing on price has it’s own drawbacks, not least the fact that there will always be somebody prepared do it cheaper and, as Vistaprint has shown, you can’t get much cheaper than free.

The second market – and the one which Patten says printers have yet to embrace fully – is the business-to-business (B2B) model. In this case, the printer typically creates a web portal with a customer’s branding that requires a login and offers various levels of authorisation depending on who is accessing the system. Users can select from a range of pre-prepared templates in which they can change certain data fields, such as contact details, while other elements such as corporate branding remain locked. Ordering is a structured process which might involve getting sign-offs from supervisors or meeting budget criteria. Such sites also feature advanced administrative tools such as order tracking, job history and usage reports, enabling the user (or head office) to track expenditure and consumption patterns.

For the printer, building such sites obviously requires a lot more work. It means sitting down with the customer and finding out exactly what their print requirements are and then building a site which encompasses everything they need. It’s a significant investment in time and money, two things which many printers have in short supply in the current market. So why do it?

“Because B2B is where the money is,” says Patten, pointing out that when many printers talk to him initially about W2P, they usually mean setting up an online shopfront whereas what he prefers to do is to persuade them to look at B2B. It’s a big ask. Setting up a customer portal can cost up to $50,000 and beyond as well as requiring specialised skills and ongoing investment. It’s not for the faint-hearted and requires a certain long-term vision. In contrast, many printers “tend to be tied into short-term cash flow,” says Patten.

The good news is that, done properly, such development work can be charged back to the client and printers who have gone down this route typically do so, says Patten. Billable hours can be charged for setting up templates and online catalogues, there may be a management fee involved too, while any design work can be out-sourced with a mark-up on top. The pay-off is not just about securing any print work that is generated as a result of setting up the site. Indeed, the usual argument in favour of setting up a customer portal, that it helps to lock in their print business, may not always work in practice; in the US, for instance, where the deployment of W2P portals is more widespread (three quarters of US printers surveyed expect to have a web shopfront operating this year), print suppliers report that clients are prepared to shop around for the best portal and will move their print business based on which solution best suits their needs.

This highlights how any solution must deliver real benefits and cost savings for the client. Typically, these come as a the result of reduced manual handling and less duplication of processes. A large corporate, for instance, may have dozens of branches, each producing their own print collateral, so by centralising all purchasing through a single site, head office is able to keep down overheads, monitor costs and maintain quality standards while still allowing a degree of personalisation at each location. Marketing material can also be better targeted and it should be easier to see which items are working where.

Despite the obstacles to start-up, Ricky Patten believes there is a real opening here for printers to corner a market so far neglected by advertising agencies. While agencies typically manage the creative side of branding and marketing, they haven’t “twigged” so far to the full potential of W2P, says Patten, so for the moment there is a perfect opportunity for printers to get in first and capitalise on it.

“Agencies see the word ‘print’ and still think it is a print issue but in fact it’s an account management issue – they just don’t know it,” he comments.

For the printer though, such a strategy may require more of an account management approach to their customers rather than simply trying to sell them print.

Minimise manual work
While the client interface is a critical part of any W2P solution, equally important is the print part of the process and how the incoming jobs are handled once the order has been placed. Here, the goal is to minimise manual intervention as much as possible and use automation to extract efficiencies from the process; the more times that a job has to be ‘touched’ by a human, the less profitable it will be in the end.

According to Napil Abdel of Tharstern Australia, (pictured) this is one reason why MIS suppliers such as Tharstern are being called upon to implement W2P solutions for their customers. Their key strength is being able to integrate the front-end with the print workflow and provide all the ancillary services – real-time quoting, job tracking, invoicing and reporting – that a fully-fledged W2P solution should deliver. On the other hand, MIS applications are usually singularly unattractive as client portals and Abdel admits that nobody should consider simply porting their MIS to the web – these are professional tools that require training and industry knowledge to operate properly.

“To get the most out of W2P, you really need the two together, and we have the experience with that,” he says.

Indeed, Abdel believes that the uptake of W2P will also drive the adoption of MIS as printers start to realise that they can’t have one without the other. As for the relative merits of retail versus B2B solutions, he says there is room for both to co-exist although Tharstern itself focuses solely on B2B solutions. Typically, he says, the requirements for these are being driven by client demands.

“The reason why printers put their hands in their pockets is because they must address customers needs, that’s the predominant reason,” he says.

That’s not to say there aren’t forward-thinking printers who have invested in a W2P solution and then taken it out to their customers as a service, says Abdel, but they’ve become thinner on the ground with the current downturn.

Apart from software suppliers, number of equipment vendors too, such as Fuji Xerox, HP and Kodak, also offer W2P solutions for their customers, providing another means of submitting jobs to their digital presses. It shouldn’t be assumed, however, that W2P is simply the domain of digital printing – it all depends on the types of jobs being submitted. Jobs that require variable data or short runs are more likely to be printed digitally these days but, equally, versioned jobs where the only change might be a different logo on the cover can just as easily be done offset.

Different W2P suppliers will offer different advantages: the equipment vendors can integrate with their hardware, the MIS suppliers combine with back office functions while workflow suppliers such as Databasics come to W2P from the perspective of digital asset management and have experience in setting up systems to manipulate data files. Which suits you best will depend on your requirements.

More than print
The e-commercialisation of print is set to rewrite the rules of the industry – if it hasn’t already. The experience of early adopters is that e-print can easily morph into ‘e-everything’ whereby print fits alongside a range of services provided via a web environment including marketing campaigns, DM, internal and external comms as well as day-to-day procurement. W2P opens the door to a host of ancillary services that printers can provide such as mailing, list management, logistics, warehousing, distribution and fulfilment and which, ultimately, may not include print at all (in the end, it doesn’t matter what the end product is; print is just one option).

Growth data from the US suggests this market is already growing at a runaway pace. What customers are buying with W2P is convenience, an easier way of working and a solution which they can control and manage themselves – this applies as much to the retail market as B2B. They are not buying print as such: print is just a means to an end and W2P is the shortest route there. Ultimately, W2P will cut costs, reduce errors, increase customer satisfaction, speed up deliveries, eradicate inventories, eliminate many tasks currently performed manually and create new markets yet to be devised.

So if you’re just starting to think about getting into W2P, don’t be surprised if you find that the boat has already sailed without you. And if you’re going to catch up, be prepared to think much bigger than business cards.