Web-to-print for In-plants

You probably don’t need to be convinced that it is important to offer your customers a way to do business with you using the Internet. After all, print e-commerce, commonly referred to as Web-to-print, has been on the scene for more than a decade. Although the dot-com bust of 2001 put mass adoption on hiatus until the past couple of years, today it is not only an accepted way to do business, but an expected one.

Web-to-print solutions address, among other things, consumers’ desire for self-service options. Do people really want to serve themselves? Yes—and more so every year. According to the third annual NCR Self-Service Consumer Study, conducted by Buzz Back Market Research, 86 percent of U.S. and Canadian consumers are more likely to do business with companies that offer a self-service option, whether those services are offered via the Internet, on a mobile device, or at a kiosk or ATM. This remarkably high number is an increase of 12 percent over those who gave the same response in the previous year’s study.

When it comes to commerce, the Internet is the most likely sales vehicle. The Pew Internet Project, a group that measures the impact of the Internet on American life through continued studies, finds that 77 percent of Americans use the Internet regularly and of those, 66 percent have purchased a product online.

But then, you didn’t need to be convinced, did you? The issue is not that you need to offer a self-service, Web-based tool to help your customers more easily do business with you; it’s knowing how to develop that solution in the first place. Unless you are fortunate enough to have a programmer/IT expert on staff to develop a solution of your own, you are going to look outside for a solution.

Features Galore

Herein lies a big part of the problem: there are dozens of companies offering Web-to-print solutions today, each trying to outdo the other with an ever-growing set of features. Do you want to offer users online design options? How about preflighting tools? Multi-language support? Instant quoting? Asset management options? PDF creation? The ability to personalize job templates? Direct links to your prepress production solution or digital front end? Should you require users to log in with a password? The number of considerations alone can be mind-numbing.

It’s too easy to get bogged down in feature sets when comparing solutions. While features matter, the solution with the greatest number of bells and whistles is not necessarily going to be the best one for your organization. So the first tip in finding the most appropriate Web-to-print solution for you is to take a good hard look at your in-plant and ask a few questions about your print customers and about your own production staff.

On the customer side, ask yourself these questions:

How tech savvy are my customers?

Are there other Internet-based tools, company tools (like online payroll) or internal communication tools that they use on a regular basis? This gives you some indication of how much experience users have with Internet interfaces. Obviously, the more such systems they use daily, the more likely they will be to successfully use such an interface to order print.

Most Web-to-print solutions offer a shopping cart check out experience similar to other commercial e-commerce sites. As a general rule, the transaction should take no more than five or six steps on the user’s part. Exceptions to this rule would be publishing environments, in which users are often designers that may need to interface with database tools to manage text, graphics and other digital assets.

Many vendors offer demo sites that let you go through a sample user experience using their tool. And most allow for plenty of customization on your part when putting your site together, so you can make a site easier to use, depending on your customer’s needs.

Check out products like AmazingPrint.com, Custom Print Now, EFI’s Digital Storefront, NowDocs NowPrint, Press-sense iWay/Xerox Freeflow, Printable and Saepio DCE. Products that fall into the not-very-expensive and also simple-to-use category include Perfect Proof’s PrintersWebsite, PrinterPresence.com and WebsitesforPrinters.com.

How print savvy are my customers?

There’s a good chance they’re not generally professional print buyers, so a template-driven solution, allowing users to choose from, and possibly personalize, posted job templates would be a better option than one that requires them to upload their own “design” files. However, maintaining templates adds a level of complexity to the production side of the equation, as someone has to manage this data, update templates as needed and so on.

The number of Web-to-print solutions that offer template-driven options has grown considerably, with even services that started out as simple Web site developers, like WebsitesforPrinters.com now offering templated options. Among the many solutions offering templating: EFI Digital Storefront, Gluon Hyperpublishing, NowDocs NowPrint, PageFlex Storefront, Press-sense iWay, Printable, Responsive Solutions Customer+, XMPie uStore.

Which browsers or computers are my customers using?

Some Web-to-print solutions work better with one kind of computer operating system and/or browser than another. Look for “browser agnostic” solutions if you have customers using different computer systems. If you have an internal mandate to use just certain applications—true in many corporate environments—this is less of an issue. While the majority of solutions work with Mac OS and browsers, some require most administration functions, like posting templates, to be done from a Windows environment.

On the production/business side, ask yourself these questions:

Do we want to license a solution, or go with an ASP (hosted) model?

If your organization doesn’t have strong IT support, it might be a good idea to go with a hosted solution. By going with an application service provider (ASP) model, you are essentially “renting” the service from the vendor. All of your interaction with the solution is done over the Internet, including all administration. Many printers, even those that are hosting a number of branded solutions for their own clients, use this model, because it eliminates the need to worry about servers, bandwidth and internal software maintenance, not to mention the staff needed to manage all of this.

Going with an ASP solution also reduces some of the risks in making a decision to go with a particular vendor, as it allows the printer to “try out” a solution for a certain contracted period of time, with the option to move to another solution if this one doesn’t work.

Be aware, however, that moving from one solution to another may not be that easy, especially when templates are involved. In fact, one consideration in selecting any Web-to-print vendor’s solution is to know the format in which templated material is kept. Can it be moved to another solution down the road if needed? All vendors support the notion that material hosted on their sites are the property of the printer, so early concerns about who “owns” material on hosted solutions is a non-issue.

Still, hosted solutions seem far less “locked-in” than licensed software. Many vendors realize that is a good way to get printers to select their solution, so they offer both licensed and hosted versions of their software. The costs are also much less upfront, although there is often a crossover point at which it can make sense to move a hosted solution in-house, depending upon how the service is being charged (by number of transactions per month, for example.)

A short list of companies offering hosted solutions include: AmazingPrint, EFI Digital Storefront, Four 51, Gluon Hyperpublishing, Hiflex Print Support, Kodak MarketMover, NowDocs NowPrint, PageFlex Storefront, Press-sense iWay, Printable, Responsive Solutions Customer+, Rochester Software WebCRD and WebsitesforPrinters.com.

Do you want to manage variable data projects?

While Web-to-print solutions work well in offset environments, some are focused on digital printing workflows. Many offer variable data project management, some with links to VDP management software, others offering personalized project management via the Web browser. Some of the more sophisticated applications also include personalized URL or microsite tie-ins to variable campaigns, along with full-fledged marketing management. Bluetree Direct and Cendix are two such companies.

Web-to-print software with VDP capabilities include: EFI Digital Storefront, Four51, Gluon Hyperpublishing, iBrams, Mindfire, Nimblefish, NowDocs NowPrint, PageFlex Storefront, Press-sense iWay/Xerox Freeflow, Printable, Responsive Solutions Customer+ and XMPie uDirect/uStore.

Questions to Ask

To find the Web-to-print solution that best fits your organization, you have to ask a lot of questions to yourself, to others in your organization and to the vendors you’re considering. Here are a few suggestions to help you in your search:

• How customizable is the solution?

• Will your site look like ABC Printer down the street?

• What skills will your existing staff need to interface with the system?

• How user friendly is the administrative interface?

• Is the system built with “standard” applications or protocols?

• Do you need the system to integrate with other existing systems in your business, like order entry, MIS, prepress/production or proofing?

• What are the up-front and ongoing costs to offer a W2P solution?

• How long will it take to get the system up and running? (Some vendors say two to 10 days, but unless you are very prepared, don’t believe it.)

• Will IT/special staffing will be required in-house?

• How long will it take to achieve ROI on the solution?

• How are fonts handled in the system?

• Which file types will the system allow to be uploaded?

• Which engine is used to create PDF files—Adobe Library, Jaws PDF creator, GhostScript, something proprietary?

Take a Test Drive

A new online resource called the Web-to-Print Test Drive, sponsored by the E-Business Council of PIA/GATF, is now available. This site provides information on most of the Web-to-print software solutions on the market today, and will soon have links out to demonstration sites that will allow users to actually test-drive (hence the name) Web-to-print software solutions. Check it out at:

www.w2ptestdrive.com

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Julie Shaffer is director of the Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (PIA/GATF) Digital Printing Council (DPC) and heads up the Digital Business and Technology Center at PIA/GATF headquarters in Sewickley, Pa. Shaffer is well known for her graphic production expertise and is often called upon for training, presentations and consulting. She conducts research on topics such as PDF color management and Web-to-print implementation and is a frequent contributor to industry publications. Shaffer is co-author of a popular and informative book called “The PDF Print Production Guide.” You can contact her at:

Jshaffer@piagatf.org