Selling Online

Print selling, like everything else in today's point-and-click world, is moving to the Internet. The massive e-commerce infrastructure built by consumer product companies, combined with innovations in digital workflows and on-demand printing devices, have many printing companies setting up shop

The cyberscape of the online print market runs the gamut of large companies to small, offering commodity-type products such as business cards, as well as bound documents, books and even higher-end, full-color commercial printing. Companies sell output produced on digital printing devices, as well as on traditional offset presses.

Major market applications target both businesses and consumers. The business-to-business space was the first area addressed by print firms who set up Intranets for client orders. The consumer market, still largely untapped, is the next frontier.

Digital storefronts, where printers target customers to purchase and design their print jobs from their own computers, are infusing new life into many companies. These services are available to any potential customer via public websites, no longer just through specially designed Intranets.

Printers building such digital storefronts are carving out profitable niche markets, reducing internal sales costs, automating job workflows, reducing turnaround time and making print more price competitive. At the same time, the increase in the number of short-run projects cries out for order entry to move from the salesperson to an automated process.

The online commercial print market has gotten a big technology push from Internet startups that allow consumers to produce affordable bound photo albums and books. Online photo processing sites such as Kodak Gallery (formerly Ofoto), Snapfish and Shutterfly let customers order bound volumes of their prints—offering a wide variety of binding fabrics, papers, templates and background image options—and have made the masses comfortable with producing and designing print work online.

Book publishers like AuthorHouse, Xlibris, iUniverse and blurb.com allow anyone to affordably write, design, produce and sell a book, including generic cover designs complete with photos. The blurb.com book prices start at $29.95 for books up to 40 pages. Typically, online book providers subcontract production to digital book printers that are electronically integrated to their websites.

Early leaders in the general commercial field, generating a lot of positive buzz, include Printingforless.com, VistaPrint and Mimeo.com. It seems a continuous flow of new firms—IDoPrint.com, iPrint.com, Print Basic, 48hourprint.com, printingyoucantrust.com, My Print Shop Online—keep entering the fray. Today, more than 30% of all print is purchased via Web-enabled tools, says Frank Romano, professor emeritus of the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology and a widely known industry educator and consultant.

Entering the online marketplace requires investing in software to build and support the digital store. Romano says 30% of printing firms develop their storefront internally, 44% purchase software from a vendor and 26% use a combination of both.

VistaPrint, whose proprietary software allows it to gang-run thousands of small jobs on 40´´ sheetfeds, believes there is huge market potential for digital storefronts—and was able to successfully go public on the concept. The company's strategy is to target the under-served SOHO (small office, home office) market, which it values at $19 billion. Company CEO Robert Keene estimates that the market is comprised of 38 million self-employed individuals or clients at firms with fewer than 10 workers in the U.S. and Europe, whose average print and marketing services spend is $500 annually.

VistaPrint client Amanda Murphy, founder of Feng Shui Footprints, reports that for $488.17 she can order: 1,000 datasheets ($243.49); 1,000 postcards ($74.99); 5,000 business cards ($94.97); 420 return address labels ($19.99); and 200 thank-you cards ($54.73).

Since its founding in 2001 as an online printer providing high-quality, low-cost printed marketing materials, VistaPrint has experienced 66% annual growth. The company recently reported annual revenues of $152.1 million, a 67% increase over the prior year.

Its website features automated design templates that function in real time. Offering free business card printing—the cards must carry the VistaPrint logo on the back, and customers pay for processing and shipping—the site has generated some 25 million hits.

VistaPrint has invested over $40 million in two highly automated production facilities in Windsor, ON, and Venlo, the Netherlands. (See GAM 8/05.)

The firm aggregates individual orders received via its website through a proprietary software program it developed internally that automatically combines similar print jobs from different customers into a single, larger run. The company can run up to 15,000 orders daily; and regularly receives an average of over 12,000 orders per day. It outlays just one minute of labor per individual print order, says Keane. The same order might take an hour at a small print shop, he says.

VistaPrint says it can gang up to 143 different business cards on a sheet and calculates it takes 18 seconds to produce a stack of 250 cards, ready for packaging.

When ordered, products are grouped based on specs (quantity, product format, color backside, finish and quantity). Orders over 100 are printed in groups using a single pass on high-volume, large-format offset and digital presses—the company operates five automated 41´´ MAN Roland 700 6-color perfecting presses with inline coating, three in Canada and two in Europe. Orders are shipped to customers in more than 120 countries.

Last month, its 68,000-sq.ft. Windsor plant added the first North American installation of MAN Roland's InLineFoiler Prindor. (See GAM, 7/06, p.1.) VistaPrint is employing the cold foil-transfer method on short runs—as low as 100 sheets—of folders and greeting cards.

Commercial printer PrintForLess.com, Livingston, MT, one of the first online shops, started in 1996 to reach print buyers nationwide with an instant pricing and ordering system—and to accept non-traditional file types, such as Microsoft Publisher. The all-Heidelberg shop offers four-color lithographic printing of brochures, cards, books, newsletters, catalogs and folders; the company also offers mailing services.

PrintingForLess.com developed its digital storefront internally. It recently moved to a new 46,500-sq.ft. facility and plans to add 40 to its staff of 145.

No online vending

The company initially envisioned having an online vending machine where orders streamed in and shipped out with minimal customer interaction, but found small business customers needed much guidance.

“Staying connected to customers in the Internet Age takes more than a helpful website and responsive customer service,” says CEO Andrew Field. “It requires a full commitment at every level of the organization to make it easy for customers to do business.”

Field says the company created a new job position in the industry, called a technical service representative, or TSR. Rather than passing customers around from customer service agents to sales staff to prepress technicians, all three responsibilities were combined into one job.

Another big player, Mimeo.com started as an in-plant for FedEx. Mimeo took over FedEx's printing facility in Memphis, which today is 150,000-sq.ft., operating 24/7 and producing two million pages a night. With headquarters in New York City, the company has a staff of 285 and allows customers to place orders online by 10 p.m. (EST) for next-day delivery.

Mimeo.com's more than 1,600 customers include individual, small business and corporate customers, such as CitiGroup, Pfizer, jetBlue, TD Waterhouse, The Timberland Company, Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Perot Systems.

The company offers an array of complex bound documents, and project growth is in the 25% to 35% range. It prints digital color on Xeikon devices and supports its online effort with a sales team of 60 and 24/7 phone support. To attract customers, Mimeo offers a $50 discount of first-time orders.

“There are three parts to the success of our 'secret sauce',” says CEO Adam Slutsky, “our user interface, our software and our quality.” Slutsky took the helm at Mimeo.com in mid-2005. Before that he co-founded Moviefone, serving as its COO, CFO and director from its inception.

The company announced last month that its on-demand digital printing and distribution service is also Mac compatible. Instead of using Mimeo.com's own print drivers, Mac users can use a PDF upload capability to get their documents to the service.

FedEx Kinko's DocStore allows consumers to build and send off any print job and pick it up at their neighborhood Kinko's. The store features an online catalog of the firm's most frequently printed documents. The company upgraded its software to allow users to print multiple files per order, automatically preview files online for proofing and choose from a wider selection of papers, including cardstock, pastel, bright, resumé and executive papers.

The software that powers the site was developed in conjunction with Microsoft and works from inside MS Windows desktop programs, or any other program, just like a print driver. File, Print FedEx Kinko's software is compatible with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

In May, quick print giant Ginny's Printing, Austin, TX, opened its ColorDirect digital storefront to sell postcards; it invested $300,000 to launch the operation. The company leveraged its expertise in providing company-specific web portals to clients for a number of years.

ColorDirect offers glossy postcards (see page 21). The company outsourced its website/software development but created its Web content and postcard design templates internally. The process took over two and a half years to complete.

“It's still a young program, but so far our customers enjoy the do-it-yourself nature to the website,” says Brandon Cornett, senior project manager. “We offer everything needed in one place. But of course, if customers have trouble, we're only a phone call away.”

On Demand Imaging (ODI), a Portsmouth, NH-based service bureau-turned-printer, launched a separate company in December called IDoPrint.com to sell print products online. IDoPrint.com is a top customer of ODI, which operates a KBA 74 Karat and 2-color Heidelberg PrintMaster. The two companies combined employ eight people and bill about $1.5 million in annual sales.

Company president John Adams said he launched IDoPrint.com because the Web was ODI's biggest competitor. “We were losing business because clients said they were getting the same product online for half the price, and we couldn't match it because of the gang-run mentality,” he says.

He says IDoPrint.com has helped ODI grow, and since online is a COD business it improves a company's cash-flow position.

The company hired a developer to build its digital storefront system. It took a year to build, from the beginning of training until the first client's site was live, says Adams, but the company realized its return on investment in six months.

The IDoPrint.com website provides users with instant job quotes in real time, based on the product selected, quantity and finishing specifications. The site then schedules jobs immediately and offers a choice of normal turnaround (four days), fast turnaround (three days) and rush turnaround (two days), providing delivered printed material in less than a week. The company caters to clients in the Northeast and New England because shipping costs to other regions make the service less price competitive.

Adams says a key to succeeding online is optimizing the storefront for search engines.

“We put our site up and thought people would just find it. When that didn't happen in the first few months, we looked into why. Once we optimized the site, people have found it from across the globe,” he says.

Print Basics, based in Deerfield Beach, FL, opened up shop on the Web in August 2005 with three clients that support almost 700 offices. With 11 employees, the company is on target to achieve more than $2 million in sales annually, says CEO Craig Tanner, who previously was a partner in a large full-service commercial printing company in South Florida.

The company processes more than 100 orders per day, with about 35% of that coming in online. The goal is for at least 75% of work to be produced online by next year. It targets letterhead, envelopes, labels, business cards and forms work, producing 50,000 to 75,000 digital color impressions per month on a Konica Minolta bizhub PRO C500.

Tanner initially hired a company to custom-build its online ordering website, but when the company could not deliver what was promised, he turned to Printable Technologies. It took only two months to get the Printable systems up and running, he says.

“Instead of competing against the thousands of printers trying to low-ball estimates to win the big jobs,” says Tanner, “we are there day in and day out to meet customers' everyday print needs.”

Tanner says allowing clients to shop online is a more efficient process that allows direct sales staff to sell services and not baby-sit jobs. Also, he says, “In the past, if an order came in from a company for 47 different products, that became 47 job tickets, which is not efficient. Now it's one order that is picked, packed and shipped. That's a big time savings.”

He also reports that the system's ability to generate ordering, inventory and shipping reports for customers is an important selling feature.

Selling print online is still in its earlier stages, but innovations and partnerships on several fronts will continue to propel the market forward.

USAData, a provider of mailing lists and sales leads, has teamed up with providers of Web-to-Print (W2P) digital storefront software to offer the ability to order an entire direct mail campaign—including print and lists—online in minutes.

The partners that are working with USData include: EFI, providing tools to help companies deliver customer-facing applications for ordering print and fulfillment items; Press Sense, a developer of Web-based solutions for the printing industry; Four51, a provider of commerce networks that allow clients to buy, manage and supply print and other products; PageFlex, a provider of software for graphic design and online document creation and customization; Saepio, whose Agilis Print product enables the use of a Web browser to version printed marketing pieces including direct mail and Web-to-print documents; and PageDNA (formerly Printra) software to automate the print ordering and fulfillment process.

WorkflowOne (formerly Relizon), Dayton, OH, launched a 300,000-sq.ft. facility near Columbus that is a showcase for its latest techniques and best practices in Web-driven, one-to-one communication and fulfillment. It creates Intranet sites for its key customers, who then order services directly online. One customer, a retailer of financial services, uses the center to customize 27 million marketing pieces to suit the needs of local markets.

Online print services:

www. authorhouse.com , blurb.com , colordirect.com , diggypod.com , fedexkinkos.com , idoprint.com , kodakgallery.com , iuniverse.com , mimeo.com , printbasics.com , printingforless.com , snapfish.com , vistaprint.com , workflowone.com and xlibris.com