How Printers Win Customers With Web-to-Print Production

Assessments of Web-to-print (W2P) solutions usually emphasize what happens on the customer’s end, and that’s as it should be. The solutions exist, after all, to make it easier for buyers of print to do business with providers. But, as they gain greater experience with online order intake, printers are realizing that it’s just as important to count the blessings that W2P brings to them.

It doesn’t necessarily take a large volume of online transactions to make the provider-side benefits plain. Dhara Taheripour, who heads the new business development team at Calitho in Concord, Calif., says jobs originating via W2P account for only about 5% of the company’s current sales. But, he points out that W2P job onboarding is what validates taking on this work in the first place.

“The jobs that are coming through by Web-to-print would otherwise not be possible for us to produce,” Taheripour says. “It is a slice of business that is enabled because of the Web-to-print workflow.” He describes the W2P jobs as small-run and highly customized, with an emphasis on distribution and fulfillment — difficult, in other words, to produce efficiently in a conventional scenario of order entry and job processing.

Herein lies the value of streamlining and simplifying the task of job entry at W2P portals. “The sites facilitate the ordering and production of these products to an extent where, for example, you don’t need someone to write up a work order,” Taheripour explains. “You don’t need a very detailed job jacket as you would in a conventional job.” The fact that customers enter much of the needed job data at the portals “helps offset the fact that these are not extremely lucrative jobs within themselves.”

‘Astronomical,’ Otherwise

The W2P routine at Calitho, built on software from Racad Tech, is a “parallel workflow” that complements order intake procedures for the company’s conventional print jobs, according to Taheripour. He adds that however small the present W2P volume may be, handling those jobs in any other way “would be an astronomical amount of work compared to what the Web-to-print is able to do.”

At Calitho, Dhara Taheripour (left) directs new business development, while Tim Lindner oversees technology and prepress.

Sean Owen sees the same kind of advantage in W2P at Talient Action Group in Manchester, N.H., where he serves as the CEO. Owen notes that about 26% of the jobs coming in through customer storefronts created with W2P software from Infigo can go direct to press in an automated workflow; the rest are vetted for production by customer service representatives and prepress personnel. His goal is to get the direct-to-press volume to 60% by converting more of his smaller accounts into W2P users.

This is as much about making business sense for Talient as it is about creating convenience for customers. “For the smaller clients, it’s a matter of can you really continue to service them properly, to sell to the client profitably, when they only produce two, three, or four projects a year,” Owen observes.

“By pushing them to a storefront, by ensuring that the products are available, and that they can automate things such as placing the order, creating the artwork, and even paying the bill online,” he says, “all of those steps just save us a ton of time.” The presence of nearly 700 ready-to-order items at Talient’s storefronts is what will attract smaller customers to W2P, he adds.

Accommodating customers in this way accelerates production for the printer, agrees Betty Maul, president of FrontEnd Graphics in Cherry Hill, N.J., and a user of Red Tie Template (RTT) digital storefront software. “It does make it easy for purchasing, since you don’t need to be after them for tiny purchase orders,” she says. “It’s all up there, and they can order whatever they need without anybody being terribly involved. Once that order is OK to go, it goes right through our workflow and out the back door.”

Maul also cites simplified job processing as one of the major benefits of W2P for printers. She notes that with traditional order entry, “you have to make up the job jacket and get all the information up front. You have to put the specs in, and have to attach the quote. The job has to be given to production to go to print, and then it needs to go out the door in shipping. There’s many, many people involved in that.”

Just Send the Bill

The built-in job and business management features of RTT speed up the sequence of events by eliminating much of the administrative overhead, according to Maul. “A lot of hands are gone from that, because it’s already priced. Because the pricing has already been done, it’s like a paper jacket at that point for that job. And as soon as that’s done, it’s ready to invoice, and my bookkeeper just sends the bill. It streamlines everything,” she sums up.

Lauren O'Connor

E-commerce is the core of the business model at Primoprint, a Huntersville, N.C.-based commercial printer that derives 100% of its sales from a self-developed W2P and asset management solution it calls Business Automated Platform. A proprietary approach is key to supporting the franchisors and other multi-location
customers whose marketing materials the company supplies, says Lauren O’Connor, chief revenue officer.

“We’re a firm believer in being able to automate and change our software and services as the client requests or needs,” she explains, noting that it is more efficient for Primoprint to do this internally than it would be to wait for the same kinds of modifications from a vendor of W2P software. Adapting the platform as needs arise lets the company “control and escalate” opportunities to make the W2P experience better for the customers who depend on it.

“We really wanted to ensure we provided the power to the customer to really manage their print,” O’Connor says. “If you remove that arduous process ­— if you can help them focus on what really drives the business versus ensuring someone’s cell phone is correct on a business card — you’re really helping to streamline an organization by saving them tons of resource management hours.”

Betty Maul, president of FrontEnd Graphics, cites simplified job processing as a major benefit of having W2P capabilities.

You Name It, We House It

The advantage for Primoprint is that it can scale and fine-tune the Business Automated Platform in whatever way best addresses the customer’s requirements. “Any item you can print, we can house it within that system,” O’Connor says. For example, one of its franchisors, a 200-location provider of housecleaning services, gets customized portals with individual logins for its each of franchisees, who use an Amazon-like interface to order templated products.

Its Business Automated Platform also helps customers preserve brand equity by controlling what users can and cannot modify when ordering print. Logos and corporate colors, for example, would be off limits to change.

The platform’s back-end reporting system also lets franchise headquarters keep tabs on how much of what their locations are consuming. O’Connor says in one case, a customer that had uploaded 254 templates learned that only six of them were being ordered, prompting the customer to reevaluate its inventory of print marketing resources.

Each of the four companies profiled here hands off work from customer-facing W2P portals to back-end production workflow in a different way. But, all of them have reaped the benefits of integrating order intake with job processing.

Owen says, for example, that automating the sequence cuts production time by an average of eight to 12 minutes per job, a savings that adds up. It also helps Talient to better forecast its need for production materials, giving the company “better buying power” through improved inventory control.

Taheripour believes successful W2P-enabled production begins with the design of the portal, which he compares in function to the tooling of a diecutter. The W2P “tooling” is important to get right, he emphasizes, because “if we cut corners on the initial build, we will pay for it down the line.”

Web-to-print software from Infigo is the solution for e-commerce at Talient Action Group, where the goal is to send 60% of incoming orders direct to press. From left, Linda Goguen, print specialist; Nick Testa, digital print manager; Christine Lilley, creative lead.

Right Place, Right Time

Although no one expected or intended it, W2P solutions that made it possible to reduce or eliminate the face-to-face aspect of selling print were at the right place at the right time when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. During the periods when in-person interactions with customers were suspended, printers who had adopted W2P held an edge over those who hadn’t.

E-commerce wasn’t a complete buffer against losses due to the pandemic. At Calitho, Taheripour notes, “the need for business cards has fallen off a cliff,” and the demand for posters and other event-
related material “completely evaporated.” He adds, however, that because increases in other types of work balanced these declines, the company’s volume of online orders remained about the same — and is now poised to go up.

Maul experienced the same pattern of slump and rebound at FrontEnd Graphics. She says activity at portals used for corporate marketing and branding materials “kind of all stopped” as people switched to virtual meeting platforms like Zoom, cutting their marketing budgets in the process.

Fortunately, the COVID-caused hiatus wasn’t permanent. The good news now, she says, is that “we’re seeing a lot of online burnout. Obviously, we’ve gotten busier, because now people are going back to using different forms of media to touch their clients.”

She also expects fulfillment to change as companies get used to having substantial numbers of their employees work from home. “Some of them are never going back,” Maul observes. “So, we will be delivering more to residential addresses, where these people are working out of their homes, rather than to office buildings.”

Decentralized Print Purchasing

The pandemic months were something of a boom time for W2P at Talient, which Owen says onboarded new clients at a rate of two per month throughout all of 2020, for a total of 26. He points out, however, that it wasn’t entirely a case of cause-and-effect.

Owen explains that although Talient gained some of its new W2P business from customers who wanted to minimize in-person contact, the principal reason was the fact that “clients were looking for an easier way to manage their print. It was about being able to manage projects in decentralizing their buying, or their artwork creation, right through the personalization and variable data options.”

“Those are the tools that really drove the adoption,” Owen says. He also notes that during the pandemic, customers had time to reexamine their print-buying techniques — a pause for reflection that helped them to better appreciate what W2P could do for them.

At Primoprint, the rise in volume of online orders was partly driven by what O’Connor describes as a “huge increase” in demand for Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM), a form of targeted advertising small businesses use to promote goods and services in their local communities. “The age-old adage is, ‘meet the customer where they are,’ meaning they’re at home,” she says. “You also had a lot of people at home who were starting businesses, and they would print hang tags with us, as an example.”

A different surge in demand arose from the cancellation of time-honored family and community events. “Here in North Carolina, people were really upset that their kids couldn’t go to graduation,” O’Connor says. “And so we saw a huge increase in Coroplast [signage] because people wanted yard signs for their kids and their grandkids” in lieu of honoring them in person at commencement exercises.

Educating the ‘Approvers’

Printers who have adopted W2P know it can be transformative, but they caution against thinking of it as something that can be undertaken casually. For one thing, Maul notes, there are no build-it-and-they-will-come guarantees of efficient utilization by customers.

“The clients who are on it, love it,” she says. “How to make it successful is to make sure the employees within those companies know it is there, that they are properly instructed on how to post up what they need, and to make sure the approver within the corporation is checking in and sending off anything that is OK to go.”

Customer staff turnover complicates things, and approvers aren’t always diligent about signing off for production when they’re supposed to. “But once they understand the process, it goes very, very well,” Maul declares.

Crucial to success with W2P from the printer’s perspective, counsels Owen, is realizing “the commitment is definitely more than just the cost of a Web-to-storefront platform or software. The commitment really is in the people you have around you, and whether they have the skill set to change the way you sell the customers and service them.”

Employees must be prepared to “disrupt” their current workflows when W2P enters the picture, according to Owen. “You could easily implement it into your old-style workflow, and you would be offering a nice service to the customer, but you won’t be benefiting from it as a printer,” he says. “Printers need to understand that this is a very big commitment, and that they have to be ready to commit their people to it.”

Vetting the Various Vendors

As for choosing a W2P solution, Taheripour states his view that “most of the vendors in this space have the same set of capabilities” at similar price points. He recommends evaluating the software providers on the basis of support and integration, as well as their responsiveness to “feature requests and bug fixes” (something Tim Lindner, the company’s director of technology, gives Racad Tech high marks for). Taheripour also thinks that SaaS (software as a service), as opposed to self-hosting, is the right model for those just starting out with W2P.

From there, a printer’s embrace of W2P is limited only by the degree of production efficiency the printer aspires to achieve. At Calitho, the degree of efficiency is extremely high, even though the number of W2P-enabled jobs it applies to is small. According to Lindner, most of these orders go from received to shipped within half a day.

“You can imagine how hard it would be to honor a 24-hour turnaround service level agreement if we had to write up an order,” Taheripour comments. “It would be impossible to act with that urgency if we weren’t enabled by
the platform.”

That’s why he sees the modest amount of W2P work Calitho presently is doing as a good indication of what the future holds. “It’s a small percentage, but considering where we were, that number is growing,” he says. “We understand that the ceiling is much higher than where we are now.”