The wide format industry is generally seen as being slower to adopt workflow and related productivity-enhancing software than other print sectors, and that includes web to print. Michael Walker looks at why that is and what products there are to streamline online sales in this diverse and booming sector.
Web to print has had something of a chequered history, stretching back to the dotcom boom at the turn of century and the ‘build it and they will come’ fallacy. Now that the technology has had time to mature, and printers have been able to form a more realistic assessment of what it is good for, it is finally gaining some real traction.
However, the wide format sector has on the whole been less willing to adopt the online sales model. EFI’s Danny Morris thinks it is simply because wide format printers have not yet felt the competitive pressures that dominate the rest of the print business.
‘Many wide format print providers are still making very high margins. They don’t have to over-sell themselves, so there’s a lack of desire to be creative,’ he commented.
This lack of pressure to automate also results in piecemeal workflow or none at all. ‘We typically see lots of separate RIPs,’ said Agfa’s software product manager Chris Burn. ‘There will be five machines, each an independent production unit.’
RIP and workflow developer Caldera’s vice president of marketing & communication Sébastien Hanssens confirms that most web to print he sees is not connected to production, and likens the typical wide format shop set-up to ‘Lego bricks that don’t fit’.
Forces for change
So if the wide format world is getting on fine without bits of technology that are increasingly considered necessary in other print sectors, why should they change?
EFI’s Danny Morris sees that increasing competition from outside the conventional wide format sector will act as a driver. ‘As commercial printers add wide format machines, things will start to hot up. The margins aren’t being challenged yet, but the smart operators will change their business ahead of reaching market saturation.’
Danny Morris, EFI
The need for a ‘get ahead of the curve’ attitude to automation is echoed by Steve Richardson, sales director at MIS developer Optimus 2020, who said: ‘There’s a divide between those who get it and those who don’t. Printers from an offset background are more likely to get it; we’re hoping to see a new breed of signage folk.’
Irenee Chappell, business development manager at web to print specialist ROI360, supports this view. ‘We’re seeing a significant increase in existing customers buying wide format printers, and often more than one. Most of these already have litho and digital presses.’
Agfa’s Chris Burn also thinks there has been a change in attitude amongst potential web to print buyers. ‘Two or three years ago there was resistance to believing that [online sales] could be automated,’ he reported.
Beyond responding to competitive pressures, web to print can also have branding benefits in making a small printer, or perhaps more importantly, a group of complementary and co-operating printers, appear larger than they are. ‘It could appear as one store with a wide range of products, but behind that there could be two or more companies producing the different items,’ said John Davies, business development manager at Fujifilm.
For work that does not need specialist installation services, web to print also offers the potential to attract work over a wider geographical area. Many smaller signmakers tend to serve very local customer bases and web to print could be a way around that, though it does have to be promoted, said Mr Davies, suggesting that social media, direct mail and Google analytics could be a way to target potential new customers, in addition to making existing customers aware of the facility.
What first?
Since web to print, workflow and MIS ideally go hand-in-hand to create a complete automated sales and production system, the question for a business that has none of them is which to get first. Fujifilm’s John Davies thinks that web to print is the easiest fit for many wide format businesses as so many of them are small.
‘Smaller companies are generally happier to take a web to print solution as supplied,’ he said. ‘There’s more value here than in commercial print, where integration with MIS might also be required, which can make it a big project. MIS might not be justified in a company with fewer than 10 staff with a well-defined set of equipment.’
John Davies, Fujifilm
Assuming that a manual workflow for job collection, checking and routing onward to production already exists, that still leaves the generic web to print questions that any printer must address: what kind of work are we trying to sell online and who are we selling it to?
Opinions diverge here within the vendor community. Claes Jeppson, general manager EMEA at wide format RIP and workflow developer Onyx Graphics commented: ‘Web to print is mainly seen as benefitting B2C type applications, as few B2B clients are willing to do the work of the printer. Colour matching on a web to print app is impossible and brand colours are important to B2B clients.’ He does, however, concede that template-driven ‘limited and controlled B2B applications are possible.’
DDS Accura’s managing director Trevor Cocks takes the opposite view. ‘B2C is all about price. If you go B2C you’re competing against the likes of Vistaprint and printing.com, and you have to invest so much time and energy in promoting your presence.’ The Accura Online e-commerce module for the eponymous MIS is designed around the assumption of an existing B2B relationship.
Agfa falls somewhere in between. Chris Burn commented: ‘Although the Asanti Storefront portal was envisaged for B2B use, we have had requests for B2C applications to support creative ideas in niche markets.’ He also pointed out that Agfa’s colour management expertise is brought to bear via a colour quality manager which is run from a central server and provides colour management direct to machine (though only Agfa’s own Anapurna and Jeti inkjets are supported) or to colour-managed PDF.
Diversity accommodated
While the phrase ‘wide format’ covers an enormous range of printer, ink and substrate types, producing an ever-greater variety of finished products, in web to print terms it is all just fields in a database. The main difference is in how products are priced and to what extent any finishing options can be supported.
‘The estimating side needs to calculate on area rather than sheets or linear metres,’ said Trevor Cocks, adding, as an example of how his product has evolved to meet wide-format needs, ‘we can support perimeter estimating for cutting out, for example.’
EFI’s Danny Morris said that in addition to a background file uploader, his company’s Digital Storefront supports wide format as standard and that as well as supporting product-specific finishing options like eyelets or lamination, it will continue to add wide format features.
Caldera bases its WebShop web to print module on the Magento toolbox that is widely used in e-commerce, but argues that the benefit of approaching a wide format specialist vendor is its knowledge of the industry. ‘If a printer goes to a web design agency for a web to print portal, he would have to explain his business to them,’ observed Sébastien Hanssens. ‘We already have that culture, so we can do it faster and suggest the issues that he might have overlooked.’
The degree of complexity in product options that you might want to offer via web to print is as much a business decision as it is a technical one. There does seem to be a consensus that stock call-off or tightly controlled template-based work are the best candidates for online ordering, though it may be possible to add upsell options for substrate or finishing. ‘As long as you can template it, it’s OK to sell via web to print,’ said Irenee Chappell, who added that ROI360’s offering includes ‘intelligent’ templates that can handle some non-linear resizing tasks, though they do not support any product-specific finishing.
Ensuring that only PDF jobs are uploaded is another way of establishing a minimal level of quality control over work that is generated outside of the portal or printer’s production system, but even that needs to be backed by some robust pre-flighting. Sébastien Hanssens said the debate is around prepress: ‘You can’t print without checking the file. If customers aren’t happy they’ll kill your reputation online.’
Rent or buy?
The other big decision for those new to web to print is whether to license software in the usual upfront manner or to go with one of the software as a service (SaaS) options. Again, there is disagreement between vendors, with Agfa for one championing the SaaS route. ‘The knowledge to build, maintain and update a web portal is too much for a small printer,’ suggested Chris Burn.
Against that is the view from Steve Richardson at Optimus 2020. ‘The easier it is to buy, the less realisation there is of the commitment to making it work,’ he said, adding: ‘There’s a graveyard of failed web to print projects.’ Optimus Cloud is his web to print solution but despite its name, he is very clear that it is not a SaaS arrangement.
The views and the products are as diverse as the wide format sector itself, but there is a clear trend towards uptake of automation for sales, if not always for production. Printers who already have web to print to streamline job acquisition will naturally want to bring any new wide format capacity under the same umbrella; the efficiencies that this brings will enable them to put price pressure on the providers who have been relying on comfortable margins to fund less efficient working practices. The latter group will eventually have to wake up and smell the competition.
