Continuing mask and distancing requirements mean that we’re not yet back to businesses as usual. In the meantime, we’ve all got used to Amazon levels of choice, convenience and speed of delivery. The same needs to be true for print, finds Michael Walker

When the lockdown in the UK closed all but essential stores and businesses in late March, the period of reduced activity has allowed some printers to review their processes, plans and staffing levels, and many of the leading web-to-print (W2P) developers have seen an uptick in business as a result. Infigo CEO Douglas Gibson says, ‘Our sales team have been very busy during lockdown. We have seen an increase of both new business requests and customers who were unhappy with their existing solution and planned to find a new provider, or didn’t have enough budget to date now see the value of moving things forward.’

David Lowe, technical sales specialist at EFI in the UK, concurs. ‘Printers who never did anything [about W2P] are saying ‘can we do it now?’, while existing users want to sell PPE, screens and hand sanitisers. We’re also getting some totally new enquiries with no previous contact,’ he adds. Vpress also reports a big spike in activity. RedTie is perhaps the exception, reporting that most of its customers have seen a downturn in activity and have been focused on what production they have in hand.

One immediate issue that many printers ran into was that they couldn’t work from home, not just because of the need to load, operate and unload presses and finishing lines, but because they couldn’t handle orders from outside the business premises. ‘The feedback we received showed that by deploying new storefronts they were able to receive orders easily,’ says Infigo’s customer service director Greg Young, adding, ‘Most of them also automated those orders directly into the manufacturing workflow due to MIS integration.’

Vpress’s technical director Kelvin Bell also sees MIS integration as a key requirement, saying, ‘If you don’t have integration with MIS, you’re heading towards a wall – especially if you have reduced the number of people in the business.’ He also notes a growing requirement to be able to tap into corporate systems like Salesforce or SAP, which let corporate users access W2P services as easily as anything else they use.

Stock options

The need to implement or upgrade W2P capability has also been driven by the move to offering different kinds of items, with many printers having shifted into PPE production and the sale of related items. While this kind of straight stock product doesn’t require the quoting and artwork creation facility of, say, a variable data mail campaign, it can mean stocking, storing, picking, packing and dispatching potentially scores or even hundreds of additional lines. ‘We would say that around 30% of our customer base shifted their focus from traditional print to manufacturing products like visors and face masks,’ confirms Ms Nayee.

As well as expanding product lines, another requirement of the ‘everything online’ ordering environment is handling multiple drop-offs. This is something that Vpress has worked with customers like Where The Trade Buys, to introduce the ability to specify multiple drops for complex orders.

EFI’s David Lowe explains that coincidentally, this kind of stock-holding call-off and warehousing inventory management was already in the pipeline for the company’s MarketDirect StoreFront (formerly Digital StoreFront) software, through a new Fulfilment module. This organises pick and pack schedules and even plots the most efficient routes through warehouses for staff. ‘It’s not Amazon,’ he says, ‘but it suits up to two or three hundred lines and helps provide a one-stop shop f or customers.’

The other recent major addition to MarketDirect StoreFront is Auto Engage, which comes from other parts of the MarketDirect suite and applies campaign-type tools to follow up abandoned carts, offering discounts or other incentives to complete orders, or to cross-sell products. While these features are mostly consumer-oriented, it’s not hard to see how they could apply in franchise, trade, inplant or other business print settings.

Vpress’s development direction is towards ‘modal’ implementations of its technology. This means embedding it into other commerce sites such as Esty, eBay or Amazon, where it can appear in a ‘pop-up’ box. The company has developed the technology to provide a proof for a print job and to deliver a production-ready file at the end; the key development direction is in underlying technology. ‘Our technology is already on some consumer sites, it’s like the engine of the car and doesn’t care what the car is,’ says Mr Bell.

Infigo demonstrated new features earlier in the year, including integration with HP Brand Centre and PrintIQ, the launch of an interactive 3D editor and a new module aimed at users without software development expertise. The latter is designed to allow the maintenance and management of content of websites through a simple user interface. RedTie is focusing on an updated report building and storefront updates to make the interface more responsive for different screen sizes.

Off the shelf or bespoke?

One area that all the W2P developers have to face is potential competition via e-commerce plug-ins for popular website platforms such as WordPress. RedTie’s Jonathan Silvester comments that ‘off-the-shelf e-commerce solution don’t usually have the functionality required for print’, while Vpress tackles this head-on with a Woo Commerce plug-in priced at £2500, which includes training and help with setting up templates. Mr Bell says that a site can be set up in a day or even within two hours.

EFI’s David Lowe agrees about the speed of deployment but points out that these solutions work best for commodity products: ‘As soon as you’re personalising, they don’t help,’ he says, though Mr Bell says that this is also an area Vpress is targeting. Infigo, meanwhile, points to the speed of updating of its Catfish platform and the broad configurability of its offerings.

The Cloud is clearly an enabling technology for W2P, and aids in speed of roll-out, though Mr Lowe says that some customers still prefer to keep their MIS data on their own premises. Mr Bell is more bullish: ‘You need to be in the Cloud, for efficiency, scalability, flexibility; it’s faster, more secure, offers better SLAs – a no-brainer,’ though he too notes that MIS migration to the Cloud is not yet complete. Remote deployment and bespoke integration isn’t an issue for any of the W2P providers, since it’s in the nature of their products to be used that way, whether it’s done via APIs or XML and hot folders.

Beyond pandemic-specific imperatives, most prospective W2P customers are generally looking for support for editing or personalisation of products, proofing and approval as well as the stock-based ordering, which is now taken for granted, according to Mr Lowe, who comments that the UK market is quite mature, though there are still some who expect that ‘the website will build itself’. Infigo also points out that the generic benefits of W2P still apply, namely a permanently open online presence, more important than ever while social distancing and remote working are still in force, plus the ability to be paid in advance via credit card facilities, with the benefits for cashflow that this brings.

Once hopelessly oversold, it looks like web-to-print is one of the bits of technology you really can’t be without in these strange times.