Imaging 12 - Fujifilm Graphic Systems

E-COMMERCE buying and selling print on-line
with volume printers such as the 16pp-
48pp web printers and larger commercial
sheetfed concerns, many of whom battle
to keep their super-productive presses
busy throughout the shift pattern. One
Bristol-based web printer describes his
experience with an auction site as “a
useful top-up to our schedule when we’re
quiet – and we’ve even picked up a couple
of repeat customers from it.”
A further refinement of the auction
site is the e-print procurement service: a
third-party online service that sells the
services of a small number of printers, in
which the printer is generally invisible to
the customer. The lack of direct contact
between customer and printer, together
with the restricted membership, are the
two features that distinguish an e-print
procurement service from an auction site.
Any printer signing up to an e-print procurement
service should resign themselves
to the fact that this is a pure press-filling
exercise, because there’s very little chance
of picking up any direct customers; on the
other hand, an e-print procurement
service does protect pricing more, simply
because of its limited membership.
Put your web on the Web
‘E-printers’ – printers offering their
services via their own e-commerceenabled
Web sites – are the fastest-growing
section of the Internet print economy.
Printers who have gone down this route
include Williams Lea (www.williamslea.com)
and Grasmere Digital Imaging (www.
cardcorp.co.uk). Self-owned Web sites can
attract new customers, though more
usually they cater for established customers
needing an online purchasing facility.
A printer’s own Web site can offer
widely varying levels of sophistication,
ranging from a basic quote request that’s
emailed to the estimating department,
through to the full service of automatically-generated
quote, template design,
job submission and online tracking of the
job through the factory.
A handful of printers have taken on
Web designers to put their sites together,
but the more accepted route is via the offthe-shelf
e-commerce front-end packages
offered by the major MIS suppliers: these
hook up to the printer’s MIS and feed the
data received via the Web site straight into
the system, triggering estimates, sales
orders, job tickets and invoicing. MIS
suppliers Tharstern, Shuttleworth,
Optichrome, PrintCafe and others all offer
6
Imaging 12 autumn 2002
e-commerce front-ends that can be
operated independently or connected to
the relevant MIS; prices range from around
£15,000 to £30,000 for an entry-level
e-commerce package.
A refinement of the self-owned Web
site is a third-party online system. These
sites vary in the level of sophistication of
the service they offer, but generally set up
a communications channel between
printers (sometimes including repro houses
and designers) and customers through
which jobs can be ordered and tracked
through a printer’s factory, templates held