Although far from a new concept, e-commerce has so far failed to take off across the vast majority of the print industry. Aside from a few notable examples, such as Moonpig, Fedex Kinkos and Vistaprint, printers have failed to capitalise on the potentially huge market that the internet offers.

This is largely down to the fact that even if you have a web-to-print (W2P) system, without a sizeable marketing budget you’re only going to be using it to service existing clients. It’s not going to make you the next Amazon. As such, many SME owners haven’t been able to see the point. Until now, perhaps.

This year there have already been three separate companies offering a new route into W2P, any one of which has the potential to have a significant impact on SME printers.

The most recent offering comes from Tweak Printer, the latest venture of stock photography magnate Jerry Kennelly, which is offering SMEs an online storefront and access to design content for zero up-front cost. Customers can log onto the portal and choose from more than 500,000 customisable content options, including logos, photos and slogans, as well as their own uploaded content, to produce 60 types of print products.

Meanwhile, having waited 10 years for the technology to catch up with the concept of W2P, Printing.com chief executive Tony Rafferty has announced the launch of a template-driven, W2P platform, based on InDesign Server. According to Rafferty, the three key criteria that the software had to satisfy were the ability for users to edit the entire document, rather than just specific fields; to create a new template in under five minutes, to prevent this becoming a bottleneck; and for the templates to link seamlessly with CRM, MIS and the logistics partner.

The third and most intriguing launch has come from HP, which has announced the arrival of HP Print Station in the UK after signing its first UK partnership with Nottingham-based John E Wright. The HP Print Station, is an interesting concept, based on a partnership between the manufacturer and various users of its digital print kit.

The Print Stations have already been rolled out in a number of developing economies, where users have the ability to "upload and modify files and make payments, but that’s all," explains HP Print Station EMEA sales manager Paolo Dal Santo. "In the UK, we should offer a much more advanced W2P solution, possibly with the ability to link [directly] into different HP production devices."

While the initial aim is to drive increased traffic to the partner stores, in the long term, Dal Santo admits that web purchases will only get bigger. Tony Barnett, managing director of John E Wright, is similarly convinced: "People want to be able to place an order online. Everything else has gone that way, why should print be any different?"

Things to come
W2P afficionado Gary Peeling, of Precision Printing, sees the HP deal as a sign of things to come. "I’m confident that we will see one or a number of players linking up with print service providers via an online network to deliver content locally; I’m sure those are going to emerge in the next couple of years," he says.

However, whereas the focus in recent weeks has been on different W2P platforms, Peeling argues the key to true W2P lies in another core print software: workflow. "What automated workflow gives you is the ability to deliver short runs at an economic cost. A lot of the orders that we’re producing now range from 50p to £2 and that’s economical not because of the W2P systems, but because the workflow can take those thousands of orders and process them automatically."

Peeling is also a strong believer in collaboration and argues that partnerships such as Precision’s with Italy-based Pixartprinting will be central to the future of W2P. "As an industry we need to wake up to sharing resources more efficiently – I don’t think we can fixate on owning a piece of equipment in order to deliver a service – and that’s very much central to the Pixart philosophy of allowing quick access in terms of price and delivery of file to a broad range of products, which allow our clients to expand our businesses."

This ethos has proved successful, not just for Precision and Pixart-printing, but for the plethora of print resellers that use their production facilities.

"In a recent survey that we did in Italy, our professional print clients reported that they are growing their print businesses by 30% per annum. They tend to be small PSPs, but the reason that they’re expanding is because they’re able to offer other products on-demand, with no risk and with easy access. Away from Pixart, I think we’re also going to see that increasingly," says Peeling.

30-SECOND BRIEFING
• While e-commerce has so far failed to take off wholesale across the print industry, three recent web-to-print (W2P) launches offer an easy way for printers to expand their online businesses
• One of these, HP Print Station, a tie-up between HP and print service providers that use HP kit, is a unique set-up that many feel is likely to be emulated by other printer-manufacturer partnerships. And although the service was initially designed to increase footfall within the partner print shops, the long-term strategy will see a much greater focus on selling via advanced and highly automated online storefronts
• For a viable W2P operation, however, the storefront is only one side of the equation. What is necessary to process the thousands of short-run orders that are required to make W2P profitable is an effective workflow
• Another aspect of this move towards greater collaboration is the concept of sharing equipment resources to enable smaller printers to offer a much broader range of products than they would be able to otherwise