The acquisition of Moonpig by Photobox for an eye-opening £120m has been a mixed blessing for the print industry. On the one hand, it has proved that the web-to-print (W2P) market in the UK, which is lagging ponderously behind the US and elsewhere, is a viable and hugely profitable area for printers to get into. On the other hand, it has accentuated a feeling within UK print that W2P is only for large, multinational corporations.

"People find W2P daunting," explains Gary Peeling, managing director at Precision Printing Co, which is one of print’s leading players in the UK W2P market. "Printers ask themselves how they can become the next Moonpig and decide that if they can’t, there’s no point bothering."

You can understand the reluctance – the likes of Moonpig and Photobox have spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds on developing their W2P systems. For a print industry made up of SMEs, that is simply not a possible outlay. However, those already operating in the W2P sector say that it’s far from the case that W2P is the preserve of the big boys with the fat wallets. Rather, be it self-made options, partnerships or off-the-shelf software, W2P is there for all to take advantage of – it just needs a change in attitude.

In terms of demand, e-commerce is now a firm part of UK consumerism, be it for commercial or corporate transactions. One look at your local boarded up high street will tell you how much of a shift in purchasing there has been to online mediums. Peeling says that print should be capitalising on this. W2P has grown his digital impressions by 80%, to the point where he is taking delivery of two new HP Indigos, taking his total to six. He gets 10,000 W2P orders per day, a figure he expects to rise to 30,000 during the Christmas rush.

And it seems to be only the UK where this massive potential is being missed out on. Matteo Rigamonti, owner of international W2P operation Pixart Printing, says the UK is way behind Spain, France and Scandinavia when it comes to W2P. In the US, things are similarly advanced, according to Bruce Popky, marketing director of Quarterhouse Software, a major player in the US W2P software market.

"In the US, the competitive landscape is quickly evolving to the point where it is becoming very difficult for completely ‘offline’ printers to thrive, and we are noticing almost universal recognition of the need to sell online," he explains.
The problem is not that people won’t buy online in the UK, Peeling’s figures show they will, as does the success of Photobox and Moonpig. It’s more that there are not enough printers offering the service.

One of the easiest routes for SMEs to get into W2P is with an off-the-shelf option such as RedTie and Vpress. Where once these systems were too expensive, costs have plummeted in recent years and they now represent perhaps the most likely route to market for most SMEs.

"The financial barriers are falling down," says RedTie managing director Jamie Thomson. "We have dropped our initial £7,000 set-up fee, so the client now just pays a monthly hosting fee of £350 plus a charge for each file transferred. The average ROI is around three months."

VPress director Kelvin Bell adds that set-up costs for his products are negligible and the fact that the software is available as ‘software as a service’ makes it even more affordable. "Financing the move is definitely not the barrier the entry," he says.

Size matters
While most people with a W2P knowledge accept that these off-the-shelf systems are perfect for the smaller printer getting a foot in the W2P door, there is some disagreement as to how suitable they are if the printer wished to scale up their operations.

"I do think a lot of these software programs can suffer from being ‘web-to-nowhere’ – they don’t tend to know how to handle the orders at the back end of the systems," says Peeling, who built his own workflow, OneFlow, to provide this automation himself for the VPress system he runs for corporate print clients’ W2P needs. "If W2P is to take off, this definitely needs to be addressed as it is crucial to bringing down the unit cost of the products that attracts the customers."

Bell counters that the job of systems like VPress is not to control the whole print process, but to secure the order and then integrate with the workflows that handle what comes after that – the production. Clearly, though, W2P software has to be able to integrate with workflows of all shapes and sizes if businesses are to be able to scale up operations, and both Bell and Thomson claim their respective products are capable of this.

But with the myriad of workflows and MISs employed by printers, it is admittedly hard to find an off-the-shelf W2P solution that fits your requirements exactly and for some that leads to the second route into W2P: building a system from scratch.
"We’ve tried a few of the off-the-shelf products on a trial basis, but they still required human intervention," reveals Anthony Thirlby, managing director of ESP Colour. "The only way we could get the level of automation we required was to develop our own solution, or rather employ a software developer to build one for us."

This is not as expensive as some might think. Of course, the massive variables involved in the Photobox or Moonpig systems can see development costs stretch into the millions, but for limited set products, Thirlby says the investment was only around 10 times what they would have paid for an off-the shelf platform, and that he expects ROI within 12 months. For SMEs, that is not an unrealistic investment.

Rigamonti warns, however, that although building your own system gives numerous benefits, it can be more complicated and difficult to predict cost-wise.

"We weighed up going with an off-the-shelf option against building out own," he reveals. "But in the end we decided to create our own solutions because it’s safer, more difficult to copy, more flexible – more under control. The cons are that it takes nine software engineers, in our case, and the cost is really difficult to determine before the end of the project."

For smaller print operations, the choice whether to go self-built or off-the-shelf is a tough one, then, but many would argue they don’t have the money to try either – the likes of Pixart and ESP are, after all, substantial print enterprises. Fortunately for the SMEs, there is a third way into W2P: partnerships. A printer does not necessarily have to have the front-end of a system themselves, there are plenty of companies looking simply for a production outlet to feed orders into. This was the case for Precision Colour Printing.

"People have to bear in mind that you can partner and be part of the process without necessarily owning and running the front-end," says Peeling. "There are plenty of web retail companies looking for printing outlets. For example, we are a printer for the likes of ClintonCards, CreateToday and Pixart Printing in the UK."

However, partnerships do have a cost, as the investment of moving into W2P is not just about software. For all three routes to market to be successful, the business has to change the way it operates.

First up is the workflow. It has to be attuned to the vast data and tracking requirements of W2P. It also has to have automation at its heart to enable the low-cost and quick-turnaround print that W2P depends on to be produced. Secondly, you need staff expert in data analysis and management to maintain the system and track orders. Lastly, you need a marketing strategy to attract business.

"When we speak to people in the UK and around the world, one of our first questions is: ‘What is your customer acquisition strategy?’" explains Jerry Kennelley, founder of W2P platform Tweak.com. "‘Build it and they will come’ is not a strategy. You need to be aware that you have to drive business to that website and that is about marketing and understanding customers."

Ongoing costs
So even if SMEs manage to put the money together, there is still a substantial investment needed to make W2P a success.

However, Kennelley explains that for the marketing at least, small printers with a loyal, regular client base are ahead of the game, it’s just a matter of converting those clients online. Thomson adds that RedTie can take on a lot of the responsibility for the extra business changes from the printers.

Bell adds that VPress also offers business assistance, as "it is in our interests for the W2P move to be a success".

While it’s tough for smaller printers to get into W2P, it’s clearly not impossible. There are three routes that are mostly accessible on a smaller budget, while the additional business changes are manageable if the right assistance is sought.
Add in the fact that SME compatriots in other countries have managed the transition, any excuses about why the UK print industry has failed to embrace W2P begin to look a tad feeble. As Thomson says, "The barrier to successful implementation of a W2P solution in the UK has been a lack of ambition, not the size of the print operation."