Both deals are the culmination of lengthy relationships, as well as some serious investment at the company's print sites in London and Sartrouville, France.

Since the start of the year, Photobox, which merged with the French photo printer Photoways in 2006 to become Europe's largest online photo service, has installed a raft of new digital print and photo-developing kit.

Group-wide, the company has gone from eight to 11 Indigo devices, including two new HP Indigo 7000 presses, which were installed recently in Sartrouville.

Managing director Mark Chapman said: "We've made some pretty substantial investments in the last 12 months. I think we've more or less doubled our Indigo capacity, because although we haven't doubled the number of machines, the ones we've bought are that much faster."

In addition to the Indigos, Photobox has installed three new Fuji Frontier minilabs in the UK and three in France, where it has also invested in two Polielettronica devices for large-format and poster printing.

The two deals, which have led to the launch of new photo ordering websites for both Boots and Cdiscount, have the potential to significantly boost Photobox's revenues.

Chapman said: "It means a substantial increase in volumes for us over the next couple of years or so. It's certainly enough to give us a few headaches but we're very well fixed in terms of production facilities and investment backing."

Commenting on the Boots deal, he added: "One of the things that we obviously had to do was convince Boots that we could cope.

"They have a fairly massive customer database and the going-in position had to be that we were capable of serving them all if they all signed up."