Getting a web-to-print website is easy. Getting it to make you money is not. We have a few do-s and don’t-s for you to consider before you take a plunge.

Web-to-print & new customers

Having a fancy website without good sales people and smart marketing won’t bring new customers. The technology is only one of components of the service a printer provides. Do not oversell it. Price, quality, delivery times, etc are more important to the customer. Web-to-print adds convenience to the overall process and reduces costs at both ends. The technology is only beneficial when both price and time are a priority consideration.

End consumer products

The competition in this market is fierce. Several established players like VistaPrint, Click Business Cards, 123 Print and many-many others have large scale operations, rock-bottom prices and huge advertising budgets. It will be very difficult for a small player to get noticed.

Google search results

“business cards” – 36,400,000 results

“business cards plumber” – 479,00 results

The first 10 pages are taken by old, well-optimized websites. It will take time and effort to move your website to the top of search results.

Google advertising

Search engine advertising is very expensive for popular keywords.

Assume that optimistic 10% of clicks result in an order.
284 clicks * 0.1= 28 orders a day at a cost of $127.5 per order ($3,570 / 28).

Corporate products

Web-to-print is an excellent sales tool. It gives your sales people a good excuse to call a potential corporate customer because you can offer what others cannot. Businesses with large number of customer-facing staff or those who order and re-order often are your best bet. Remember that their time spent ordering a product from you costs them money and lost productivity, but don’t be surprised if they don’t like doing it online. There are plenty of people who prefer the old way.

Charging a premium for your online services is risky, because your competitors don’t

The effort of setting up a template is roughly equivalent to processing 2 orders manually. Will they order often enough?

Brands and franchises

A deal with a franchise head office or a brand name holder is an excellent opportunity to get high order volumes at very little customer acquisition cost. Web-to-print is perfectly suited for this type of customers. The technology does make a big difference here.

Brands and franchises – partisan approach

A lot of master franchises and brand name holders neglect the printing and advertising aspect of their business or demand exuberant prices though “preferred suppliers”. It leaves the franchisees unhappy and looking for better alternatives. Usually it is not difficult to identify individual franchise holders and approach them directly with your offer. It should be very easy for you to beat the prices demanded by the “preferred supplier”.

A good service, low prices and the convenience of web-to-prit will quickly bring you more franchise members through word of mouth. You can achieve the same low customer acquisition cost and web-to-print technology makes all the difference.

Consider copyright and trademark issues. Their head offices may not like your approach.

Niche consumer products

We see some incredible examples of web-to-print being used for niche products of all sorts and kinds. It is all about knowing that niche market and having access to the customer base. A simple example – greeting cards. Who would think that apart from a few big players there are successful printers servicing tiny micro-markets where good service, right price, excellent designs and the convenience of web-to-print bring very good order volumes.

Conclusion

Web-to-print is only a tool and will not replace your sales and marketing. You can extract only as much value out of it as you put into promoting and selling your services.

No matter how good your web-to-print software is, but if the price is too high or the quality is too low it cannot not help you get more business through the door.

Integration into popular CMS, e-commerce and ad management platforms is easy. We have lots of open source tools, plug-ins and extensions to help you bring dynamic imaging to other websites.

Content embedding

Our Flash dynamic imaging widget can be embedded into any web page like a YouTube video. Just cut and paste a small HTML snippet. You can use it with your own banner templates and promote your new cool service through other websites. A banner can be created within someone’s else web page and submitted to your ad manager with one click.

WordPress

We have a bunch of web-to-print plug-ins for WordPress.

E-cards plug-in

Generate virtual cards right inside a WordPress page and email them as images. Just another way to promote your new cool banner generator or run a viral campaign.

PayPal Pro payments

PayPal Pro is a good solution if you want your advertisers to pay for banner creation on the spot. We have a plugin that can do it out of the box.

Magento

Magento is a popular and growing e-commerce platform to act as a shopping window of your ad management store. Just add our web-to-print store extension and you can sell banner designs straight away.

OpenX

Our OpenX extension helps advertisers create banners from within OpenX.

Dynamic imaging API wrappers

Developers will save time integrating web-to-print into your existing website if they use our web-t0-print wrappers for PHP5. ]]> /ad-networks/open-source-imaging/feed/ 0 /ad-networks/banner-marketplace/ /ad-networks/banner-marketplace/#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:52:02 +0000 admin http://www.zetaprints.com/?p=975 Too many small advertisers prefer text ads because it takes too much effort to create or commission their banners. Using ready to use banner templates eliminates this barrier. We have an open marketplace where banner templates can be traded between graphic designers and advertisers.

Variety

Choosing a suitable banner is not as easy as it sounds. A choice of 1000 templates is quickly reduced to a handful once style, color scheme, topic and size are taken into account.

All our templates are submitted by members of our design community. They vary in style, color, size and topics. They are created by different people and it ensures a good variety to choose from.

Cost

Prices for templates from the marketplace include designer royalties. Designers can either set the price at $10 or FREE. The free templates are just that – free, the users don’t pay anything for them.

Ease of use

Commissioning a banner design takes some effort. The design needs to be explained, several options produced, reviewed and changes made. It takes hours at best. Usually it is days.

Our design marketplace helps advertisers acquire a design instantly, without leaving your website.

Text effects

The user doesn’t need to be concerned with applying some fancy text effect or transformation. Whatever the effect is in the template it will be applied to the new text.

Image effects

Images can go through multiple transformations to match the placeholder image in the template. No additional action is required from the user apart from uploading an image.

Mixing it all together

Layering and mixing different effects can produce absolutely stunning design. They may take hours or days to produce or they may be still simple, but visually appealing. It is in the hands of the designer. Let them get creative!

Cost of making a template

The difference between our image generator and many others is in the cost of making a template and what effects can be applied to the variable parts.

How others do it

There are lots of image generators that need a programmer or a designer with special skills to create a decent templates. A Flash template like in any of the examples above can cost hundreds of dollars + programming costs. It’s not the way we do it.

How we do it

Creating a template for our image generator costs no harder than creating the design itself because the design forms the basis of the template. The designer needs to mark which parts are variable and upload the file. No programming is required. Any designer can do it.

Image uploading

One of the main benefits of integrating our image generator is automatic image transfer from our system to your ad manager. Otherwise the advertiser would need to download it from our site and upload to yours. It is an absolutely unnecessary manual step.

Flash widget

We developed an open source Flash widget that can be embedded into a page in your ad manager. The widget is easy to embed, but on its own it’s a rather limited option. Users may need to leave your ad manager to complete some transactions or make a payment.

A single integrated interface

The same Flash widget can be supplemented with other integrated features for search, payments and account management. It will require some programming effort at your end, but will remove any need for advertisers to leave your site before the transaction is complete.

Automatic image generation

Large advertisers will benefit for automatic image generation. Banners can be updated in bulk with data coming from the advertiser’s database without any manual data entry.

Campaign-wide banner update

The same process can be applied to multiple banners at the same time. For example, an advertiser has 20 different banners in a single campaign and changes “daily special” information. An integrated solution can do it all in one step taking few seconds.

Database driven image generation

The same image generation process can be fully automated with the data fed into ZetaPrints from some external source, such as a customer’s CMS and the updated banners get placed into the ad managers without any human intervention.

Professional banners and D.I.Y.

An advertiser doesn’t need a designer every time a banner needs to be created or changed.

A banner can be uploaded to our web-to-print and dynamic imaging system as a template. Then it’s a matter of entering text and uploading images by the advertiser to get a finished product.

The cost of making a template is no more than the cost of designing the banner itself. The cost of making a change to the banner is a tiny fraction of what a designer or agency would charge. Besides, it’s instant.

Flexible business model

We are open to your way of doing business. Things to consider:

• who creates and owns banner templates
• who pays for use of our system
• how dynamic imaging is integrated into your ad manager
• end user prices

You can use our system purely as a convenience for advertisers and let them pay us or you can set your own prices and only pay us our dynamic imaging fees.

Fully managed solution

Our partners will be happy to help you set up a web-to-print portal, fill it with your templates and manage day to day operation. This arrangement would be directly between you and one of our partners.

Help from freelancers

We have many freelancers in our graphic design community who are happy to help with preparing and maintaining templates or creating new graphic designs. You can manage all the technical apects of your web-to-print portal yourself and outsource graphic design work to freelancers.

Converting designs into templates

It is easy to convert your existing graphic design files into templates. For example, converting a vector graphic design from PDF to a template may take between 10min and 1 hour, depending on how clean the original design is. Converting designs made in raster applications such as PhotoShop may take longer.

We are here to help

Whatever option you think works best for you, please, do not hesitate to drop us an email and ask for help.

Template-based ordering

Having a web-to-print portal with your branded designs makes it easy for your staff to order print, place ads or create display banners for Internet advertising. It is faster and cheaper to use our web-to-print service than using designers to make manual changes.

Access control and approvals

Access to your web-to-print portal is fully controlled by you. It can be open to any member of the staff or locked down with access by selected users only.

Output files generated by the portal can be sent directly to the intended recipient or go through a simple approval process.

Security and integration

Our service is fully hosted and sits outside your Intranet. However, it can be completely hidden from outsiders and accessed from within your corporate network only.

Integration of the portal into your Intranet applications such as CRM or procurement can make it even friendlier with a single sign on and information flow between the systems.

Output for print or Internet

Personalizing a business card design is not much different from personalizing an Internet banner. Our web-to-print system can handle both equally well. Banner advertising is a lot easier if you have the creatives prepared in minutes at negligible or no cost. It can even be done automatically with data from your DB or CMS.

Casual designs

We have lots of design templates submitted by community of designers. You may well find just the design you need there.  It only costs you a fraction of what a custom made design would cost you and in none of the time. Find a design, personalize, pay a small fee (if any), download the files and it’s ready to be sent to printing, publishing or downloaded for whatever other purpose.

Did you know we have lots of free templates you can use right now?

Branded designs

It’s cheaper and easier to turn your branded designs, such as business cards, ads, letterheads, etc into templates. You can make changes to it any time, anywhere yourself and you won’t need PhotoShop for it. Just enter text and upload images. It couldn’t be easier.

Print or digital

Your web-to-print portal can produce output for printing (PDF, hi-res Jpeg) or images for Internet advertising. Making changes to a business card or an Internet banner becomes so much easier!