Improved Delivery Process!

Jul 27 11 under Uncategorized | Leave a comment

For the last year we’ve sent the vast majority of our orders by DPD Couriers, overall the service is fantastic with a far higher percentage of first time deliveries than our previous couriers. We do appreciate that if you have an order that’s delivered late it may not feel like this but on average the service level is very good.

We’re always looking for ways to improve the level of service we offer and from tomorrow there’ll be a small addition to the delivery process.

On the day your job is dispatched you’ll receive a Dispatch notification from us by email and (if you’ve enabled it in your account) by SMS.

On the morning your job is out for delivery (normally the next working day, unless you’ve chosen to have a Saturday delivery) you’ll receive an Email direct from DPD with an Estimated Time of Delivery, you’ll also receive this by SMS if you’ve enabled it.

DPD will provide you with a 1Hour Delivery Window (i.e 13:00-14:00) if this time isn’t convenient then you can choose to rearrange the delivery directly with DPD.

TRADE CUSTOMERS: You’ll receive the notifications to your main account email address in the same way you’d receive the Dispatch Notification. If your jobs are being delivered direct to your client you can forward the email on to the client if you choose to.

If you have any questions about this just pop us an email to info@printvend.net or call us on 0800 033 7175.

Booklet Printing at PrintVend

Jun 14 11 under Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Booklet Printing (well binding anyway) in action:

We’re 4 Years Old Today!

Jun 8 11 under Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Happy Birthday to us… it was 4 years ago today (8th June 2007) that we incorporated Cordite Media Limited the parent company of PrintVend.

A Brief History:

8th June 2007 incorporate Cordite Media Limited
Move into temporary office space
October 2007 – move into our current offices/factory
October 2007 – first printer and guillotine are delivered
March 2008 – take on our first employees (Nick & Pete)
May 2008 – upgrade the guillotine
April 2009 – Install our 2nd printer
January 2010 – Add our booklet making line
February 2010 – Start work on our bespoke website (PVPress)
July 2010 – Add Laminator and better Creasing/Folding equipment
September 2010 – Launch the new PrintVend.net website
January 2011 – Install Perfect Binder
March 2011 – Change our Company name to The Internet Printing Company
April 2011 – Launch the Whitelabel Website System
June 2011 – 4th Birthday, 3rd Printer, New Factory…

Work being done on the new factory....

UPDATE:
…our shiny new floor is completed.

Our shiny new floor...

PDFs for non-techy-graphicy human people.

Jun 2 11 under Guides, PrintVend | 1 Comment

...exact replica of the tshirts we wear around the office. Trendy!

It’s true, they’re not perfect, but (overall) we do Love them.

Given the option of Jpegs, Tiffs, Word Documents, Powerpoints or Wood Carving we’d MUCH rather print from a PDF file.

I went on about PDFs a couple of blog posts ago so I’m not going to do that again…. what I am going to do is give you an ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC FREE TOOL WHICH MAKES BRILLIANT PDFs.

Presuming you’re working from your generic word processor or something similar this is going to be a far better option than either the built in export option or sending us the actual document.

It’s SOOOO Cute.

Cute PDF is a Free PDF writer which acts like a Print Driver. You can download it here.

Then, when it’s installed, it’s simply like another printer on your computer. Apart from rather than printing your document onto paper (we do that bit) it turns it into a PDF.

That’s it. Post over. You have a PDF ready to use on our website.

(we’re yet to have ANY problems with a PDF created from Cute… that says alot.)

Well done Cute. We love you too.

When will I get my order ?%!?!??

Jun 2 11 under Digital Printing, PrintVend | Leave a comment

After 7 years of selling print online (in various forms) this is probably the question I still hear being asked the most often.

I’ll give you the answer at the end of this post… after I explain what we’ve done (…and are still doing) to make sure you always get the answer you want. (yes, we’re working on making “yesterday” a possible answer) …I digress.

A long time back I used to sell print that took an average of 5 working days to be delivered, sometimes (if things were going really really badly) an order could take 7 working days to be delivered. I know, I know, it makes me feel slightly queasy too.

When I started PrintVend this was one of the BIG things I wanted to change. When you order something online you expect it to be delivered in a couple of day MAX. A lot of the time you want it next day…. you wouldn’t wait 7 days for an ipod to be delivered by Amazon… there’d be a new one out by then.

SO… we started off by offering DIGITAL PRINTING. This was still a bit of a dirty word back then (…all the way back in 2007) There had previously been quality issues and it was generally seen as a “cheap” option. BUT, digital print meant quicker deliveries were possible. Unlike most Lithographic print which is sold online where many orders are Batched together and ran at once, with digital each order is run individually. The problem with batching is that you require lots of similar orders to be able to run the job cost effectively… hence the 5-7 working day turnaround. The longer the turnaround the more likely it is the printer will get more similar orders which can be batched and which therefore brings the cost down, so the printer makes more money. Yippee! (for the printer) (as a side – we have no issues with Litho Batching – it’s a fantastic way of getting long runs of cheap printing, it can just take too long)

By running every job individually we have a far greater control on schedules, we’ll pretty much run jobs in the order they’re placed/approved. We can be running 300gsm A6 Flyers one minute and 150gsm 32pp A5 booklets the next. Digital is flexible which means the turnaround times can calculated far more exactly, with the savings (in time) passed on to you.

This is essentially what we’ve based our business around, flexible on-demand production. We know (give or take a small margin) exactly how long each process in a job will take. We currently only measure this in days, with a process taking 1, 2 or 3 days to complete… however in future we’ll be getting our unit of measurement down to hours… so we’ll know what work we have on each machine/process and how much available capacity we have, this can then link back to the website ordering system and should eventually mean even shorter turnaround times.

So when will my job be delivered!!!

Well, we spent a lot of time designing a system which could a) produce dynamic quotes (a quote for almost any combination of options) and could then b) tell you how long it will take to produce and therefore when it will be delivered.

When you produce a quote for an item you get a price and a Free Delivery Date underneath this. Presuming you get your proof approved on time this is the day it will be delivered. Alter the options (i.e add lamination) and the delivery date will increase.

…but seriously, when’s the quickest I can get my job!?

OK, so there is a slight complication to this. We offer FREE delivery anywhere in the UK (mainland) however we also have an EXPRESS delivery option. This REDUCES your turnaround time by 1 day, but ADDS 10% to your order cost. We think it’s incredible value.

Oh, and you can also get your order BEFORE NOON, or BEFORE 10am. These cost £10 and £20 respectively… unless it’s a Saturday, in which case they cost £25 or £30…. the delivery drivers like a lie in at the weekend so we have to make it worth their while to get up.

All of the available delivery dates are displayed when you’re placing your order, with all the exact costs calculated, so it’s nice and easy to see exactly when you’ll get your order and exactly how much it will cost.

So that’s when you’ll get your order: When the website says you will. (as long as you approve your proof)

Ch… Ch… Changes! (to our order and proof approval process)

Jun 1 11 under Uncategorized | 1 Comment

You may have noticed we have an amazing online print ordering system.

It’s still not perfect, but we’re getting there one small revision at a time.

The next thing which is going to be updated is the Order Placed By Time (I can’t think of a short word for this) and the Approve Proof By Time.

I’m not going to try and clarify what our current “rules” are… we’re generally pretty laid back about it and will always try to get your job out on time, even if you didn’t approve your proof until 10 minutes before we were meant to ship it out.

BUT: as we process more and more and more orders we do need to make sure our processes are bang up together and clear for everyone involved…

So here’s our new Order/Proof timing process:

Place your order by 2pm (Monday to Friday)
You’ll be given a delivery/collection date based on your orders options and whether you’ve chosen to pay for an EXPRESS turnaround
We’ll get you a PDF Proof over within 3 hours
Approve your PDF Proof online by 6pm
Your job will be delivered on the day you selected. Easy.

If you don’t get your PDF Proof approved by 6pm…

Your delivery day will increase by one working day:

Monday becomes Tuesday
Tuesday becomes Wednesday
Wednesday becomes Thursday
Thursday becomes Friday.
Friday becomes Monday.
Saturday becomes Tuesday OR the following Saturday. Please confirm which you’d prefer. If you go with Tuesday then we’ll refund your Saturday delivery charge.
Phew…

I highlighted the Friday and Saturday options as these do sometimes cause confusion. We use a Courier service for all our deliveries. They do deliver on Saturday but this is a premium option (£20). However they don’t collect from us on Saturday or Sunday, so if you miss a Friday dispatch the next Dispatch day is Monday which will give you a Tuesday delivery. Phew…

It sounds quite complicated in the above description however it’s all worked out by our clever ordering system and we’ll send you an Email AND an SMS (if you want one) to tell you to Approve your proof AND when your job is dispatched. Magic.

Of course, if you do forget to approve your proof and your jobs delivery date is life or death then you can call us to see what we can do… we’re very nice and will do our absolute best.

“I sent you a PDF, I don’t need a PDF Proof!”

May 30 11 under Uncategorized | 2 Comments

As part of our order process we provide a PDF Proof, we’ve been asked a few times why we do this so I thought I’d try to go over the main reasons.

We’re far from unique in providing PDF Proofs, almost every commerical printers provides something similar. The reason for doing it stems from one of the big misconceptions about PDFs; that they’re a fool proof format which will display the same on every display and output device. Unfortunately not!

There are two ways PDF proofing is approached “Normalizing” the clients files and/or “Ripping” the clients files.

Normalizing
This is basically correcting any problems with the file and ensuring various parameters within the PDF are correct. The main things which will cause issues are missing fonts and transparencies… although there are lots of others too. Many of these things are taken care of using the PDF/X standard, so we’ll commonly check that your files meet the standard and provide our PDF Proof as a PDF/X compliant file.

PDF/X is covered really well here – so well infact that I’m not going to try and explain it in a better way myself!

Ripping
Sounds cool – actually isn’t unless you’ve got a love of printing: like we do.

Ripping the file is basically converting the file (generally a PDF) from the vector, text and image information it contains into Dots which are printed.

Giving a Ripped proof is the absolute safest way of providing an electronic proof, every dot which is printed is displayed on screen as a pixel. The easiest way of describing it is if we were to take a photo of your actual job and send you this. There are however quite a few problems with providing a Ripped proof, the main one is due to file size. A single page is likely to be around 500mb (it’s basically a massive image file) so you can imagine for a 32 page booklet that’s 32x 500mb files – or 16gb.

We don’t provide Ripped PDF Proofs….

Why’s it called Ripped… It comes from Raster Image Processor, the computer which translates the input (PDF) information into Dots. A document which is made of Dots (such as a Jpeg or Tiff image file) is known as a Raster file.

Our New Factory, Offices and Equipment…

May 29 11 under Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I’m not sure if anyone actually reads our Email Newsletters (I’m sure someone must do!) however if you have then you’ve probably noticed me mention our new factory space and possibly mention new equipment…

For lots of reasons (well one reason: the factory needs a new floor (and roof) and it’s taken ages to get it sorted) it’s taken us longer than we hoped to have the new factory sorted. We’re taking on a unit adjacent to our current one which we’re then going to transfer all our production kit to, giving us a lovely new factory space…. easy! That will leave our current unit, which is a combination of our offices and production space, purely for offices which will be used for sales, customer service, studio etc. Nice.

Anyway, work on the new unit is underway and should be completed by Friday so we’ll then be able to start getting all our machines moved next door. We’ve already taken delivery of a second digital printer (still in pieces) and this will be the first thing to be put in next door. Because we’ll have two machines we’re hoping the move shouldn’t cause too much disruption to service… fingers crossed anyway. Plan for the worst, hope for the best as they say.

I’ll keep you updated on here, on twitter and in the next newsletter.

Our Odd Experiment cont.

May 29 11 under Business Things, PVPRESS | Leave a comment

Well the Odd site went live on May 16th, the only marketing we did was networking on Twitter, getting listed on some directories and a couple of £ spent on Google Adwords (literally just a couple of pounds… we were going for very specific key words

The first order came through on May 18th and we’re starting to get quite a few phone/email enquiries through too. So around 48 hours for the first order and the site would have paid for itself in about 1 week. Overall quite pleased with the results!

Other Whitelabel Stuff
I was speaking to one of our whitelabel site operators the other day (he’d also just had the first order through his site) and he asked when we expected the combined sales from Whitelabel sites to overtake the direct sales from PrintVend.net.

It was a really good question and actually not something I’d put too much thought into… PrintVend is coming up to be 4 years old (woo hoo!) and has gone through a pretty steady pattern of growth. We’ve had some larger increases in sales over the last 6 months due to a more focussed sales effort and because of the new site going being launched in September.

However, going forward our focus is firmly on developing the Whitelabel side of the business. I’m not going to go into exact figures, however I’m hoping the combined sales of Whitelabel sites to overtake PrintVend within the next 6-12 months. That’s a pretty massive target. When you take into account PrintVend is still growing at a rate well into double digits the additional Whitelabel sales should more than double the amount of work we’re handling (see my next post which relates to this quite nicely!)

The first Whitelabel sites went Live during May and so far they’re providing 1.8% of our total orders (PrintVend providing the other 98.2%) – I’ll try to keep you updated with how it progresses!

Our Whitelabel System & an Odd Experiment

May 16 11 under Business Things, PVPRESS | 1 Comment

You may be aware that we have an absolutely fantastic whitelabel website system.

We’ve got quite a few sites set-up using the system and the feedback we get is great.

However, to find out just what the system is like we’re going to set-up another site using the system, promote it to a (different) local market and see how we get on.

We’re going to try to promote it simply using Social media (twitter/facebook/youtube etc) and the Free marketing material we give out when you signup for a site…. roughly 1,000 postcards and 500 business cards, however it does tend to depend on how generous we’re feeling

The site we’ve set-up is called Odd Printing (on demand digital printing, haha get it) and we’re targeting the site at the Brighton/Sussex/Hove local market. A few reasons for this, the main one being a family connection. Best not to ask.

Anyway, here’s what the Odd Printing homepage looks like:

The Odd Printing Homepage

In terms of styling we haven’t done too many alterations to the standard PVPress layout. We’ve swapped the Standard homepage for a more text based one, updated the header and menus and a few other tweaks to the styling.

Excluding the logo/branding the site would probably take around 3-4 hours to set-up if you were reasonably confident with CSS.

So, let’s see how we get on launching a new site into the market. So far we’ve been doing the rounds on twitter… please follow us, please, pretty please!! (twitter.com/oddprinting) and we’re about to get setup with Facebook.

Would be interested to hear your feedback!