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VistaPrint’s online solution targets big companies
By LaShell Stratton
VistaPrint, an online print provider with more than 7 million customers, noticed something over the years as gang sheet after gang sheet rolled off its presses.
“We saw orders from the same companies coming from different sales reps,” says Karen O’Connor, director of solutions development at VistaPrint, Hamilton, Bermuda. “So we decided to go to a corporate level and offer a solution to companies that have lots of distributors. We wanted to explain to them how it is more cost-effective to try it this way, and how it could help them control their brand.”
VistaPrint’s Business Solutions, which launched its beta version in March, allows multi-million dollar companies that have franchisees or sales reps to use personalized web portals to create and order business cards, stationery, postcards and other collateral using approved templates. The websites, created with the help of VistaPrint proprietary technology, also offer monthly reporting and analysis.
“We can tell the partners what people are buying; which templates are the most popular,” O’Connor says.
Many print vendors offer online print stores with customized content to lock-in sales with clients, but this is a new business venture for VistaPrint, whose primary focus is the Small Office/Home Office market rather than big business.
“Most of our customers have just one, two or three employees,” said VistaPrint President and CEO Robert Keane in an interview with Print Solutions magazine (December 2006, page 20.) “They include local businesses like dog-walkers, caterers, independent consultants, florists and plumbers.”
“Our focus hasn’t changed,” explains Jeff Esposito, associate manager of public relations at VistaPrint. “The focus of the company is still small businesses. This is just an expansion.”
O’Connor says the time it takes to create and activate the Business Solutions websites varies from customer to customer. “If it’s someone who already has material in our database, we can pull it together in about two hours,” she says. “If it’s someone who offers a lot of feedback and there is a lot of back and forth, it can take three to four days.”
O’Connor says that three things differentiate VistaPrint from other print providers who offer similar solutions. “The first is definitely ease of use,” she says. “We found that a lot of our competitors had websites that weren’t very simple to use. Other factors are pricing and product quality. We’re very good at pricing. When we talk to companies, we ask them what is more important to them: the pricing or the revenue stream. Some want to focus more on the discount, while others care more about a mix of the discount and revenue share.”
After only two months, 30 companies had live Business Solutions websites. One of those organizations is American Physical Therapy Association (APTA), which offers custom business cards and letterhead through VistaPrint as a member benefit to its 70,000 private practice physical therapists.
“It was pretty simple to set up,” says Jennifer Baker, director of risk management and member benefit services at APTA. “We looked at a couple of other companies to see if VistaPrint’s pricing was on track, and it was. We also liked the ease of set up.”
Baker says APTA is now in talks with VistaPrint to expand the products offered through their Business Solutions website.
LaShell Stratton is assistant editor at Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to lstratton@PSDA.org.