INKISH.TV Proudly Presents: Patrick George · EVP Sales & Marketing · PrintSites · MI, USA
Patrick George from PrintSites explains in this INKISH.TV film about PrintSites – one of the rather large e-commerce exhibitors at GraphExpo 2016. PrintSites have taken SaaS solutions a step further and also help their customers with first-line customer support. This is truly great and new in our opinion.
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0:11 PrintSites is an e-commerce solution that’s started providing an e-commerce solution with and for the printing industry. So, think of print service providers, print brokers, print distributors, wide format printers, enterprises that have print in franchise quick print organization. So, we built a lot of tools to help the print industry, which we’ve grown beyond that. Now, we have become a more versatile e-commerce solution where you can sell anything through our platform, but we still focus our apps and our add-ons on the printing industry at this time. And so, we’re really excited with what we’re embarking on, but we’re really focused on providing a meaningful and relevant buying experience for the consumers that purchase print or personalized products, for that matter. Right? It could be a t-shirt, it could be a USB stick or just a door hanger. Right? It’s just something that still has ink on it.
1:14 How do you see PrintSites in a very competitive marketing situation, while the overall market is decreasing?
1:18 PrintSites is really focused on providing a really solid front end, so that anybody, meaning large corporation to a small office, could build a web presence that could evangelize their brands. Whether again, how deep in the depth and breadth of the site that you needed to go, you could really personalize the platform, you know, in a responsive and a meaningful way, whether you’re on a phone, a tablet or on a desktop computer. So, we really focused on that. And, one of the foundational things that we also did that we feel will provide for a lot of relevancy, not only for the printing industry, but primarily for the printing industry. As we built all of these apps, utilities, so we have a pricing configurator based on the needs of building products within the print industry, a very relevant tool. And then, we built tools for sourcing and we built tools for collateral management and we built tools for managing dedicated portals and relationships. A lot of those have similar needs throughout other e-commerce relationships, right?
2:30 The internet is powering communications today, and everybody means to be able to use the internet to find you, buy from you. So, when you need to engage your clients, you need to have that front-end experience that’s going to build the trust in the relationship that you’re going to be able to deliver on what you’re selling or what your evangelizing that your company can do, whether it’s a product or service. So, we really spent a lot of time focusing on the front-end experience. And also now, we obviously have a very solid back-end, as well.
3:02 What are your main advantages over competitors?
3:06 Some of the things that we do that are different than competitors across the board is we really truly try to help our clients once customers visit their site, as well. So, we have a multi branded tool for engaging in a live chat environment that when a customer comes on to this site, if our customer wants us to be them, we can be them. They go through a process of an onboarding where we understand the relationship, the voice that the customer uses, the tonality of which they speak to their customer. Are they very formal? Are they playful? And so, we will engage their customers on their behalf when they get to the site. And, in the printing industry, itís very relevant because these tools, we built them. Who knows them better than us, right? So, we’ve set a really great foundation. We’ve built a lot of tools that allow us to understand how they interact, how customers are engaging and interacting with the site, and as they move through it, we have messaging that can be automated real-time, AB testing and we gather a lot of that data, and it also helps us figure out how to develop our product going forward, as well. We’ve made a tremendous amount of strides just from these engagements, you know.
4:23 Is there heavy competition for print e-commerce solutions in the US? How do you see your competition against what you do?
4:26 When we started, we focused on the B2C experience, and there were a lot of the players were on the document management experience and customer portals, and we are focused on how customers are engaging the web presence in the website, right? And, if you think about that today, it’s growing, right, not just from the B2B or B2C side, but it into the B2B environment, right? They want a beautiful experience. They want a meaningful, relevant experience, so they want to know if they’re buying a product and how that goes and why that buttons are where it is. So, when we focus on that side, we kind of separated ourselves from everybody else. There aren’t a lot of players that stock the shelves with templates, right? That continuously refresh and stay current with modern design, right? Modern theming of business cards or postcards. But, it’s not to say that people haven’t come along. We do have some competitors that have come along, and they’re very good at what they do, and they challenge us and they keep us fresh and exciting. And then, you know, we look at the incumbents on the B2B side, and what we’ve been doing is seeing what they do and how they do it, and we’re learning from them. And, we’ve started to add customer portals and other tools, but with using modern techniques and modern development practices, and more and more recent code. So, ours is a fresh codebase which allows us to be flexible, develop more quickly, more Agile. I know it’s a theme that everybody is talking about these days, which is Agile Development. But in reality, it’s true that it does give us those advantages, I think. We’re not carrying a legacy technical debt, right?
6:00 Your Graph Expo impressions?
6:03 It’s been great, you know. I would say, going to a new venue, a lot of our staff was super excited to just go somewhere else and experience a different place. And, Orlando has been so welcoming, the people have been fantastic, the staff here that have helped us put our booth together and the freemen in OCC. Itís just fantastic. The show certainly hasn’t had, I would say, the same draw, as it has in years past, and there’s probably some ñ I can hear some of my colleagues here or maybe not even colleagues, what other show and exhibitors saying that there’s a Drupa effect this year. So, attendance is down. But, you know what it’s really done, is it’s given us a lot more time to have more one-on-one relationships with those that do come into our booth. So, it’s been great. In years past, we might be two or three deep here, but now all the stations are full, everybody’s engaging, and we’ve actually sold more this year than in years past.
7:07 And isn’t that the purpose of being in the show?
7:09 That is the purpose of being at the show. Yes, absolutely.