High quality digital & offset printing – Interview with onlineprinters.com

With nearly 250 employees the Onlineprinters GmbH is one of the biggest national online providers of printed matter. The Onlineprinters GmbH, unlike most online print providers, is not a retailer but a manufacturer and finishing company. The inhouse production of the printed materials is processed exclusively by high quality offset and digital printing in three overlapping shifts.

Find out more in the following interview with Managing Director Walter Meyer.

At onlineprinters.com several print technicians are at the customers’ disposal for the calculation of individual inquiries and for consulting on different assignments. If desired experienced media designers check the customers’ files and prepare them for printing.

What is the idea behind your online store?
Onlineprinters are selling printing products like flyers, posters, catalogues, postcards, stickers, stationary, business cards and much more. You can also order marketing tools as flags, displays and so on. These products are printed in high quality offset-print or digital-print. The difference to a traditional print shop is, that we are due to aggregate daily production of many individual contracts. So the customer is reducing fixed costs, this is not possible with normal printing processes. This production is limited to the high order volume in the online area.

Why did you decide to start an e-commerce business?
The reason why I started an online-shop was the decline of the conventional printing business.
The company was founded in April 2004. The online-store went online in August 2004. In June 2007 a complete relaunch of the online-shop and mail order software completed the internet presence.

Could you tell us about your professional life before you started your online store?
I still am a manager of a conventional printing company. The entry into the online business required a total rethink and further training. In many areas the online business is different from the bricks-and-mortar business. For instance the advertising is completely different.

How many employees are currently on your payroll?
Nearly everybody in our online-shop is working fulltime. At the moment we have nearly 250 employees (including our production) but we are steadily growing.

Where are your customers located?
Our customers are located all over Europe. We hope that UK and the international market will become more and more important for us, because we’ve started our English shop 2 month ago. Now our international business grows steadily and will soon represent up to 30 percent of the total sales.

Which shop system are you currently using?
Our online-shop was created by the company “Websale AG” from Nürnberg. The online-shop is linked to a mail order software from the company “D&G Software GmbH” from Karlsruhe, which controls the internal merchandise management, order management and the accounting. Some special features of the website and the mail order system were programmed for our special purposes.

Which payment systems does your Shop offer?
We currently offer Pay Pal, Giro Pay, credit cards like: American Express, Visa Card and Master Card and DIRECTebanking. We also offer cash on delivery and advance payment. Current we’re not planning to widen our payment options because we offer a variety of systems already.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
The advantage to a high street store is that the customers don’t have to go outside to make an order. They’re saving time, because their orders will be delivered to their home or to their workplace. They can save time and money because they don’t have to pick them up.

Do you also run a physical store?
No, we don’t run a physical store.

Does your store have any special features or functions?
We are very proud of our ordering processing with automatic pressure data upload. Each product can be offered in all kinds of variations. The consumer can calculate, see the price immediately and order online.

What measures have you taken to increase consumer confidence?
One step we’ve taken to increase consumer confidence was the certification by Trusted Shops. It was an important milestone in our customer acquisition. The Trusted Shops trustmark shows potential customers that onlineprinters is a reputable and reliable shop.

What did you do to increase the visibility of your shop?
We have taken several steps to optimize our online shop for search engines like “Google”. We are also investing in “Google AdWords” and try to put more emphasis on offline advertisement like television ads.

Are you using web 2.0 approaches for your online business?
Not yet. We observe the development in this area. If possible we will implement some special features in our Shop.

Where do you gather information about online shopping and web-retailing?
Most of the information I get from newspapers and magazines like “Webselling”, “Deutscher Drucker” and “Handelsblatt”. I also read the Trusted Shops newsletter and regularly visit the Trusted Shops website.

Which recommendations would you give to other e-tailers?
I can only advise you to use different ways of communicating with your customers. Inquiries by customers should be answered as quickly as possible. I know from my own experience: nothing is more annoying when you buy products online get no response to your questions afterwards. That shouldn’t happen in a professional online-shop. Complaints must be handled quickly and correctly, too. The customers will be grateful.

What are you currently working on?
We are working on the translation of our online-shop to other languages like French. This way we try to increase the number of foreign customers.

What is your favourite online-shop as a customer?
My favourite online-shops are amazon and expedia.

If you want to find out more about this interesting shop you can find it here.