Great post. We use your software and will have over twenty sites up this year that process profitable business.

Roy

I love the Social Print Experiment you’re running. I was reading about you’re development process and got to thinking. Wouldn’t it be easier to, instead of build a whole new site, customizing something like Printfolder (www.printfolderapp.com) instead?

Just a thought.
Good luck with the experiment!

Runno Allikivi
http://www.cannedapps.com

1) Clear definition of goals
2) Storefront builder has been given time to learn
3) Storefront builder is motivated

Let me expand on those a bit:

1) Clear definition of goals.

Obviously, you know what you want, and are going for it. There is no committee or – as commonly see – an end-user corporation involved in storefront design and review of their project. The B2B storefront space is especially notable for having more of this revew process, more templated products, Look and Feel tweeks by committee, etc. That is where 2-3 weeks becomes more typical.

I may add that your initial goals are pretty basic – we have some storefront projects that involve building dozens of templates, importing thousands of users, integrating into a corporate enviornment (Ariba, Single Sign On, etc)…. these also add time requirements on both sides.

As a sidebar regarding goals: We are often approached by printers and print resellers who ask us for advice on where to start building W2P storefronts — asking me where I think they “should” start building first. Sometimes these are smaller printers who want to be the next VistaPrint, but have no ideas/budget for a marketing gameplan. In B2C, you cannot simply “build it and they will come” – and I am sometimes the bearer of this bad news to printers who have idealized visions of how easy it will be to get eyeballs on their storefront.

Other firms that approach us have many corporate customers but don’t know which to build for first – that is an easier scenario for us to help with: I usually suggest they sort accounts by revenue and then within the accounts sort by product type, by sales volume. Start with the largest customer and biggest product line… then move outward.

Alternatively: they may wish to start with a customer unhappy with a current ordering process – or start with a brand new customer – and use them as the guinea pig, so to speak.

In any case: You don’t knock down an old bridge, and THEN build a new bridge. Instead, you build the new bridge (W2P) alongside the old bridge (fax/phone orders or older W2P system) and then move traffic over gradually.

2) Storefront builder has been given time to learn

It is critical that the storefront administrator is given a “runway” by management… in other words, they need to have time carved out for them to learn the system – especially at the beginning when the learning curve is steepest. Versus the approach of management just adding another chore to an already-50-hour work week… which doesn’t help with our final factor:

3) Storefront builder is motivated

This is one of the most difficult areas – is the storefront builder excited about learning? Do they clearly understand the importance of this system – and their new role in helping build and maintain the storefront?

While we see it less and less, in the “old days” we’d occassionally have internal operators sandbag W2P operations, because they saw the system replacing parts of what they did internally day-to-day – for example, a typesetter would have “problems learning” W2P but were happy to sit for hours typesetting and hand-imposing business card orders. In some cases, the owner would take over maintenance and have to show the employess “look, _I_ can do this, and you need to do this, too” or just become the storefront admin personally, going forward.

This situation is equivalent in my eyes to an ATM machine being rolled into a bank, and the bank tellers saying “No… we don’t need those machines here”.

First: you can’t UNinvent the ATM machine, the technology (W2P) is here and your competitors have it. More importantly: your customers WANT the ATM experience for ordering simple print jobs (why do I need to talk to someone to get a quote on a $200 print job?). Lastly: print firms NEED to optimize the internal workflow to remain competitive.

I might add that most of the firms who had internal staff “sandbagging” are no longer in business. The typesetters are no longer typesetting – they have moved on to other industries entirely… would that be the case had they embraced the technology and allowed their internal role to evolve (and expand) into W2P?

We may never know.

-steve
Steve Enstad
http://PageDNA.com