as i agree with you on most of your points, i think the initial thought process was solid. these guys set out to look for more productivity for their press, but unfortunately found nothing but problems from scavengers. i personally think the program should run that you send your file via email and have the work sent out to you everything is cherry. although where problems arise is that many wanted a personal touch which i don’t think the site was meant for. now getting to your price analysis if you spend .18 (click .08, overhead .05, .02 labor, .03 paper) and sell for .40 i think this makes perfect sense. maybe i did not understand your stance on this, but let me know if you think i am in the wrong. cheers, kristian.

You wouldn’t think that a press salesman would care much about some printer offering 10 cent clicks, but when you are having the “adopting digital” conversation with 80% of your prospects, those who remained on the fence in regard to buying digital did so, in some cases, because they can buy out a click cheaper than doing it themselves.

Do the math. Let’s say the average monthly payment on a new piece of gear (Canon, Konica Minolta, Xerox, your choice) was a nice round $1,500. After aggressively negotiating, a high volume printer might commit to 100,000 clicks (that’s high volume these days) and proudly sleep at night because that commitment got them a $0.05 click even if they print 2-up. Now figure out the true fixed click cost in that scenario ($1,500 spread over 100K clicks is another 1.5 cents, plus 5 and another 2 for overhead/labor you get a grand total of 8.5 cents).

As soon as that customer drops in volume, has a bad month, has to re-run a job (it does happen and guess who eats that cost)or goes down for a major issue and has to outsource work – you get the idea. Why take all the risk in a perfect world if you are paying 8.5 cents and for 1.5 more could get rid of the entire headache?

Notice I am not talking about selling cost. Profitable variable data work might sell for 40 cents a sheet so no one is suggesting you walk away from the work, but a smart printer with good prepress skills can do all the VDP work up front and still provide a 200 or 2,000 page pdf (VDP in there) to the same printer and get the 10 cent price. He doesn’t care what you give him as long as he just hits print and in some cases the smartly prepared VDP job runs better than the 2,000 separate “copies” of 2,000 different files.

Bottom line – The minute you put a “one size fits all” price on everything from garbage quality up through carefully prepared high-end profiled, VDP rich work, you murder the value proposition that better and more intelligent “content” can achieve a higher profit margin. At 10 cents the LED imaging units don’t care where the dot goes or how much work went into designing it.