The True Cost of Online Printing

Print Pricing and Quotations

The vast majority of online printers will offer you their products at the best price they possibly can. Most of the time that will be considerably better than the price you’d get if you went into local high street printer, simply because the overheads associated with running an online printing company are much lower than the overheads involved in running a real-world store. What you’re very unlikely to find is a printing company who can undercut the costs of their online competitors by the same margin as they can the high street. All of us at Pulse Print have previously worked in jobs where we were the printing client, rather than the provider, and we all agree that online printing is the kind of industry where you should ALWAYS look a gift horse in the mouth.

Perhaps you’ve found a printing quote online that seems to be exceptionally good, better by 20% than any of the alternatives – unless you’ve worked with that company before, make sure that you’ve checked that your quote is all inclusive before you commit to using them. Many online printing companies will quote you a great headline price, but won’t tell you the delivery costs until you’ve done a bit more digging (this tends to be especially true of online printing companies which provide a fully automated service, and make it hard to speak to a real person); we’ve even seen instances where VAT is added automatically to any order, regardless of whether the product is VAT exempt or not – requiring the customer to click ‘No VAT’ and hoping to catch people out (we’ve covered VATable and zero-rated/exempt print products in another of our blog posts – so do double check whether you should be paying VAT or not)

A trustworthy online printing company will be proud of their prices, and won’t have anything to hide from their customers. If you’re shown a headline price that seems suspiciously low it’s worth clicking ‘Add to basket’, or whatever, and see what comes up in the checkout section of the site – because it’s most likely that this is where you’ll be confronted with the hidden costs. If a company is willing to conceal it’s true prices until you’re already pretty much committed to the purchase, then you should probably be asking yourself what else they’re keeping quiet – lengthy turnaround times? low quality? poor materials? Who knows? All we can say is that people don’t tend to be unscrupulous in one area and then all above board on everything else…

At the end of the day, the online printing industry obeys the same principles of competition as any other commercial sector. If there was one company which could actually consistently undercut everyone else by huge margins then one of two things would happen: either they’d secure every job that was going and force all their competitors out of business, or their competitors would find a way to match their prices. Just as Tesco keep an eye on what Asda are charging, so each online print company is aware of their competitors’ offers and prices. Certainly there’s a range of prices available, but it’s very narrow – variations are based usually on how much of a profit margin the printer in question is adding to each product, not on the cost of the raw materials. So while you might find an online print company which appears to undercut our premium business card prices or our hourly rate for graphic design by a long way, we’d be surprised if you’re getting the whole story – either the specifications aren’t the same (even if they’ve got the same description) or there’s additional costs to come.

When a saving isn’t really a saving.

Whatever you’re buying, you usually save money per item by ordering in volume. This is especially true of the print industry, where the majority of a job’s costs are in the set up, rather than the printing itself. Decent printers will pass on the saving to their customers – so that 5000 Premium A6 Flyers won’t cost you twice as much as 2500 of the same product. While it makes sense for the customer to take advantage of price breaks like this, it’s also worth keeping in mind that it’s only worth it if you’re sure that you can use the extra. This is especially true on bigger jobs, where there’s an upper limit on what you can actually use. Yes, ordering 2,000 booklets rather than 1000 might bring the unit price down from 60 pence per copy to 55 pence, but if you only need 1000 copies, and the rest are going to take up space and never get used, then all you’re achieving is ripping yourself off and giving yourself a storage problem!

This is really all about research and knowing your needs. Some printing companies will try to convince you that you should disregard your estimates of what you actually need and go for the price break that kicks in if you order ‘just’ twice what you wanted in the first place. In the case of promotional flyers that might make sense, as there isn’t much of a difference in price, but it pays to be sure that the price break is actually worth going for when you’re placing your order. Again, this is a trick that tends to be used by fully automated printing websites, where there’s no option to talk to a person and therefore less accountability.

Automated Ordering Processes vs Human Interaction

It’s strange, but while most people have a gut reaction against automated service processes, many will actively avoid talking to a salesperson when they’re buying something. Maybe that’s because they’re worried about high pressure sales tactics, but we all know that in an online market, with such a lot of choice, there’s no point in even trying to strong-arm people into buying something.

Faced with the failure of traditional tactics to deal with an online marketplace, a lot of online companies (not just printers) have reduced their sales force, saving money, and adopted a new tactic for maximising their profits. Let’s call it ‘giving the customer (almost) what they want’. It takes advantage of people’s natural aversion to talking to salespeople, and it makes sure that more of your money ends up in the coffers of your printer. Best of all (from the unscrupulous online printer’s point of view) it takes full advantage of the limitations of a streamlined automated process.

Imagine you were looking to have company branded bookmarks printed. A fully automated system might offer you only one option for your printing, or a limited range of quantities. You can bet your bottom dollar that the standard product listed on an online printing company’s website will be the one that makes them the biggest profit (I include us in this – it makes perfect business sense to make the automatic option the one that we make a good return on). Where a good online printing company will differ from a less-good one is in giving you the opportunity to go off the menu. For example, every product listed on Pulse Print UK gives you information on how to get in touch with us to discuss your order in more detail; every page has a link to our online LivePerson chat facility at the top. We want you to talk to us about your order, whether you can find exactly what you want on the site, or if you’re looking for a bespoke quote. We’re not going to hide behind a fully automated process if you want to come and talk to us!

The advantage of having the option to talk to a real person is that you can let them know exactly what you’re looking for. There’s no chance that they can artificially boost their margins by giving you almost what you’ve asked for and billing you for stuff you don’t want or need. If a company’s offering 5000 Premium A5 Flyers on 350GSM Glossy stock, but you want them on Silk, or at 250GSM, then you should be able to ask for that. Even if they have to come back to you and say that they can’t offer you exactly what you asked for because it’s not cost effective, you have the right to be told that, rather than being railroaded into ordering something you don’t want.

Company Guarantees

Whether you’re using an online printing company, or a high street store, the chances are that you’ll be handing over your money before the print job is done. This isn’t anything to worry about, per se (after all, when you go for your weekly shopping you have to pay for it before you can start eating it), but the fact that your printers are asking you to trust them means that they should be willing to put their money where their mouth is and guarantee a certain standard of quality, service, cost and delivery. Again, we don’t want to brag, but we make a price guarantee, a delivery guarantee, a service guarantee and a quality guarantee core to our business – they’re all featured on the About Us section of the website. We’re making the promises because we know we can fulfill them – and if there’s another company that’s shy about doing the same then we’d have cause to wonder why.

Other hidden catches

OK, so we’ve covered quality and satisfaction guarantees, we’ve covered hidden costs, we’ve had a look at the benefits of being able to talk about your order with a real live person and we’ve thought about whether you’re ordering more than you really need just to line the pockets of your printer. There can’t possibly be anything else, right? Surely if you’ve exhausted this list you can be confident when placing a print order, right? Well, nearly… But there are a couple more things you might want to check before going ahead.

Outsourcing abroad.

Confession time: there is a way for online print companies to get their raw materials on the cheap – ordering from abroad. Sounds OK as long as the price is right, doesn’t it? Well there are reasons to be wary:

• If a company is UK based, but outsourcing it’s work abroad, how much control can they really expect to have over quality? If you can’t see it, you can’t guarantee it. There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing in itself, lots of printers do it for jobs that they don’t have the specific equipment for, but at the end of the day your supplier should be working with people that they can conveniently visit and speak to as often as necessary in case anything needs to be sorted out quickly.
• Assuming that the customer is based in Swindon, and the printer is based in Oxford, how long should it take for an order to be processed and delivered? We offer 3 working days as standard on most products – one for the printing, one to let the ink dry, get the product finished (trimmed to the right size, bound if appropriate, that kind of thing) and one to get it to the client by courier. But if we were getting the printing done in China? Well, it might just take a little longer. Be especially suspicious if the company you’re thinking of using tells you that they’ll give you a delivery date after you’ve made the order – as with everything that’s gone before, a lack of transparency is never a good sign!
• Bear in mind that different countries have different industry standards. That’s not to say that one set is better than any other – it’s just to say that whoever is actually doing your printing will be aiming to meet the local standard, rather than the standard you might be expecting. Whether or not the printing standards (ink usage, or drying time, or any one a load of other technical bits) of one area are objectively superior to those of another doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, what you want is to be happy with your product, and that means that you want it to conform to your expectations.

“Subject to sight of the artwork.”

Thankfully this isn’t one that actually comes up all that often, otherwise online printing companies would be about as trusted as lawyers, estate agents and used car salesmen. It’s still worth knowing about though, just in case. Most printers will include a line on their quotes about the price being “Subject to the sight of the artwork”, which is fair enough – if they’ve quoted you for a standard 4 colour print job, and you’ve then included a spot colour on your artwork (which is more expensive for them to do) then they need to be able to pass the extra cost along to you so that they don’t lose money.

Where this legitimate disclaimer can be a problem, though, is when your printer uses it as an excuse to bundle an extra load of costs onto your invoice, without letting you know until you get the bill. Often, for one reason or another, people who supply their own artwork don’t submit it in a form that’s ready for print (that won’t apply to you though, because we’ve written a handy guide to preparing your artwork for print for you you have a look at). When this happens it’s usually easy enough for the repro department to fix, but there will be a cost for fixing it. At Pulse Print we believe that the best practice is to offer a free check of all artwork submitted to us and to let the customer know what they need to change to make it print ready. We’ll offer to fix it for you for a small fee, but we’re not going to do the work and surreptitiously add an item to your bill. That’s not on.

Where you see the disclaimer “Subject to sight of the artwork” it’s worth asking your contact at the printer what exactly they mean by that, to make sure that you’re not going to get stung by unexpected repro costs that you could have avoided by fixing the artwork yourself. Then again, if you’re looking at a company that won’t let you talk to a real person anyway, you might have a problem on that score…

A Disclaimer

We’re an online printing company, we’re well aware of this. Presumably you know that too (the name’s a bit of a giveaway). Obviously we’d love it if after reading this article you decide to choose us to do your printing, but we’ve been careful to be balanced when putting together our thoughts on the online printing industry. Please contact us if you think that we can improve this article in any way (or leave us a comment below!)