The Skypricer - in a Nutshell

 

 

 

The e-Commerce world is divided into "simple" products like books, and "complex" products like T-Shirts. The difference is a book is just a book whereas T-Shirts come in different colors and sizes. True, if a book sells well enough to make it on the bestseller list you can usually find various editions of it - hardcover, paperback, even printed in a foreign language. But those editions all have one thing in common: They're listed individually when you shop for them on Amazon. Not so T-Shirts. Tees are shown as a single item (medium size in white, for instance), with a row of buttons that define the size (small, medium, large) and a second row that defines color.

The operative words are "shown as." Walk into a brick-and-mortar store and every product you see is simple, even T-Shirts. Small, medium, and large are all displayed on the shelves for you to touch and feel. On the web, the only T-Shirt you see is the most popular configuration. Variations are reduced to check boxes and radio buttons. There's nothing new here. It goes back to the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Think of a shopping site as a virtual catalog.

All printed products are complex by nature. At a minimum, you're dealing with a variety of quantities. You wouldn't dream of displaying the same letterhead a dozen times, one for each of twelve quantities. Then add a dozen more for different paper, resulting in two dozen pictures of the same letterhead. Your customers expect to find a single letterhead, priced in its base configuration, with buttons to instantly show them what the same letterhead would cost in a more cost-effective quantity and on different paper.

 

 

Makes sense, but here's the rub. As the seller, you still have to individually calculate the price of the base letterhead and all of its variations, regardless of how you present the product on your website. The example above shows a letterhead offered in four quantities on three kinds of paper, on a Shopify-powered online shopping site. To upload that same product, the seller will have to:
 

1.Calculate the price for four quantities, when printed on 24 lb colored Classic Laid
500 = $103.75; 1000 = $156.60; 2500 = 312.00; 5000 = $416.80 (four calculations).

2.Calculate the price for four quantities, when printed on 24 lb white Classic Laid
500 = $101.55; 1000 = $152.40; 2500 = 301.70; 5000 = $403.60 (four calculations).

3.Calculate the price for four quantities, when printed on 20 lb white Bond
500 = $69.55; 1000 = $91.20; 2500 = 155.80; 5000 = $216.60 (four calculations).

 

Shopify and Woo Commerce
 

 

Twelve calculations, all told, for a simple letterhead. Not unmanageable, especially since in the Shopify and Woo Commerce spreadsheets you enter the total Price for each configuration. BigCommerce and WIX software, on the other hand, use [ADD] rules, so you'll need to get out the calculator for eleven more. In the spreadsheet below you have to enter the Additional Cost of each variation, not the total price. In other words, $21.65 extra for 1,000 white bond letterheads, not the out-the-door price of $91.20 that you calculated above.

That's both time-consuming and error-prone, should you forget to deduct the base cost of $69.55 from the total. Why take the risk and do all that work. When you could just select a product and specify options, click a button, and watch the Skypricer print out a worksheet in the appropriate format - total prices for Shopify and WooCommerce, additional prices for BigCommerce and WIX. Hard to imagine how it could be more simple.
 

BigCommerce and WIX
 

 

If you think pricing the variations for a letterhead in four quantities is a nuisance, imagine doing it for double the quantities and twice as many paper options. For instance, a newsletter offered in ten quantities on four different types of paper, folded and unfolded, results in no less than eighty variations that all need to be priced and keyed in. Not to mention having to redo it all when your paper vendor announces a price increase.

The Skypricer does a number of things, but will do three of them really well:

1.Calculate the price of every variation of a printed product, then hand you an itemized worksheet for uploading those prices into your shopping cart software. All in the blink of an eye, using the shop rates and paper prices of the built-in estimating program for digital and wide format. They're the same shop rates and paper prices you're using to make quotes because the built-in program is a turbocharged version of the Silver Edition, working with standard Morning Flight data files.

2.Keep the prices you quote on the phone in sync with the prices you show on your website. Say your paper vendor announces a price increase for a paper item that's included with product Z and X on your website. You update the paper price in your estimating program but forget that the paper is also optional for one or more products on your shopping site. That's cool. As soon as you update your paper price, the Skypricer will automatically scan its web products database, alert you about the discrepancy, and suggest you print new worksheets for product Z and X. Nothing else has changed, so no other web products need to be updated. The Skypricer is telling you that.

3.Reconfigure the pricing formula of all your online products, should the need arise to host your site with a different vendor. It happens. Sometimes you just outgrow your current vendor. Other times their hosting fees go through the roof, or their software becomes dated or is discontinued altogether. Here, too, the Skypricer will relieve the pain. Remember, you didn't construct your product database in the vendor's software, you had the Skypricer build it on your desktop or network, or in cloud space under your control. Printing a revised set of worksheets that will work for the new vendor is just a mouse click away.

Now nobody can hold you hostage.

 

With that as a Backdrop ...
 

Nobody could blame you for being tempted to sign up for one of the canned web2print subscriptions in the hope all this goes away. And it actually does, provided you can live with their recommended one-buyer-fits-all market prices. If you can't, that web2print solution is no different than any other shopping cart provider. You're back with your calculator at square one.