We know one of the main things you consider before placing a print order is the price and we’ve always tried to offer the most competitive prices we can.

Following a review of our prices we’ve made some changes to our pricing structure to bring our base prices down…. if you don’t mind waiting an extra day for your order. Of course, if you need your order sooner you still have the option to Express the turnaround so you can get it one or two days sooner than standard. We charge 15% or 25% for the Express turnarounds and the exact surcharges are given when choosing your delivery date.

We hope the new changes make sense and you can take advantage of the new lower prices!

We’ve recently changed how we produce Hard Copy Proofs… ok, in reality we’ve removed them completely… kind of anyway.

Let me explain a bit more about what we’ve done and why.

Since we launched this version of our site in Autumn 2010 you’ve had the option of adding a Hard Copy Proof to any item ordered. This is a great idea in principle as it allows you to check exactly how an item will look prior to the full production run… the cost for this was just £5.

Unfortunately the actual execution of how the Hard Copy Proofs are produced/approved etc has never been completely perfected. The idea is quite straightforward, you get a PDF Proof initially which allows you to check for any obvious issues, once this is approved (online) your Hard Copy Proof is produced and sent out, you then approve this via email or our message board and your job goes into production. Sounds simple in theory but unfortunately we’ve found jobs with Hard Copy Proofs rarely go this smoothly. We’ll put our hands up and admit this is almost entirely due to how our system has been built and that we haven’t been able to successfully communicate how the Hard Copy Proofing option should work.

Some of the regular problems we get with Hard Copy Proofs:

1. The turnaround time provided when you order a Hard Copy Proof relates to the Hard Copy Proof alone and not the actual job. The normal turnaround time is around 3 working days. If the Hard Copy is sent on Day 1 and Received and Approved on Day 2 that gives us a matter of hours to get the entire job printed, finished and sent out. Hopefully you can appreciate to see this is very difficult!
2. Receiving approvals for Hard Copy Proofs… ok so this is a system problem which in fairness could be resolved quite simply. Our online system only allows the approval of PDF Proofs and not Hard Copies. Hard Copies needed to be approved by email/message board and this can often lead to approvals either not being received at all or being missed.
3. Cost of Hard Copy Proofs and actual finished products. Again this is one that is entirely down to us. This stems from the ongoing development of our business, when we first started we offered a very simple range of items such as business cards/flyers etc, essentially items which required very little “finishing”. The Hard Copy Proof price (£5) was set when this is what we were producing. While our product range has expanded to include various options such as laminating, booklet making and perfect binding the Hard Copy Proof price was never increased. There was an added complication to this as we different items can have drastically different proof costs, i.e it costs a lot more to produce a proof for a 200pp book than a business card. So to sum up, the cost of Hard Copy Proofs would have had to be increased and we’d been looking at a cost of around £20 per proof.

So why haven’t we just increased the Hard Copy Proof cost to £20?

This was our other option, however to go hand in hand with this we’d have needed to make significant changes to our systems to handle proofs in a smoother way. This would have additional development costs and we still didn’t think this would provide an “ideal” solution.

So what have we done?

We’ve removed the option to order Hard Copy Proofs with items completely. To order a Hard Copy Proof you simply need to order a single copy of the item you’re looking to have printed… when you’re ready to order you simply need to let us know what the order number of the proof was. We’ll then match to it. We keep file copies of all jobs for 90 days so the Hard Copy remains valid for about 3 months.

The cost of this is greater than the previous hard copy cost, however as mentioned the costs would have had to be increased whatever. Using this method means the costs are directly related to what you’re actually ordering, so a single copy of a business card is obviously a lot less than a 200pp book. You get an exact delivery date for the proof and you don’t have to worry about approving it, you simply need to place your actual order when you’re ready and let us know the proof order number.

We hope you find the new system a lot smoother and understand some of the reasons behind it.

For the last year we’ve sent the vast majority of our orders by DPD Couriers, overall the service is fantastic with a far higher percentage of first time deliveries than our previous couriers. We do appreciate that if you have an order that’s delivered late it may not feel like this but on average the service level is very good.

We’re always looking for ways to improve the level of service we offer and from tomorrow there’ll be a small addition to the delivery process.

On the day your job is dispatched you’ll receive a Dispatch notification from us by email and (if you’ve enabled it in your account) by SMS.

On the morning your job is out for delivery (normally the next working day, unless you’ve chosen to have a Saturday delivery) you’ll receive an Email direct from DPD with an Estimated Time of Delivery, you’ll also receive this by SMS if you’ve enabled it.

DPD will provide you with a 1Hour Delivery Window (i.e 13:00-14:00) if this time isn’t convenient then you can choose to rearrange the delivery directly with DPD.

TRADE CUSTOMERS: You’ll receive the notifications to your main account email address in the same way you’d receive the Dispatch Notification. If your jobs are being delivered direct to your client you can forward the email on to the client if you choose to.

If you have any questions about this just pop us an email to info@printvend.net or call us on 0800 033 7175.

Booklet Printing (well binding anyway) in action:

Happy Birthday to us… it was 4 years ago today (8th June 2007) that we incorporated Cordite Media Limited the parent company of PrintVend.

A Brief History:

• 8th June 2007 incorporate Cordite Media Limited
• Move into temporary office space
• October 2007 – move into our current offices/factory
• October 2007 – first printer and guillotine are delivered
• March 2008 – take on our first employees (Nick & Pete)
• May 2008 – upgrade the guillotine
• April 2009 – Install our 2nd printer
• January 2010 – Add our booklet making line
• February 2010 – Start work on our bespoke website (PVPress)
• July 2010 – Add Laminator and better Creasing/Folding equipment
• September 2010 – Launch the new PrintVend.net website
• January 2011 – Install Perfect Binder
• March 2011 – Change our Company name to The Internet Printing Company
• April 2011 – Launch the Whitelabel Website System
• June 2011 – 4th Birthday, 3rd Printer, New Factory…

Work being done on the new factory....

UPDATE:
…our shiny new floor is completed.

Our shiny new floor...

You may have noticed we have an amazing online print ordering system.

It’s still not perfect, but we’re getting there one small revision at a time.

The next thing which is going to be updated is the Order Placed By Time (I can’t think of a short word for this) and the Approve Proof By Time.

I’m not going to try and clarify what our current “rules” are… we’re generally pretty laid back about it and will always try to get your job out on time, even if you didn’t approve your proof until 10 minutes before we were meant to ship it out.

BUT: as we process more and more and more orders we do need to make sure our processes are bang up together and clear for everyone involved…

So here’s our new Order/Proof timing process:

• Place your order by 2pm (Monday to Friday)
• You’ll be given a delivery/collection date based on your orders options and whether you’ve chosen to pay for an EXPRESS turnaround
• We’ll get you a PDF Proof over within 3 hours
• Approve your PDF Proof online by 6pm
• Your job will be delivered on the day you selected. Easy.

If you don’t get your PDF Proof approved by 6pm…

Your delivery day will increase by one working day:

• Monday becomes Tuesday
• Tuesday becomes Wednesday
• Wednesday becomes Thursday
• Thursday becomes Friday.
• Friday becomes Monday.
• Saturday becomes Tuesday OR the following Saturday. Please confirm which you’d prefer. If you go with Tuesday then we’ll refund your Saturday delivery charge.
• Phew…

I highlighted the Friday and Saturday options as these do sometimes cause confusion. We use a Courier service for all our deliveries. They do deliver on Saturday but this is a premium option (£20). However they don’t collect from us on Saturday or Sunday, so if you miss a Friday dispatch the next Dispatch day is Monday which will give you a Tuesday delivery. Phew…

It sounds quite complicated in the above description however it’s all worked out by our clever ordering system and we’ll send you an Email AND an SMS (if you want one) to tell you to Approve your proof AND when your job is dispatched. Magic.

Of course, if you do forget to approve your proof and your jobs delivery date is life or death then you can call us to see what we can do… we’re very nice and will do our absolute best.

As part of our order process we provide a PDF Proof, we’ve been asked a few times why we do this so I thought I’d try to go over the main reasons.

We’re far from unique in providing PDF Proofs, almost every commerical printers provides something similar. The reason for doing it stems from one of the big misconceptions about PDFs; that they’re a fool proof format which will display the same on every display and output device. Unfortunately not!

There are two ways PDF proofing is approached “Normalizing” the clients files and/or “Ripping” the clients files.

Normalizing
This is basically correcting any problems with the file and ensuring various parameters within the PDF are correct. The main things which will cause issues are missing fonts and transparencies… although there are lots of others too. Many of these things are taken care of using the PDF/X standard, so we’ll commonly check that your files meet the standard and provide our PDF Proof as a PDF/X compliant file.

PDF/X is covered really well here – so well infact that I’m not going to try and explain it in a better way myself!

Ripping
Sounds cool – actually isn’t unless you’ve got a love of printing: like we do.

Ripping the file is basically converting the file (generally a PDF) from the vector, text and image information it contains into Dots which are printed.

Giving a Ripped proof is the absolute safest way of providing an electronic proof, every dot which is printed is displayed on screen as a pixel. The easiest way of describing it is if we were to take a photo of  your actual job and send you this. There are however quite a few problems with providing a Ripped proof, the main one is due to file size. A single page is likely to be around 500mb (it’s basically a massive image file) so you can imagine for a 32 page booklet that’s 32x 500mb files – or 16gb.

We don’t provide Ripped PDF Proofs….

Why’s it called Ripped… It comes from Raster Image Processor, the computer which translates the input (PDF) information into Dots. A document which is made of Dots (such as a Jpeg or Tiff image file) is known as a Raster file.