Printfection Blog

Price Increase Announcement & FAQs

To our Valued Store Owners:

As you may already know, many costs are rising that affect all of us in one way or another. We've held off as long as possible, but have found our volume has reached a point where it is necessary to offset the increased costs of doing business with a modest price increase.

Beginning July 2, 2008 the new prices will automatically take effect. There is no need for you to make any changes to your accounts and/or products.

After a thorough analysis of aggregate sales, we have determined the increase in price will only be an estimated 10% site-wide. The much needed increase will allow us to continue to focus on the highest quality printing and order fulfillment, quality in-house customer service, increase the speed of new feature and product development, and maintain our free services to you, the store owner.

If you would like further information regarding this issue, please see the FAQs below.

We appreciate your understanding and support and wish you continued success!

Sincerely,

The Printfection Team

Price Increase FAQs:

Q: Why are two different prices displaying in my store, for the same product?

A: For 36-72 hours following the update, the product pricing displayed in your stores & the shopping mall may be inconsistent with the pricing displayed on the product detail pages & shopping cart pages. We're working to update the pricing across the website; this is a rolling upgrade that will take 36-72 hours to complete.

Rest assured, the pricing displayed on the product detail and shopping cart pages is the new, correct pricing. You don't have to do anything, the new pricing will slowly appear in your stores and the shopping mall over the next few days.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Q: Do I have to make any changes to my products or pricing?

A: No. The new retail selling prices will automatically “go live” in your store(s) on July 2. All price changes will be automatic and there is no need for you to change your products manually. For example: If the old base price on your product was $10 and your commission is $5 the retail selling price was $15. ($10 + $5 = $15). If the new base price is $11, then the new retail selling price is calculated automatically to $11 + $5 = $16.

Q: How does this affect my commission rate?

A: Your commission rate will stay the same. If you had a $5 markup before the price increase, you’ll still have a $5 markup after the price increase goes live. Like always, you can increase or decrease your commission at any time.

Q: How does the new pricing affect sales? Won’t this drive our customers away?

A: We have done a thorough analysis of price vs. sales volume and have not found a significant correlation between the two. Some of the most successful Printfection store owners have significantly higher markups than the average store owner. In many cases a higher selling price equals higher sales, as the customer perceives an increase in value. Furthermore, the new price structure is still within market and remains competitive. Therefore, we believe any negative impact will be very minimal, if at all.

Q: What is the new pricing? Where will we see the increases?

A: The wearable products are subject to the price increase. All of our sublimated products are remaining the same (mouse pad, coasters, etc). There will be an increase for double-sided printing from $2 to $3 and an increase to the dark garment surcharge due to the additional production costs for these value-added services. Overall, the price increase is about 10% for the average store owner’s sales mix.

Q: Will the store owner service remain free of charge?

A: Yes, the store owner service remains free. Printfection is still the leading Print-on-demand company offering completely free, 100% customizable stores with no limits on the number of products, images, sections, and stores in your account.

Q: Printfection has never raised prices before, why now?

A: We have been monitoring the exponentially rising costs of fuel, inbound freight charges, product costs, and labor costs for more than two years. We’ve held off as long as possible, but we have found that our volume has reached a point where it is necessary to offset the increased costs of doing business with a modest price increase. This way we can continue to maintain our quality, value, order fulfillment, excellent customer service, and maintain a free platform for you to capitalize on.

Q: Is Printfection not doing well? Should I be concerned you might not be around in a while?

A: Printfection is doing better than ever! We plan to be around forever! The company is growing like a weed. In 2007 we grew 400% and are growing like crazy this year. The price increase allows us to continue our high-quality production, in-house customer service, speed up new feature development, and more—in a business environment that is more costly than ever before.

Q: What about bulk pricing? Is this still available?

A: Yes! Bulk pricing is still available. The pricing structure for bulk orders is not changing. The only change in price is for the base product cost.

Q: I know the cost of fuel is at an all-time record high. Are shipping rates increasing?

A: No! We are maintaining our current shipping rates. Printfection has absorbed numerous price increases from our shipping vendors in an effort to keep shipping costs low for your customers. We will continue to do so as long as possible.

Are you the best CEO you can be?

“Tag. You’re it. Blame game over. As the CEO, you’re the one ultimately responsible. Suck it up and realize that you make mistakes. Not you? Think again.”

The quote above is the headline on a piece of junk mail I received for an upcoming conference here in Denver called CEOfocus: 51 Fatal Business Errors. The conference takes place August 22^nd in Denver and it looks like there are dates nationwide. Let’s take a moment to further examine 5 of the 51 fatal business errors presented in this amazing piece of junk mail:

I work in my Business

You work daily in your business to get the job done. Whatever task needs doing, you do it no matter what. That tactical approach won’t get you anything but long hours, stagnant sales and a non-existent personal life. Work ON your business, not IN your business. Start thinking strategically and the future will take care of itself.

No one else can do (fill in the blank) as well as I can

Your ego can hurt you and your business. It gets in the way of realizing that you’re supposed to be the leader, not the only one who can do the job. Does Donald Trump deal the cards at the blackjack table? No, and neither should you. Start leading and stop working.

Democracy is important in my workplace

Open door policies only let in the flies and other pests. A well-run business isn’t a democracy. It’s a well-designed structure with a hierarchy that needs to be followed. Yep, business is more like the military. After all, you are the Chief Executive OFFICER.

As a busy worker bee, I get the most honey

With that attitude, you may reach the honey first but you won’t have that much if you’re away from the hive so often. Your role is the Queen (or King) Bee – delegate from your hive, have others do the work. Get lazy.

I spell success: $UCCE$$

Profits – that’s what good business is all about. You’re right. However, looking only at the profit margin won’t get you to the biggest bottom line. Pick five non financial critical performance measures and they will accurately predict profits. If you select the right five, the bottom line will take care of itself.

This has to be the best piece of junk mail ever. Being the leader of a startup I can resonate with many of these points. I think most early stage CEOs probably struggle with at least a few of these. The main thing is to keep plugging along building a team of highly skilled people and then continue teaching them everything you know so you can keep working ON the business instead of working IN the business! Enough already – go register!

Denver #11 for Small Business Growth

Of the top 75 metros in the USA, Orlando ranks #1 for small business vitality. Various Florida cities take 4 of the top 5 positions. Interestingly, Denver (the hometown of Printfection) takes #11 - not too bad!

There are 71,813 small businesses with 99 or less employees in our little Colorado town of 2.3 million people with 9.3% growth in small businesses from 2000-2005! Review the entire chart on BizJournals.com

People are Digg'n the $2 T-Shirts

This morning around 9am our $2 t-shirt promotion ended up on Digg's homepage. See the article here. Now a whole bunch more people will get to see our amazing printing process first-hand!

Where's the Infrastructure Supermarket?

Question: What's the 1 thing every Internet company has to worry about, takes up lots of their time, and their customers never fully see or appreciate?

Answer: Their infrastructure.

Growing Internet companies all face this same problem. All the sudden your website starts to take off, users are signing up left and right, and then your servers start to get slower and slower. The IT guys are telling the marketing folks to stop their advertising-- all those PPC visitors are killing the servers! It becomes clear... time to upgrade the infrastructure!

Building infrastructure takes an enormous amount of time, resources, and money. Just think about all of the equipment running behind the scenes to power a service like Printfection: servers, data centers, databases, off-site backup locations, clusters, load balancers, switches, routers, etc.

After just about one year on-line we are starting to feel the infrastructure crunch. While our site is still running smooth today, we're preparing for the future (what good retailer doesn't think about Christmas in February!) It's becoming time to upgrade the hardware that powers our website. Simple, right? Just add a few more servers and everything will run faster and all our customers will be happy. WRONG! There is so much more to think about. Buying the servers and installing them is only about 1% of the problem. There are code modifications, database splitting, backup configurations, redundancy issues, and the never ending problem of worrying about how the solution you are designing today will scale as you grow bigger and bigger.

What I find funny (well, not really) is how every Internet company from Flickr to YouTube to Smugmug has gone through the same growing pains and is constantly trying to solve the same problems, yet everyone is doing this alone. Everyone is re-inventing the wheel in their own data centers. Configuring their own redundant clusters of servers, their own SANs, their own backup solutions, and more. This reminds me of pre-industrial America when most people lived on a farm and grew their own food, raised their own cattle, and were for the most part self-sufficient in their own little worlds. How come the Internet is like this now? Why are we all forced to be farmers on top of our normal jobs? How come we can't just buy our basic food (infrastructure) at the supermarket and concentrate on what we're really good at (selling t-shirts). Sometime in the future I hope we can just buy our infrastructure like we buy food at the supermarket. This would allow all Internet companies to concentrate on what they're really good at & would advance web-services at a much faster pace. It's nice to see Amazon Web Services entering this space, and I hope this becomes a mature industry with lots of options sooner rather than later.

Until this happens, we'll continue to worry about our own infrastructure so our website runs fast and reliably. Too bad our customers and store owners will never really see how much time and effort goes into the "behind the scenes" infrastructure projects. Yes, it does slow down development of new features. No, we cannot just forget about our infrastructure-- at least not yet.

Yes, No, or "On the List"?

Every day we get suggestions for new features and improvements. A natural result of having passionate store owners that really care about us! In less than a year we have over 1,000 posts in our suggestions forum and receive countless e-mails and phone calls for every feature and improvement known to man. No matter how hard we work, the reality is we're never going to accomplish every feature request nor build a service that is perfect for everyone. Today I came across this post over at a VC blog and it really caught my interest. When should you just say no? The VC believes startups should say no to just about every request from customers. This helps the company stay focused and on track. While I don't agree 100%, he has a point. We're never going to get around to every feature request. We can always say "It's on the list" but does this really help our store owners? Maybe we should just start saying no! It wouldn't be the most popular answer, but probably the most realistic and honest.