Online print shop iPrint Inc has paid Lycos Inc $2.25m to market its web-based pre-press services. For its money, iPrint gets exposure on Lycos and its subsidiary Tripod. In return, iPrint expects higher hit rates. So far, so good, says president and CEO Royal P. Farris: Our service has gone nuts so far this morning. Farris is proud that his company has been in business since 1997 – eons in ecommerce time – and that up till now it has confined its activities to creating a scalable environment. We have done no advertising or marketing to date, he says. This is our first deal that will start heavily promoting the iPrint concept. That concept is to automate the fifty-odd steps in the traditional pre-print process, the steps between accepting a customer’s order and presenting a finished file to the commercial printers themselves. It’s a fairly complex process, Farris reveals: People always want to call us the Amazon.com of the print shop world, but the problem we’re solving is an order of magnitude bigger. He likens iPrint’s service to a bank’s automatic teller machine. Where an ATM lets customers self-serve most of the popular banking transactions, iPrint lets them control most of the popular printing transactions – business cards, mugs, t-shirts and so on. The company’s technology base runs proprietary C++ and Perl software on top of Windows NT and a Netscape web server, but Farris is confident it will scale to handle increasing transaction volumes. If it can’t, iPrint will be in a double bind, since the deal with Lycos and Tripod includes incentives to the portals for driving business iPrint’s way. To be worth the investment, those hits must translate into business.
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