Customization is now a key asset for many businesses, especially in industries such as Web To Print. Offering customers the ability to customize their product themselves and previewing the final result can improve Customer Experience. For that reason, Printu, a Colombian company on PrestaShop, decided to implement Zakeke’s Visual Product Customization solution to improve the Shopping Experience and scale up their business.
Printu was born in 2015 in Colombia and is a Web To Print company specializing in printing advertising materials, packaging and merchandising for B2C and B2B markets (especially for small and medium-sized companies). The company’s mission is to enable its customers to virtually print designed and customized products on their computers and receive them directly at home.
“Printu is a Web To print company. We are a basic eCommerce company that allows people and companies, especially small and medium-sized ones, to print virtually anything in a very easy way. Our mission is basically to make it easy for people to print what would otherwise involve transportation, a lot of intermediate consulting and processes that we want to avoid, simply using a very simple to use ecommerce platform.”
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager
THE CHALLENGE
Before choosing Zakeke, Printu was already working with product customization. E-commerce and manufacturing were already well connected, but the company needed to find a solution to scale up, boost sales, and improve the Shopping Experience. These are the reasons why Printu wanted to implement a Visual Product Customization tool within its e-commerce.
Printu was looking for an all-in-one value for money solution which could offer a customization service that was easy to implement and easy-to-use for the customer. In addition, Printu was looking for a product pre-visualization and mockup service to improve the Customer Experience and avoid any possible friction between what the customers expect and the final product they get.
“We said how are we going to make it so people can pre-visualize and then customize products, so that they can see what they are doing, before taking it to production, so that the customer feels much more comfortable with what they are doing and has much more confidence.”
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager
Before using Zakeke, a professional resource was responsible only for creating designs and previewing custom products and then sharing the material with production. In addition, the Customer Service Team was continuously providing assistance to support customers in creating their custom products.
Thus, another major challenge was related to the reduction of manual design work and Customer Service’s activity to define final custom print files. By implementing a tool such as Zakeke, the whole process can be automated, avoiding friction and reducing the effort of internal work.
“We would be reduced in the amount of consulting and the time spent helping customers assemble orders and create their products.”
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager
THE SOLUTION
Printu was looking for a Visual Product Customizer which would allow the customer to view a realistic mockup of the product, easily customize the product, and visualize the result using 3D or AR. To achieve this goal, Printu tried out many tools, most of them expensive and difficult to implement. Zakeke offered all these features in a single platform with a price that was significantly favorable compared to competitors.
“We did an evaluation of many platforms, including some that we already had and that were operating, but that we had to renew and actually what we found is that in order to achieve that objective we would have had to buy extremely complicated, sophisticated, difficult to implement, and expensive platforms in terms of acquisition and cost of ownership. Then we found Zakeke, we did some tests and we said Zakeke meets the very specific objectives that we are looking for.”
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager
One of the features that led Printu to choose Zakeke’s Visual Product Customizer is the easy installation of the tool. Zakeke is a plug-in and integrates with PrestaShop easily. Also, a free starting Demo further simplified the process.
Zakeke is not only easy to install, but it is also easy to use for end customers who can customize their products quickly, without the need for special knowledge in customization and printing.
“Within the initial evaluation that we also did, we were fortunate to have an initial demo. Then we tried other things, as I was saying, we had some platforms. They were extremely complicated. Instead, with Zakeke, we made the process very simple, very fast. And that’s when we said, definitely we’ll do it with Zakeke, it’s much easier for us and for the customers.“
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager
Zakeke provides customers with many features for product customization. One feature that Printu particularly appreciates is the possibility of assembling the templates of products even in blank without design, but only with spaces where people can later put their own designs. In addition, products’ AR preview was a key feature for Printu to reduce pre-revision problems and improve the Customer Experience.
“There was a gap that was not closed, which was between what the customer was thinking they were buying and what they sometimes thought they were actually going to receive. All that space was filled using Zakeke.”
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager
THE RESULTS
Thanks to the implementation of Zakeke’s Visual Product Customizer, customers can easily customize their product and view a 3D preview that exactly matches the product they will receive. In this way, Printu has improved the Customer Experience and increased Customer Satisfaction by creating an easy and smart Shopping Experience, but also it has saved costs related to production mistakes and Customer Service Team activity.
“There were savings in terms of customer service cases and production errors in some products where the lack of previewing did not allow the customer to be sure of what he was sending to print until someone detected it within our team or when the product was already printed.”
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager
Since Printu implemented Zakeke’s Visual Product Customizer in 2020, orders and sales have increased significantly. In addition, Zakeke enabled the company to add a new line of products to the catalog associated with image and photo printing. The managing of these products required the implementation of an expensive photo printing platform, but Zakeke, with its customization and pre-visualization features, is also able to manage them to the fullest.
“The number of orders received increased because we were able to assemble new products that could not have been done without having Zakeke or any pre-visualization or online design editing platform. I’m talking about products like photo printing, albums and other kinds of products more associated with images and photos that were created as an additional line.”
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager
Zakeke’s Visual Product Customizer has enabled Printu to significantly reduce the manual work hours associated with the processes of making previews and sharing print files with the production Team. Zakeke automated the whole process allowing Printu to save resources and money.
“At the internal process level, we no longer had the need for one person in the team to dedicate himself solely to creating projects in order to preview and send items to production. So, there was a significant savings there.”
Fredy Moreno – Printu Growth Manager