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BaggaDonuts · March 11th, 2008

My small business is interested in working with an online order fulfillment company to process orders in bulk. We have our own e-commerce system that handles all of our orders. I am looking for a printer that can recieve a product feed of all of our images available for print on a daily basis and then fulfill batch orders for those products from another data feed that we can provide on some interval.

The reason we are seeking this solution is because ideally, we would like to retain our customers on our site for the bulk of their experience, rather than referring them to a third party to order a single product or browse products we've configured on that third party site. There is an awesome CD printing company called "Custom CD" that does this exact thing for software distribution.

We are after this solution for t-shirt printing. Does anyone know if there is a printing company out there now that supports that business model?

Adam · March 11th, 2008

What country are you in?

BaggaDonuts · March 11th, 2008

I'm in the United States

Rodney · March 11th, 2008

I don't know of any company doing this yet via a datafeed.

I think the cafepress API used to allow something like this, but they've stopped giving out access to their API.

Adam · March 11th, 2008

Not really Rodney, the CP Content API allows you to create designs (SVG) and products, not place orders for the products you've created. I wish it did though!

The datafeed to fulfillment idea is one I'm highly interested in as well, so if anyone wants to set up that arrangement I'd be interested too.

BaggaDonuts · March 11th, 2008

i'm actually suprised no printers support that feature.. i contacted pretty much all of the ones on this forum and no one does it. might be a good business idea

BaggaDonuts · March 12th, 2008

FYI, PrintFection is implementing this feature. Here's a reply that i got from their customer support:

"This should be possible sometime this year using our API. Please email api-beta@printfection.com to get on our mailing list. We'll let you know when this functionality is available."

Adam · March 12th, 2008

Sounds cool. Although a lot of things are apparently going to happen at PF. I'm already on that mailing list. I'll believe it when I see it

Darla · March 13th, 2008

so what your asking is if there is anybody who when somebody orders from your site can do the order and ship to that person kinda somebody "behind" the scenes sort to speak? am i on track here?

Adam · March 14th, 2008

Yes - somebody who will print and send out orders, plain i'm taking it.

What Bagga wants to do is send you a datafeed daily, which could be something as basic as a text file, or a CSV file it'll contain all his order details. He will also send across all images needed for the printing, they'll correspond with some unique reference within the datafeed.

Yes, you'll be behind the schenes, just the printer. He'll retain his brand and customer base, he'll be your customer and pay you for the orders you fulfill.

Darla · March 14th, 2008

thanks adam that is what i figured it was about

pokerman · March 15th, 2008

What kind of volume are talking about because there are several ways to do this.
Are you thinking 10 shirts a day, 100?, 1000?

BaggaDonuts · March 15th, 2008

We're still in the planning phase at this point in time, so i can't accurately gauge our numbers. 100 orders per day would indicate a good level of success in my opinion, but as this is a new business, it may take some time to get going. Honestly this venture is an experiment with the potential to be moderately successful.

But yes, Darla and Adam are correct, I am looking to provide an order feed for printing. The feed would contain the following per order: an ID, a link to the image, shipping info. I am looking for a company that will then be able to ship the orders accordingly. We may also need a reconciliation step for accounting purposes by sending notification that the order has been shipped. This can be accomplished in a number of ways: updating the status per order via a web service, providing a report, or another data feed on some interval.

Uncle John · March 15th, 2008

If, I understanding you correctly what you want has been around a long time, not just for shirts. When we shipped to Academy and Galyen’s we would receive and email we had orders. We then would go to EDI, EDI Solution, EDI Software, EDI Compliance, SaaS EDI Software enter our password and there would be the complete purchase order with shipping, due date, sizes, packaging requirements etc.
There is a monthly fee, but the UPC hangtags were also generated from there.
There are other company’s that do the same thing.
Is this what you mean?
Sounds to me like you should just fax the orders you get to your supplier that has you art on file they print and ship.

BaggaDonuts · March 15th, 2008

Faxing orders is not a viable option to us. But EDI is definitely a worthwhile solution.. If a printer can accept some standard EDI document, then that's what I'm after. Thanks for the link, i'll research it a bit more.