Apogee and Asanti StoreFront 3.0 give printers or print service providers (PSPs) a series of new features to promote their service offerings to their customers and reach new markets online.

“At the moment our largest StoreFront account is a print service provider who is running 51 B2B stores for different clientele,” said Andy Grant, Head of Software, Agfa Graphics. “Today StoreFront serves more than 1,000,000 pages per month, a number that very well illustrates the potential of this market."

Storefront is being used all over the world today. Regions like Switzerland and Scandinavia are extremely active when it comes to promoting print in a B2B environment via web-to-print.

“This new release is great for one of our automotive industry customers,” said René M. Jørgensen, System coordinator at Kailow, Denmark. ”The store that we built for them contains about 250 products in over 20 categories, ranging from brochures and newsletters to stock photos and videos. The ability to group related documents in subcategories, will make it easier for the car dealers to navigate the store. The new animated banners allow their marketing team to highlight new brochures or promote product videos that were recently added to the web-to-print shop."

One of the new StoreFront 3.0 features, is the use of animated ‘carousel banners’ and custom footer function on store pages. The ability for shop owners to either provide information to shoppers or promote specific products or services allows them to optimize their store for their needs and use it as a marketing tool as well. The HTML5 banners are easy to set up and properly display on mobile devices. The footer function can be used to add contact data or payment and shipping information on store pages.

Andy Grant continued: “From the start, our StoreFront solution was developed with automation in mind. The tight integration with the Apogee or Asanti workflow is extremely powerful and saves printers a lot of time because incoming orders are automatically processed."
"With the new releases, we focus more on the business side of web-to-print, enabling printers to create bigger, more efficient stores, operate in larger markets, support electronic document creation and distributions and handle various payment models and invoicing" Grant said. "Kailow’s automotive customer is an excellent example of how StoreFront enables a commercial printer or a sign & display producer to offer more value and services online."

StoreFront 3.0 now also supports price rounding either per item or for the total order value and business customers with stores aimed at international visitors have better control over international value-added taxes (VAT). In countries where it is customary to add a surcharge for credit card payments, such fees can now be added to the order total.