THE IBS CUSTOMER JOURNEY SYSTEM (CJS)

A holistic approach to facilitate Awareness, Conversion, Engagement and Entrenchment

We know you have been patiently waiting for the release of our reseller websites and so we wanted to flick you through an update regarding where things are at. In order for you to grasp where we are now, we first need to tell you a little more about where we’ve been.

For the first 15 years of IBS, we actually never put ink on paper. Our business was purely about creating systems, streamlining workflows and building software to gang work as efficiently as we could. Being able to put ink on paper is now just a by-product of our success. In fact, we’re so much an IT company that we’ve actually been employing developers longer than we’ve been employing printers. Crazy, we know!

Why we bucked the trend of ‘W2P’ & chose to invest our time in creating a Customer Journey System (CJS) instead 

As one of the first developers of a W2P system in Australia over 10 years ago, we quickly realised that ‘W2P’ as the industry saw it (typically viewed as just an online catalogue/quoting calculator) was pointless if it was viewed as just one part of your customer's journey and not the final destination. In fact, if you’re just looking for an online catalogue or quoting calculator for your website, then this is probably not the right solution for you. The truth is, that success in any business is only created when the four areas of a customer journey are considered. A CJS facilitates all 4 areas of a customer journey:

Creating Awareness - by being able to host customised landing pages, provide professional SEO services to help you get seen, and to offer the ability to integrate with all of your online and offline lead generation strategies.

Converting Clients - by offering you product fulfillment services at discounted trade pricing, and a range of industry low priced products to help you offer a tripwire deal to get your clients first sale.

Engaging Your Clients - with the ability to instantly integrate our monthly deals with your own portal at no cost to your business, and the option of done-for-you marketing automation to keep your clients engaged.

Entrenching Your Customers - with their own unique logins to your portal and the ability to create a Digital Asset Management System (DAM) for each customer. They can view previous orders, reorder at any time, and most importantly should be used for your customers to browse a range of products that you have pre-designed and uploaded into their portal for super simple ordering. This is one of the best ways to over-deliver, and also expand the range of products your customers order from you and generate customer loyalty.

OUR VISION

As I am sure you are aware, our plan for this CJS project was always to finish off the new IBS portal website which our in-house developers have been working on for over a year now. As part of this rebuild, we moved the focus from a traditional B2B type of platform to one that was also a user-friendly experience for a B2C e-commerce website. Instead of building core components into each individual page, the website has been constructed in a way that data such as logos, colour schemes, pricing, fonts etc are contained in one area of the website and pushed out to each page from there. The reasoning for this methodology, was to enable us to simply replicate our alpha IBS site with customised data entered into one section of the website, allowing us to instantly create a unique reseller website with our clients' own individualised look and feel.

This sounded great in theory and by all estimates we were expecting this to be ready mid last year. In reality though, like most things with IT, this has not worked out. The alpha site itself is now up and running well but the ability to spinoff the beta sites has uncovered some unforeseeable challenges, particularly pertaining to some of the customisation and flexibility that we feel is a non-negotiable for our clients.

THE INSIDE SCOOP

Knowing that everyone is very keen to see these e-commerce sites getting up and going as a matter of urgency, we made the decision late last year to pivot the project in a slightly different direction to allow us to get things up and going as quickly as we can. Our team has literally been working around the clock to create a solution to the problems that we have encountered in the website spinoffs by developing a new template where the outside skin and functionality is individually customised, with the IBS e-commerce solution embedded inside the shop page itself. Basically this means, you will have full control over the look and feel of the content pages of your entire site (Home Page, About Us, Contact Pages, Blog, and any additional landing pages that you choose.) We will be giving you access to a fully customisable CMS to control colours, fonts, text and images so that no two reseller websites ever have to look alike. The only thing that will remain the same is that the ‘Shop’ page will be a direct replica of our own shop functionality (a multi million dollar e-commerce solution we have been fine tuning for optimum retail performance for years).

CHOOSING WHICH PRODUCTS TO DISPLAY IN YOUR SHOP

To manage the back end of your shop, we have set up an admin section inside your new IBS portal login where you’ll be able to set which of our products you’d like to display in your shop. As default our unbranded imagery and product descriptions will automatically appear in your store front. With over 900 product variations available, we knew that this feature would be one of the most time saving and attractive features that we wanted to invest our time in.

And the best news?!

Every time we launch a new product, all you have to do to start offering it, is jump into your admin site, set the markup and turn the product on. We will have already created all of the imagery, descriptions, templates, and features you need to sell a product retail. Better yet, every sale we offer or product we launch comes with a free white-labelled marketing toolkit done for you. A point of difference we’re extremely proud of in our reseller offering.

SETTING PRODUCT MARKUPS

Product markups can be set at a category, sub category, product, or individual qty and size level. Having worked with W2P systems for over 15 years, we knew that setting markups for our enormous range of products across a wide range of categories, sizes, stocks and extras was one of the most difficult challenges our customers faced (especially if you were building your own e-commerce site from scratch...believe me, we know!) We’ve spent a considerable amount of time creating an easy to use markup system that allows you to set customised and tailored pricing within minutes, not days.

Here's how:

• You can set a Global Markup to your entire site called a ‘Catch All’ markup which is the minimum markup you would like to be applied to any product of ours you choose to offer
  
  
• You then have the ability to customise your pricing further; you can choose to add markups to a product category (for example, our ‘Print, Stationery & Labels’ category) and within that category set your markups based on pricing ranges. We found this has been the best way to quickly and easily customise pricing as most customers want to add a higher margin to lower value work, and a lower margin to higher value work
  
  
• If you wish to customise this further you can then apply the same markup theory to a Sub Category (for example to all ‘Flyers’), then a Product type (for example to all ‘115gsm Gloss Art Flyers’) or even individually adjust the price of a particular size or quantity. The system will automatically choose to display however far you have customised each product.
  
  

UNIQUE LOGINS FOR YOUR OWN CLIENTS

Our CJS will also offer you the ability to set your clients up with their own unique logins to your store to create a customised portal for each customer. Pre-upload their branding assets for simple reordering, so that customers can take control of their own print orders without you having to do a thing. 

Once they’ve selected your pre-uploaded artwork for a particular product and the quantity they’re after, the job will be sent straight through to our manufacturing system, allowing it to bypass any manual intervention normally needed from you. 

You will also be able to offer custom pricing or discounts per client login, an invaluable marketing tool if you’d like to reward loyal customers with specific discounts. 

CJS ROADMAP

This will be Version 1 of our offering. Subsequent versions will include the ability to add in an online editor across our entire product range for your customers to design and proof their own files online (a project we’ve been working on for over 12 months). Although this is a feature we plan on offering for those who have expressed their interest, it is from our experience in W2P systems, that client’s don’t want to self serve, they want to be served. They are after the convenience of being able to order online but would rather have their jobs designed professionally. All they really want is to be able to choose when and how they order their pre-made professionally designed collateral. It is for this reason that we have launched V1 without the online editor. Most clients using a W2P system, aren’t expecting it to be canva, vista print, or to use it for one off orders. The best solution to truly get the most return on your investment, is for your customers to continue to use you for your service and keep the high margin design work in house. The value then comes once the artwork is approved and you can upload it into their portal for them to order, and manage reorders in the future themselves.

With years of thought, hard work and experience put into this project, we want to be very upfront that our offering won’t be for everyone. We have purposely built a system that will allow you to grow. It will give you the ability to scale, to get to market quickly, to offer a wide range of products instantly and provide you with an automated system that will allow you to free up your own time from the daily mundane tasks, so that YOU can focus on growing your business. We are not offering you a website, we are offering you a print management system, built on over 26 years of experience of what is needed to scale a business.

Version 1 is now very close to completion and you can view a video walkthrough of this here so that you will get a clear visual of how the sites will work. Once launched, if you do choose to invest in a CJS site, the next steps would be to work with you to load in your own branding and copyright to the surrounding skins. Future versions will allow you to do this entirely yourself.

PLANS & INCLUSIONS

VERSION 1

In Version 1, you will have the full website built for you and be automatically put on the 'Basic' monthly plan.

The CJS system has a build fee of $5000 + GST which includes the following:

1. A full website solution that will allow you to have complete control over all of the information pages of your site.
2. An admin portal to control what IBS products you would like to offer, and the ability to customise their images and description.
3. The ability to tailor your product margins entirely in just minutes with our easy to use custom pricing structure.
4. The ability to allow your customers their own logins to the online shop so that you can give them access to reorder past jobs and gain access to any special prices you would like to give them on any individual product or product ranges.
5. Ability to create your own discount codes for special pricing – you can align these with IBS special discounts so that you maintain margins but pass on the IBS discounts to your clients. A done-for-you marketing plan at your fingertips.
6. Ability for your clients to choose their own freight options for delivery and consolidate freight for multi product orders.
7. Full automation of the process so that all money is collected on your behalf, the job is automatically sent through to manufacture and delivered to the end user without any manual intervention by you or your staff.
8. Unlimited ability to add your own landing pages as and when you require utilising the easy to use page builder function and content management system.

Outside of this build fee, the only ongoing plan fee is:

• a $125 per month + GST plan that covers website hosting, future upgrades (including all new IBS products as we launch them), access to the content managing system and website statistics and reporting.

VERSION 2

Coming soon, when we launch Version 2 you will also have the opportunity to update to the following plan:

• a $245 per month + GST plan for clients who wish to include an online editor into their website so that clients can design their own products online;
  
  You can upgrade/downgrade plans at any time with a month's notice.

FUTURE UPGRADES

We will also be offering a range of optional managed extras including a suite of services that we will manage for you to provide more value out of your site for less work. These include:

1. Website admin service - An ongoing managed virtual assistant to handle any physical content upgrades to your website as and when required
2. Online marketing services – Access to a suite of managed marketing services to help promote your website including SEO, pay per click advertising and marketing automation.
3. Livechat help desk service using IBS Livechat agents – As your website will be promoting IBS products, our own fully trained team can man your live chat on your website and answer all product relational questions on your behalf. From our experience 95% of live chat queries are either product, job or artwork related, all of which our team handle already on a daily basis. However our team will flag anything that can’t be answered and notify you to call or email the client back.
4. Customised Customer Journey Plan - Our team highly recommend you book in for a customised Customer Journey Plan with our General Manager Kelly to accompany your site. This will ensure the best return on investment possible, and help you determine what you need to know, to know where you need to go, before you build your site.

These upgrade package options and pricing will be made available shortly.

SO WHERE TO FROM HERE?

Early this year we will be rolling out both our new website and our CJS offering. If you choose to invest in a CJS system, you will be able to choose the products you’d like to offer, as well as set up all of your pricing and margins through your new ibsportal logins. We will use a temporary subdomain while your site is in draft form, and work with you to customise your homepage, info pages and main navigation.

FAQs

Some other questions that we have been asked throughout the process so far are as follows:

1. We’ve seen free options that allow us to sell other companies' products, why would we pay for yours?

Great question, and this is the main reason we want to make it clear that if you just want a set and forget website with a few products and pricing calculator, we’re probably not the solution for you. And that’s ok, we know we won’t be the right fit for everyone. We’re looking to work with companies that want to grow, that want to free up their time with more automation, that want to streamline their systems, and that want the ability to expand their offering instantly. We’ve built this system for clients that see the value in efficiencies.

Our main points of difference from other offerings available are:

• We are not an iFrame you add to your site, our system comes with unbranded product images, retail product descriptions, FAQs, and templates for a full retail experience.
  
  
• We allow the highest level of pricing customisation in the quickest, and simplest set up structure we could create.
  
  
• We have worked for YEARS to create a system that can offer our reseller community the widest range of products from a number of completely different product categories. We offer over 900 products, with every different ‘category’ of products requiring a different set of forms and intricate back end functionality to capture the data needed to offer that specific product. The functionality required to quote you on a print item is completely different to the functionality needed to quote you on a promotional product, or wide format sign. If you’ve never developed a website before we understand that this might not seem like a big deal, but this functionality has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and is one of the considerations we took into account when setting our pricing.
  
  
• The main structure of your site is completely your own! Other than the ‘shop’ page itself, your website does not have to look like any other resellers site. The skies the limit on customisation!
  
  
• Full manufacturing automation. Once a job is ordered with press ready artwork on your website, it goes straight into our manufacturing system, bypassing any manual intervention on your behalf.
  
  
• Ability to create client logins. Take the hassle out of reorders and allow your customers to do this themselves with individual logins to their own portal.
  
  
• Ability to grow with you. We’ve only got plans for this to grow, so we can help you grow. As you’re ready to take the next steps, we will have optional extras available at your fingertips to integrate marketing features, live chat assistance, admin help, all in the effort of freeing up more of YOUR time, so that you can focus on where it really matters.
  
  
• Digital Asset Management. The truth is almost all clients just want stuff done for them. In our experience, just because you have the ability for clients to browse your e-commerce site, design their own jobs or upload their own artwork, it doesn’t mean clients will use it. In fact, most medium to large organisations will request the use of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system so that they can see everything they’ve ordered previously, reorder quickly and easily, but most importantly, see all of their available assets (artwork pre-uploaded to specific products ready for customers to order). With the ability for you to create customised logins for your clients, you have access to a personalised DAM system for each client at your fingertips.
  
  
• A Corporate Module is on its way! In future versions, we’re opening up a corporate module for your customers that have 5 or more employees, where you will be able to set up your own design templates in the online editor that your customers can edit. A powerful tool where, for example, you can design their business card once, lock down the branding elements, but let your clients edit their own name, position and contact details. This allows you to set up systems that not only save you time, but give your larger customers a better online experience.

        2. What do we need to provide you with?

You will need to provide us your branding assets (logos, fonts, colours, branding guideline if you have them), and your written copy for information pages (we will be sending you through an online form to help collect these in an easy manner).

        3. What changes can and can't we make?

You can change the sites branding and content pages as well as product content and images

Unfortunately you can’t change the workflow, order form, cart, or checkout.

        4. Can we host our own site?

Our initial intentions were to offer hosting as an optional extra however, unfortunately we ran into a few issues when it required to use a database on our server. To get the best out of the site's speed and stability, we have decided to host them in the same place for the all-inclusive price.

        5. Will V2 be any additional costs?

Updates and hosting are included in the monthly fees, it will only be the add-ons or upgrades that are additional expenses such as the ability to send jobs elsewhere, add an online editor, live chat or marketing services etc

        6. Are we locked into any contracts?

Not at all, there are no lock-in contracts and you can terminate the agreement at any time by giving us one month's notice.

        7. Where does the money go when an order is placed through our website?

Initially all money received will come through to IBS to be redistributed to each reseller at the end of every week. In Version 2, we will have the option for you to have your own payment gateway.

        8. Can we still use our existing site and have a link to the ‘shop’?

Unfortunately not, but we will offer an onboarding service that will convert your existing copyright into the new website structure for better functionality in general for $1000, however this has already been included for all grant applicants.

        9. What would happen if we wanted to terminate the agreement? Would we lose our site and all our data?

All data from the website is yours but the IP will remain the property of IBS. You are able to download all of your own content and images to take to another site if you wanted to build another one yourself.

        10. What's your experience in IT as a printer?

We started building our own MIS system 26 years ago and have been developing in-house with own team of 15 developers ever since. We joke that we’re an IT company that just happens to print. Having created one of the first customised W2P systems in Australia 10 years ago, we consider ourselves a pioneer in this technology.

        11. What is your roadmap for the CJS sites?

Our roadmap sees a lot of exciting developments coming including the addition of a corporate portal to allow more of a base login ordering system for corporates as well as more integration with 3rd party marketing platforms. Within V2 we will also be looking to offer web dev services to allow you to offer them to your clients.

We know that launching an entirely new service comes with a bunch of questions, and so have appointed one of our employees, Natalia Lawczys, as Account Manager of all CJS systems. Working remotely, she is available between 9am and 2pm via email and can be reached at nlawczys@ibsportal.com.au