Learn how Print Science automates the online ordering process for blueprints and engineering drawings, featuring drag-and-drop batch uploads and real-time area-based price calculation.
Video Transcript
Up until now, it has been difficult to automate the online purchase process for blueprints and engineering drawings.
What makes orders for blueprints and drawings unique? One: your customers want to print large batches of files.
Two: the person placing the order does not have detailed information about the size of each file in the batch.
And three: the files in the batch are a mix of black and white and color images.
Printer’s website has special functions to automate the entire purchase process for blueprints and drawings.
With printer’s website, your website can calculate a price quote for a large batch of files, can transfer that large batch of files from your customer’s desktop, and then allows your customer to complete the order process online.
Let’s see the whole process in action.
This folder contains a number of engineering and blueprint-kind of documents.
Some of them are black and white, some of them are color.
Most importantly, I don’t really need to know exactly which size each of these documents is.
All I need to do as a user is simply drag and drop these documents from my desktop into the webpage.
Once the documents have been dropped into the webpage, the page will open each document in turn and analyze the document.
It will determine the number of pages in each document, the area of each of the pages, and most importantly, whether each page is black and white or color.
Once all of the files have been analyzed, the system adds together the area of all the black and white pages and the area of all the color pages.
Finally, based on different per-square-foot or per-square-meter prices that you have set for the black and white portion of the printing and the color portion of the printing, the system calculates a total price for printing all of the files that have been uploaded.
Once the customer hits the ‘add to cart’ button, the files are uploaded one by one.
The files arrive in your account in the Amazon S3 cloud.
Because the file target is Amazon S3, there’s no limit to the number of files you can upload, and most importantly, there’s no limit to the size of each of the files.
Once all the files are uploaded, the system automatically switches to the shopping cart page where we can see a summary of the order.
Obviously, this is a blueprint product.
We can see the total area for black and white pages, the total area for the color pages, and we can see the list of the filenames that were uploaded.
From this point onwards, the customer can check out and purchase the product in the totally standard way.