Rapidquote Tutorial & Guide

In this video, we're going to take a look at the printers' website feature called Rapid Quote, which is a feature built specifically for the AEC printing world.

What is unique about AEC printing is that the customer that is frequently ordering the printing is not actually the customer that produced the files in the first place.

Typically, the files are created by engineering firms or architectural firms, but the actual printing ordering is done by a contractor who receives those files from their architects or their engineers.

What's difficult for the contractor is that he doesn't know very much about what is inside the files.

He simply receives a folder containing a large number of files, but for each individual file, he doesn't know how many pages it might contain.

He doesn't know whether it's black or white.

He doesn't even know what's inside of it.

And all this can make things difficult for that contractor.

And in particular, it might make it difficult for him to estimate how much it might cost to have you print those items.

So we have built a feature called Rapid Quote, which makes it possible for your customer to get an instant price quote from your website and then upload your files and place a complete order for those documents.

So here we're going to demonstrate the Rapid Quote system.

Here we have a folder filled, in this case, with five different files.

These are very typical architectural types of files.

Here we can see we have some line drawings and other schematics.

We also have some rendering and other shaded line drawings.

So this is a very normal mix of files for a real-life situation for your customers, meaning they have a folder containing a mixed set of drawings.

What your customer needs to do is come to the website and enter in a project name.

Next, all they need to do is drag and drop all their files into the webpage.

What is happening now is that the Rapid Quote system is opening up and analyzing every single file the customer dragged and dropped inside.

Here we can see some of the details of the analysis.

The system has analyzed the number of pages each file contains, followed by the ink or toner coverage of each of those pages, as well as the area of those pages in the files.

In this particular case, as you can see, there are five files.

All the files are just one page.

But as you can see, the first file, which is a rendering, has 100% coverage, which means that there is ink on 100% of the page.

You can see that some of these lines and shaded drawings have a lower percentage of coverage.

So our system has measured the coverage of each of these pages in addition to the area of each of the pages.

In this particular case, the system was configured to round up, so the area here might have been 3.5 square feet, but it was rounded up to 14.

Finally, and most importantly, our system displays a price to each document based on the coverage.

So as you can see, our first document which has 100% coverage is being charged at $6 per square foot.

And the second document, which has a much lower coverage percentage, is being charged at $3 per square foot.

And of course, in the last column, you can see the total price for each of the files.

So here is a real breakdown for the customer of the pricing.

And now the customer can see how many pages he's got, what sort of ink coverage, and how large they are, which clearly shows how it is that the system arrived at that price calculation.

From this point onwards, if the customer is happy with the price, he can click add to cart.

And it's only now that our system is uploading the files from the customer's desktop to the server.

Printers' website has a very powerful file uploader built-in.

There's no limit to the number of files nor the size of those files.

Once all the files are uploaded, the customer arrives in the shopping cart and he can see a summary of the order.

A total of five pages, 48 square feet, and a list of the files in the batch.

From this point onwards, it's a very standard checkout process.

Your customer will fill in all those personal details such as his name, billing address, and shipping address.

Your customer can also choose to pick up the items at your place if you allow that.

And the last step is to ask the customer to make a payment.

And now the order is complete.

This is the order confirmation page.

So in just a few minutes, your customer can receive a nice price quote for a large batch of AEC files.