One of Germany’s largest digital print providers needed a single system to configure and price 1,000,000+ product combinations (formats, papers, finishes, runs) — live in the open web — so agencies and European resellers could calculate, compare and order within seconds. The market would benchmark against it, so speed, stability and accuracy had to be world-class.
case studie
real-time product & pricing engine for a leading digital print hub
A real-time configuration and pricing engine for 1M+ print combinations, open to the market and instant under load. Agencies and resellers calculate and compare in seconds, learn in-flow via an embedded training hub, and place Web2Print orders that go straight to production.
location
berlin
industry
print
What we done
real-time product & pricing engine for a leading digital print hub
summary
challenge
Pricing lived across many tools and teams. Quotes took minutes, sometimes hours; traffic spikes from partners slowed everything down. Misconfigured specs created prepress tickets, waste and delays. Know-how was buried in PDFs and emails; new users learned by trial and error.
solution
We built a balanced, real-time platform that feels instant — even under heavy load:
- Real-time pricing engine: Combines materials, capacity, finishing, shipping into a single price in milliseconds; pulls live inputs from ERP/MIS and inventory.
- Refined load balancing & caching: Multi-region routing, autoscaling and edge caching keep response times low during traffic peaks (thousands of requests per second).
- Guided configuration (Web2Print): Only valid combinations are shown; artwork checks and specs are auto-validated before add-to-cart.
- Open for the market: Public calculator for agencies/resellers; partner APIs for automated quoting and bulk uploads.
- Integrated learning hub: Bite-size tutorials, validations and examples embedded in the flow reduce mistakes and raise data quality.
- Click-to-production: Orders flow straight into prepress & production (JDF/JMF/RIP), with status tracking to delivery.
- Governance & trust: GDPR, audit trails, price versioning, and transparent cost drivers.
impact
- Quotes in ~3–5 seconds (down from minutes) — even at peak traffic.
- Time-to-order −80–90%; fewer back-and-forth emails.
- Prepress tickets −40–60% thanks to valid combinations + inline checks.
- Waste −20–30% through correct specs and better upstream data.
- More margin control: capacity-aware pricing and live material costs.
- Happier customers: self-serve, always-on calculator; learning hub shortens onboarding and improves artwork quality.
- Sustainability add-ons: optional CO₂ estimate per job and smarter gang-runs for fewer make-readies.
- Reliability: 99.99% uptime; P95 latency <200 ms during campaigns.
Tags: industry / online shop / print