September 2016

 

 

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The Skypricer is here, and I'm tempted to leave it at that because building our latest product has been a bear - easily the most exhausting coding project I've ever taken on. The time and effort spent on developing the patent application for it pales by comparison.

You can catch a quick summary here, then follow it up with a detailed description on the web. Click the links below to take you there. And since this FlyBy is totally about the Skypricer, I will gladly take Winston Churchill's advice: "Stand up, say what you have to say, and when you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending, sit down."
 

All the best,

Hal Heindel
Unitac International Inc.

 


 

 

skybeta-A3

 

The Skypricer. What is it, and do you need one?

 

What the Skypricer is, in hindsight, is more of everything I had anticipated it to be. Whether you need one, that depends: Do you now sell, or are you planning to sell, printed products online?

If you're already selling online, it won’t take much to convince you. You've discovered first hand how mind numbing it is to price and enter the insane number of variations for something as simple as a newsletter. Which, in eCommerce terms, is anything but simple.

In the online shopping world, "simple" means devoid of variations. And printed products have a ton of them: Different quantities, different paper, different printing. Even some prepress and finishing now and then. Those variations don't add up, they multiply. Ten quantities with three paper options will have you working up the price of thirty variations, not thirteen. All must be entered into your shopping site separately - one variation at a time.

The idea for the Skypricer came to me when I listened in on a webinar during which the IT guys of two large Chicago printing companies told the audience that setting up their online stores had been no big deal. When pressed, both were forced to admit that pricing and stocking the virtual shelves with hundreds of items and thousands of variations took the better part of half a year. No mention was made of constantly having to update them.

They were right about one thing: Setting up an empty store really is simple and doesn't cost much, given today's technology. BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce - lots of great shopping cart providers to choose from without having to box yourself in with a years-long contract. Even getting paid has gotten easier. PayPal and Stripe make the once onerous task of establishing a payment gateway painless.

That said, being simple isn't the same as being quick. Simple is digging a huge hole in the ground with a shovel in preparation for building a house. Quick is digging the hole with a Caterpillar excavator. The Skypricer is that excavator. Our invention will be of interest wherever complex products are sold on a shopping website. It will be indispensable in stores where all items are complex and stocking them is always labor-intensive. As it is in the printing industry.

We're releasing the Skypricer as a no cost beta to all users of paid Morning Flight editions. Over the next few weeks, we'll privately email you the download link. The program will stay on beta for the rest of 2016.

 
The Skypricer, what it is        How to use it