A bit more about Global Print API Routing and Profiles

Getting your print-on-demand job automatically routed from your web2print,  publishing  or corporate platform to the most qualified print partner has, for most businesses, been a long-term challenge. The decision of where to route consists of critical factors such as location, pricing, production times, performance, and the level of automation at the selected print partner.

When companies have decided how to run their global print network, they often 'hard code' it in the core of their platform.

For a while, this runs well, but then volume grows, or print partners have a peak season, presses are down, or even worse, they go bankrupt and cannot fulfill your print on demand orders anymore.

Re-routing in such cases requires resources from your IT department or a manual job to change settings for new incoming print orders.
In our team’s previous job positions they all experienced such issues while working at web2print, publishing, and large corporations.

When we started to design the Cloudprinter.com platform for our Print API, we made intelligent print order routing one of the critical parts of the core API.

Nowadays our AI order algorithm learns from the history of similar print jobs by analyzing production time, quality, and the amount of time it took the related logistics provider to deliver the final product. We combine this data with the print pricing levels, cross-border data, and production options at the print partners. This process is fully automated and takes just milliseconds to decide how our Cloudprinter.com platform routes the print order to the print-on-demand partner.

This is what we called Automated Network mode and it is a standard feature of our starter and business subscriptions.

With the Enterprise Print API subscription, you can use the Manual Network Mode. This print routing mode enables you to set fixed routing schemes for selected markets or countries. For example, while using the Automatic Network mode for worldwide orders, you might want to exclude Germany as you have been working with a great print partner there for years. Then for Germany, you set print orders to this print-on-demand partner as a fixed routing rule on the Manual Network Mode settings.

With the Cloudprinter.com Print API Business subscription, you can set a price range or gap for your products by using custom routing. Print partners with higher pricing than your price gap will be excluded from the routing AI algorithm.

Both routing network modes can be fine-tuned by using routing profiles. Custom routing rules enable you to set a maximum amount of print-on-demand orders to be routed to the print-on-demand partner.

An example of a customer routing profile in Manual Network mode can be: Print on demand partner A in Australia will get 500 orders a day. When the number of 500 is reached additional orders should go to printer B. Or, share orders on 60/40% between the print partners by using the custom routing profile.

Custom routing profiles are a feature of our Enterprise Print API subscription.

For Business and Enterprise subscriptions we have also launched the SLA routing rules. Here you can specify the SLA parameters for print-on-demand partners. Examples of SLA parameters can be average production score, certification, and selected equipment such as the newest digital presses, etc.