MarketDirect StoreFront

Integration of Market Direct Storefront (MDSF) with Printsmith Vision (PSV) created a Very Nice Automated path to production. This saves us Hours every day by eliminating the need to interpret email and telephone orders to create Job Tickets. Manual entry was error prone and slowed the process of getting jobs into production.
The integration with our Fiery is also Automated and eliminates the need for the operator to set up the Rip. It already knows the Rip Settings and Quantity so the operator mounts the requested paper and releases it to Print.
We also use MDSF for our Sign Shop, Garment Shop, and Advertising Specialty divisions.
EFI is doing a lot of work to make Market Direct Storefront a leader in the market.
Thank You EFI.

We create Store Fronts for many Clients who's users don't need to know about our production facilities.
I'd like to see a simple Administrative way to customize each Store Front with unique Contact info where our print shop is anonymous.
I'd also like to send the Order Notification from each Store Front to different email locations in a readable format so that Our Customer can see that Their Users have placed orders.
EFI Communities is a HUGE step in the right direction for Tech Support but there are times when 24/7 access to support would have been a savior for me.
I nearly lost a client because I didn't have access to immediate technical information to get their Store Front to perform correctly.
It's becoming quite competitive out there and we need all the help we can get to be the best.
I know that this is a Tall Order, and a significant cost, for EFI but other Store Front builders do this and as a Market Leader EFI should consider it.
With so many Good reasons to choose EFI this may be the weakest link I found.

I like all the different type of options when it comes to products, I appreciate the level of customization across the entire backend such as printing services, papers, products, design, etc.

Some services and specs, filled out by the customer, don't come across to our PrintSmith depending how you have that setup. We had to rebuild all ticket templates in PrintSmith (yes a second time) in order to link products up to ticket templates from our storefront. This was our workaround, some things still don't come across until recently, SIZE wouldn't come over from the storefront into PrintSmith, so I think there is room for improvement here. I like the idea of product overrides, but in the new version it is not working. This could also use some updating keeping ticket templeting to a minimum. Can't copy products that have overrides. Because of this alone, I typically have to create a new ticket template for every product, usually due to the paper. SmartCanvas is very promising, but comes with a large learning curve and even then I feel that a well thought-out guide would be very helpful. Fonts don't show up correctly in certain views and makes paragraph styled text boxes extremely hard to see how type will flow from the customer side. I will say the level of control with SmartCanvas is very nice locking fonts, colors, sizing or allowing the buyer to fully customize the product in anyway.

Lots of features and great security, Our 2 biggest accounts are Universities.

You need to be good a coding and HTML so you can customize your pages.

I love that the software integrates well with PrintSmith our printing and accounting software. The easy of using the different template options is a very simple process. Clients seem to find the navigation of the new site very user friendly and easy to use. The integration however was a very difficult item to over come. It was a very time consumer task to accomplish.

There are certainly features in the old system that would be nice to have in the new system - such as being able to drag and drop line items from one to reorganize things. It would also be very helpful if you were able to have more than 1 invoice open at a time to be able to create new orders based off multiple invoices by dragging and dropping into a new one. The integration with PrintSmith was not an easy thing - you basically had to recreate everything you had on PrintSmith again in MarketDirect StoreFront. We have spent years creating templates in PrintSmith and now having to basically recreate them again is crazy when before it was seamless. It’s also difficult that the pricing isn’t exactly the same from one platform to the other. Now we are forced to round up or down in MarketDirect instead of PrintSmiths pricing just automatically transferring.

The best part of Market Direct Storefronts is that all our customers say that it is so easy to navigate making training a non issue. When users can navigate easily it makes them use it more!
We were able to merge this system together with the EFI MIS we are using to run our business streamlining job creation and billing considerably. Same goes for the build(s) very intelligent software and easy to prepare sites. We probably use 75% of what the system currently has available to us; only because we haven't had the customer requests. The software has many further options that we are still using as requested by our customers.

We have had customers come up with a few challenges for the software but we usually find either a workaround using storefront options or reach out to EFI service people and they can either help immediately or have professional services build or add to an upcoming software update.