Tony Zara, president of commercial printer Accent Impression, branched out around two years ago with a web-to-print business, veraprint.com. While he's already been offering the service to Canadian consumers, once through a partnership with Costco which has ended, he's now tackling the U.S. 
 

"We learned the ropes to a certain extent by doing business in Canada," he said. "Last month we opened up our portal to the American market hoping we have access to more customers."

 

Initiatives to get the attention of American consumers, "include a partnership with some affiliate marketing, ads and e-mail blasts," he said. "More importantly, we're doing basically what the big guys are doing in the market...hooking customers with a very low price, with the hope they'll come back with bigger orders."

 

He said getting print orders across the border won't be a particularly big challenge. "98% of the orders are under the amount that would be scrutinized by customs," he said. 

 

For now, he doesn't feel the need to add any new equipment to handle bigger volumes, although he added that business is already growing and the "vast majority" of orders are for business cards. 

 

But why should Americans pay attention to his web-to-print shop? 

 

"The vast majority of people online, they don't know we're not American," he said. "What is very important is service. It's very easy for clients to get hold of us ... they can contact us by email, voicemail, live chat.

 

"The other thing we do that' s different is we literally scrutinize every job to make sure they're well-done before we print it, and contact the client if the file doesn't work."