The idea: Give customers a tool to order custom photo cakes
While print service providers most often use web-to-print, this technology also helps companies in many other industries achieve their business goals. This success story from a cake manufacturer shows how web-to-print opened a fresh way for customers to order and personalize cakes online.
Photo cakes were a big ‘returning’ product after the pandemic for us. The old process was very clunky, from ordering all the way through to production. So, we decided when we brought it back to really take a look at our options both from the user’s point of view - allowing a bit of creativity - but also putting a bit of structure around it for those people that are in a hurry
About the Company
Sponge Cakes is a UK-based online cake company that started its business in 2000 as a cafe in Norfolk. It grew into a large factory producing and delivering personalized cakes and brownies across the country.
The challenge: Build a web-to-print system with a high-quality user experience
After several attempts to build a solution on their own, Sponge Cakes decided to trust the web-to-print experts, ending its search with Customer’s Canvas.
Image editing is a really complex domain, and despite a few attempts, we just could not produce in-house an editor with the level of capability our users would expect, with a high-quality user experience and cross-browser and device compatibility. Thus, we realized we needed to involve a third party who are experts in such matters
The solution: Integrate web-to-print with a PHP-based storefront
The project required integration with their online store developed on PHP. Customer’s Canvas has a robust API that opens up nearly limitless opportunities to add product personalization to workflows of any scale.
Customer’s Canvas BackOffice was integrated with the company’s backend on PHP using the API. BackOffice is an admin panel that simplifies the management of a web-to-print integration.
We needed something with good documentation and developer experience that was embeddable into our existing funnels and wizards. We also wanted fair and predictable costs and not a ‘pay per view’ model where we would be charged every time someone
used the editor
Our personalized products are essentially step-by-step wizards. This setup made it easy to ‘drop in’ Customer’s Canvas as a replacement for our in-house editor at the design step. The change required only a very minor adjustment to our production pipeline
The results: Ordering personalized photo cakes has never been easier!
Sponge Cakes has organized a convenient customer journey on its site for ordering personalized cakes. The web-to-print integration allowed customers to bring their creative visions to life and add an extra dash of joy to their celebrations. But this is just the beginning. The company has ambitious plans for the future use of Customer’s Canvas.
Customer’s Canvas has really helped us get some interesting new ideas. We’ve always wanted to get into the templated user design space somehow but had been resistant as the amount of software development work would have been huge. We’ve been getting some good feedback from the editor aspect of it. For example: ‘We’re super impressed with how easy-peasy the photo tool is on their site.’ We’re also still figuring out how to get the best out of it.
