Case study
Étapes Print Customise, and watch the price move
In custom printing the quote always arrives too late: you choose first, then you discover the price. We built the store where every option recalculates the total live, so nothing is waiting for the customer at the end.
The context
Étapes Print is a French online printing house, specialising in communication materials, working B2B.
Custom printing has a structural flaw in its purchase journey: the price depends on choices the customer makes one at a time — format, quantity, paper, finish — and most sites only reveal it at the end. You configure blind for five minutes, then you are shown a total. If it does not work, you have to start again without knowing which option was the expensive one.
That is not a usability problem. It is a problem of trust: a price that appears only at the last moment gives the impression of having been calculated on the customer rather than on the order.
What we produced
A bespoke e-commerce platform built around customisation.
Navigation that guides the uninitiated
Categories, filters and menus were structured so a customer finds things quickly, and the interface guides them step by step. The vocabulary of the printing trade is not the buyer’s: someone who orders flyers once a year does not know what paper weight means, and a site that asks without explaining loses them.
Customisation tools that show the result
Colours, sizes, specific options: every setting is available, and every change is visible immediately. The customer sees what they are ordering before ordering it — the only way to remove the doubt about a product that does not exist yet.
A price that recalculates live
This is the heart of the project. At every step of the customisation, the price updates. No estimate, no range, no quote to request: the amount follows the choices.
The effect goes beyond convenience. A customer watching their total move understands what costs money, and makes the trade-offs themselves — drop a finish, raise a quantity. Transparency does not merely keep people patient: it turns the buyer into the person configuring their own budget.
A shortened checkout
Once the product is configured, ordering takes a few clicks. The decision-making having been done upstream, the purchase no longer has to be a second ordeal.
What it changes
The quote disappears from the journey. What used to happen through exchanges — configure, ask, wait, approve — now happens on a single page, live.
For a B2B printing house, what changes most is the nature of the calls that come in: they are no longer requests for a price, they are unusual projects. Which is to say, the ones genuinely worth picking up the phone for.
And there is one measure you cannot fake: the site has been rebuilt since, the calculator is still running. A bespoke extension that outlives the rebuild of the site around it has stopped being a piece of work — it has become a production tool.
In pictures
How it looks
More work
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