Vistaprint 2009 Annual Report Download - page 17

Marketing Technologies
Split Run Testing technology assigns our website visitors to test and control groups. Depending
on the test group to which a visitor is assigned, he or she can be shown slightly different versions of
our website. This technology permits us to evaluate changes to our websites on a relatively small but
still statistically significant test group prior to general release. We then use analytics software to
correlate the changes on the site with the visitor’s browsing and purchasing behavior and to compare
our profitability for a given pair of test and control groups. Our testing engine allows us to run hundreds
of these tests simultaneously on our websites, reducing the time to take an idea from concept to full
deployment and allowing us to quickly identify and roll-out the most promising and profitable ideas and
promotions to maximize our customer value proposition.
VistaMatch Software automatically generates and displays one or more additional customized
product designs based upon a customer’s existing design. Design elements and customer information
are automatically transferred to the additional design so that customers do not spend additional time
searching for other products or templates or re-entering data. For example, if a customer has designed
a business card, VistaMatch can automatically generate corresponding letterhead, return address
labels, and refrigerator magnets that the customer can add to its order with a single key stroke.
Automated Cross-Sell and Up-Sell technology permits us to show a customer, while the customer
is in the process of purchasing a product, marketing offers for one or more additional or related
products. We use this technology to dynamically determine the most effective products to offer to
customers based on a number of variables including how the customer reached the website, the
customer’s purchase history, the contents of the customer’s shopping basket and the various pages
within the website that the customer has visited.
Localization/Language Map is our content management system that permits all of our localized
websites, and the changes to those websites, to be managed by the same software engine. Text and
image components of our web pages are separated, translated and stored in our managed content
database. If a piece of content is reused, the desired content automatically appears in its correct
language on all websites, enabling our localized websites, regardless of the language or country
specific content, to share a single set of web pages that automatically use the appropriate content,
significantly reducing our software installation, deployment and maintenance costs.
Customer Recognition/Segmentation technology allows us to identify an inbound caller by their
phone number and match that information to that customer’s history from our customer databases. We
can then tailor the types of calls that are taken by our customer service and design service agents and
appropriately adjust call flow, scripts, up-sell and cross-sell suggestions in an effort to maximize
contribution margin per call.
Technology Development
We intend to continue developing and enhancing our proprietary and licensed software programs
and our manufacturing processes. As of June 30, 2009, more than 300 of our employees were
engaged in technology development. Our technology and development expenses were $60.9 million,
$44.8 million, and $27.2 million in the years ended June 30, 2009, 2008, and 2007, respectively.
We have designed our infrastructure and technologies to accommodate future growth. We have
designed our website technologies to scale to accommodate future growth in the number of customer
visits, orders, and product and service offerings. This Internet-based architecture makes our
applications highly scalable and offers our customers fast system responsiveness when editing
document designs. Our production technologies for aggregating jobs in preparation for manufacturing
Form 10-K
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