The following appears on theweekinimaging by Scott Cullen

Terry Bogner of Austin Technology Group in Austin, Texas, had an epiphany a while back. He had one of those inexpensive inkjet MFPs at home that had seen its better days with the exception of the scanning function.  Even after he replaced that device with a laser printer, he was still using that original inkjet MFP as a scanner. Then it hit him. “That’s what customers are doing to us! They’re telling me they’re copying less, printing less, and scanning more, and brag about how they went paperless as if I’m supposed to be happy for them,” laments Bogner.

Bogner is like many dealers, still trying to figure out how to charge for scans. He’s heard through the grapevine that some dealers are charging customers as much as 5 mils per scan, which is a little higher than what he’d thought it might be. His estimate is 2 mils.

“That’s what we discussed years ago when scanning was a new feature,” he recalls.

Meanwhile, customers who are scanning more are costing him money because he still has to service that machine even if it’s being used a lot less for printing and copying these days. “A lot of the time we don’t charge for it because it’s a good customer or they have a maintenance agreement,” states Bogner.

He wonders if other dealers are covertly adding scanning into maintenance agreements or if they’re telling the customer up front that they’re now charging for something they once gave away for nothing.

As far as he knows none of his competitors are charging for scanning, and even if it makes perfect business sense, nobody wants to be the first dealer in the market to charge for scanning.

I spoke with Jim Coriddi, vice president, Dealer Division, Ricoh Americas Corporation, about charging for scanning last week to get an OEM’s perspective.

“By and large what we’re finding is the profit-oriented dealers see this as an opportunity that they have not been acting on because of where we are in the market,” says Coriddi. “Unfortunately, there are enough competitors out there that are attacking the market with price. Some of our better dealers are trying to provide more of a value to be above that, but I don’t think there’s enough confidence in the value proposition to be the first on the block to start charging for scans. We’re working toward that. Ricoh is looking to support our dealers with a more services-led approach to be able to bring that deeper more expansive value to our customers. We all recognize its’ something we need to do and we need to meld it into a bigger value proposition.”

What do you think? Take our survey and let us know if you are charging your customers for scanning on their MFPs or not?