The growth of the ecommerce industry also gave a boost to the printing industry, which, before ecommerce boom, was mostly an offline business. But things have changed in the past decade. The rise of ecommerce gave birth to a new industry now known as the web-to-print industry. The web-to-print industry is a ecommerce business model where customers give printing orders online and vendors get the products printed and delivered to the customer directly.
Where technology plays a part in all this process is the process of creating printable designs online and seamlessly integrating the design files with the printing process. Latest ecommerce technology has made all this easy, much to the delight of customers who can now create their own designs online, try it on the products they want it to be printed and if all goes well, order it right away – all this in a matter of few mins and without ever leaving their homes.
As wonderful as it may sound a good web-to-print solution has to have some qualities that would make it work. Otherwise it may just end up being a cool tool that nobody uses.
Here we have covered five such qualities.
1. Easy To Use
Any piece of technology works well only when it is simple enough to be adopted by its target users. A complicated system, not matter how powerful it is will be a failure. Since the users will be non technical people, the web-to-print design interface needs to be simple and intuitive to be effective.
2. Higher Adoption Rates
A good web-to-print solution provider will do everything in their power to help increase adoption of the web to print software. This includes giving incentives to customers for customizing their products and offering them whole library of design elements and design templates to make it super easy for them to use the service. Is you web-to-print solution offering all these? If not, you need to think hard about why not.
3. Elimination Of Irrelevant Features
Just adding more features will not make customers use your design tool. In fact too many unnecessary features may spoil it for your customers who may find your product designer too complicated to use. There are companies who promote dozens or even hundreds of features that are too intricate to even understand. The fact is, only a few numbers of features will be used by your users. A good web-to-print solution will focus on the most important features and make them as easy and accessible for users as possible.
4. Customer Service with Focused Support
What kind of customer service you provide to the store admin who is managing the web-to-print solution and to the end users who are using the tool is so important that it can make or break your product. A good product will have both admin and customer level support built-in to make it easy for admins to manage and for customers to design and order.
5. Flexibility and Scalability
There are two kinds of web to print platforms offered with different pros and cons. 1) Built by core software technology companies 2) Built by printing & marketing companies. A good web-to-print product will have the best of both. It will have the scalability that a robust technology provides and will also have the flexibility that printing and marketing companies have with the network or printing partners. As a web-to-print entrepreneur if you don’t want to fulfill the orders yourself your solution provider can connect you with partners who do.
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