A Guide to Use Web-to-Print Solutions for Franchise Businesses

Summary: Struggling to manage operations and maintain brand compliance across multiple print franchise locations? Overseeing your print franchise network without a robust system in place can be a complex task. In this article, we will walk you through all the necessary information on how advanced web to print solutions can simplify franchise management and drive business growth.

Franchise businesses have always been popular due to the reduced risks involved in them and the possibilities for rapid growth.

Let’s consider a scenario where a character named Michael’ is a print business owner at a popular franchise printing business named ‘XYZ’, which has several franchises at different parts of the United States.

By adopting traditional methods, Michael was facing difficulties in managing all the franchises and was not able to ensure brand consistency across their marketing materials. When Michael switched to a cutting-edge print franchise web-to-print solution, he was able to have a holistic view of all the print partners which enabled him to effortlessly streamline processes and maintain a unified brand image across multiple locations.

Recent research states that, the print media market size is currently valued at $359.53 billion in 2025 and is anticipated to reach $388.95 billion in 2029.

And due to several reasons like consistent market demand and high profit potential, owning a print franchise is a smart business option in this digital age. Interestingly, many renowned print franchises in the world are utilizing W2P technology for transforming their business operations. Let’s explore how you can be one of them.

Why Web-to-Print is a Game-Changer for Franchise Businesses?

The most popular print industry trend i.e. web-to-print technology can be utilized by several print businesses, including franchises. In this section, let’s understand about web to print and how it streamlines print operations for franchise businesses.

Simplifying Complex Print Processes for Franchise Networks

Businesses operating in multiple locations often face challenges like handling the complex tasks involved in managing design templates and printing. W2P centralizes and simplifies these operations by providing franchise owners with automated workflows and enabling them to offer print partners with pre-approved design templates.

Ensuring Brand Compliance Across Franchise Locations

Franchises may find it difficult to adhere to brand guidelines and maintain brand integrity when using elements like logo, designs, fonts, and color schemes in their marketing materials. Web to print systems enable franchise owners to offer standardized templates with pre-defined limits, allowing franchises to modify only the permittable design elements for achieving consistent branding across all locations.

Creating a Holistic View for Franchisors to Monitor Key Metrics

Web-to-print solutions offers a centralized dashboard for allowing the franchisor to maintain an oversight of how their brand is represented across various locations, providing a holistic view of their franchise network. It helps you to monitor the status of print orders and performance of all your franchises from a single location, enabling you to effectively track the sales data and other important metrics in real-time.

How to Maintain Franchise Brand Consistency with W2P Solution?

To maintain franchise brand consistency with web-to-print solution, franchise owners can lock the brand elements while enabling print partners to customize the designs for their localized needs. Let’s go a step further to understand how this works and what more could be done to achieve consistent branding across locations.

1. Design Management for Control Over Brand Elements

Template Creation & Management

Utilize a reliable web to print online designer that offers a centralized template management system to create and manage templates across multiple locations, ensuring to maintain consistency in prints like brochures, banners, posters, etc. These cloud-based templates designed by following brand guidelines, simplifies the design creation process for print franchises and helps to maintain a unified brand image across all the locations of operation.

Pre-Approved or Ready-to-Use Designs

Web-to-print solution utilizes the pre-approved templates that are designed by the headquarter's design team or the franchisor's marketing department for ensuring brand consistency. These pre-approved templates can be customized by the print partners or franchises for their local marketing needs, enabling swift design creation process and allowing the design team to focus on larger and high-priority projects.

2. Automation-Enabled Capabilities for Print Products

AI-Driven Systems for Multimedia Generation

Franchisors, franchisees and resellers can leverage AI-based tools to automate the design creation process and launch stunning products to the print ecommerce storefront in the blink of an eye. As per the guidelines of the parent company, franchisees can ensure compliance in the branding elements of their products and customize the design elements to suit their location and target customers.

Bulk Upload Support for Product-Specific Data

Manually uploading the products, their pricing details and other relevant data one-by-one in the print ecommerce storefront can be a time-consuming process. A w2p system allows franchise owners to import these data in mass quantities, enabling to view a comprehensive summary of the uploaded data and effectively utilize inventory deployment strategies like push and pull systems.

3. Holistic View of Print Franchise Network and their Operations

Franchise Network Operations Management

Web to print solution for franchises enables you to create a single source of truth for managing your entire franchise network and their order management in a streamlined manner, ensuring consistent brand image across diverse locations. It allows franchisors like you to enable the creation of personalized storefronts for your print partners as per their localized needs, enabling them to fulfill orders while keeping their profits intact.

Brand Control from a Single Dashboard

Leverage the unified dashboard of your w2p system to maintain an oversight of the design, production and branding requirements of print products, ensuring strict control over brand materials. Additionally, integrating digital asset management software (DAM) will enable franchise owners to access and manage the most recent data such as brand guidelines, logos, design layouts, image libraries, fonts for ensuring brand compliance.

4. Boosting Print Reseller Network Growth

Branded Storefronts for Print Resellers

Franchisors can add a revenue stream by incorporating a reseller network and utilizing a scalable web2print store for print resellers to create brand-specific reseller storefronts with unique business names, logos, and branding materials. In this modern era, starting a thriving print reselling business is quite simple with dynamic web print software.

Flexibility in Pricing and Revenue Models

This advanced system allows your resellers to set various pricing strategies like profit markups and commission amounts, ensuring they follow the pricing guidelines set by the parent company. This digital brand identity allows your reseller network to set competitive prices and modify their offerings based on their localized needs, creating a win-win situation for everyone involved in the business.

5. Diversification of Responsibilities through W2P

Tailored Marketing for Localized Needs

Web to print systems allows franchisees to run localized marketing campaigns, ensuring they follow the marketing strategy, brand guidelines and strict parameters set by the parent company. This diversifies the responsibility of the franchisees operating in different locations, giving them complete control on their marketing efforts while maintaining brand integrity.

Shipping & Logistics Optimization

Franchisees can utilize web to print systems for integrating with shipping service providers like UPS, Fedex, Chile Express, DHL, Parcel perfect, Yurtici kargo, Parcel pro, Shiprocket or Auspost based on their demographic area of service. Partnering with a reliable shipping service provider can ensure efficient management of logistics and on-time delivery of products to your customer’s doorsteps.

Key Features of a Web-To-Print System for Franchises

When considering a web-to-print solution for your franchise business, don’t miss out to check if it can provide the below-mentioned features. Let’s look at what these include.

Personalized Web-to-Print Storefronts for B2B and B2C

Franchisors and franchisees can opt for tailored print ecommerce storefronts for both B2B and B2C clients, ensuring precise targeting with personalized layouts, segment focused content and product prioritization as per market demand.

Centralized Management of Franchises in Multiple Locations

Web-to-print systems should offer centralized management of franchises that serve in multiple locations, providing a unified view of print orders, inventory levels and sales performance in a single dashboard.

Customize Prints While Ensuring Branding Requirements

Franchisors can utilize web2print solutions to standardize brand elements such as logos, color schemes and even raw materials while allowing localized customization of print products for consistent branding.

Pricing and Profit Control for Specific Franchise Stores

This innovative system enables franchisors to manage the quotes received from multiple platforms as well as provides franchisees and resellers with the flexibility to set product margins tailored to their store type, products and locations, ensuring profitability.

Integration with Existing Systems & Third-Party Applications

It should support powerful web to print integrations like MIS, CRM, ERP, shipping, accounting as well as trade printers like 4Over and Sinalite for diversifying product offerings.

How Can Franchisors Overcome Challenges in Web-to-Print?

Print franchisors might face certain challenges during the initial stages of the web to print implementation. Let’s know these complexities and learn effective strategies on how to overcome them.

Initial Cost of Implementation

The cost for implementing a web-to-print solution for your print franchise businesses can initially seem expensive. However, the long-term benefits it offers for your print business will ultimately outweigh the expenditure on this implementation, providing high efficiency and profitability.

Customization vs. Standardization

Ensuring a balance between customizing print materials for local franchise needs and maintaining brand consistency as per corporate brand requirements is essential. W2P system makes this task easier with its customizable design templates, seamless approval processes and centralized data management system.

Adopting the Right W2P Features

Opting for the right web-to-print features that are crucial to smoothly run your franchise business can help you avoid unnecessary costs and complexities. When choosing an ideal web-to-print solution partner, ensure that it allows you to pay only for your selected features, providing flexibility to scale as your business grows.

Best Practices for Managing a Franchise Web-To-Print System

As a franchise business owner, simply adopting a w2p solution may not be sufficient. We have mentioned below a few best practices that can help you maximize the efficiency of your implementation. Let’s take a quick look.

Establish Clear Brand Guidelines

Franchisors can provide franchise businesses operating in multiple locations with comprehensive guidelines, locking the elements used for brand identification and offering design customization for local market needs, ensuring brand compliance and integrity.

Leverage Automation Capabilities

Take complete advantage of the w2p-enabled automation capabilities for managing orders, inventory levels, print job assignment, print production workflow, and marketing operations to reduce manual errors and enhance efficiency.

Monitor Performance Metrics

Leverage the innovative reporting & analytics in your w2p system to monitor and track the performance across your print franchise network with metrics like sales, most in-demand products, inventory levels, reseller data and much more.

Regular Training and Support

Offer ongoing support and training for your franchise team, providing access to tutorials, webinars, help documentations and the ability to reach to your w2p provider’s customer support for promptly resolving queries related to the implementation.

Encourage Feedback and Adaptation

Ensure that your franchise team is able to adapt with the newly implemented system and encourage to provide feedback on how it can be optimized for simplifying complex challenges faced by them on a day-to-day basis.

How OnPrintShop Can Help Franchise Printing Businesses?

OnPrintShop is a leading web-to-print solution provider that empowers franchisors like you by providing a centralized w2p platform to manage your franchise networks and operations, enabling to maintain brand consistency across diverse locations.

We at OnPrintShop understand that every franchise business is unique and hence offer franchise-specific web-to-print solutions that are tailored just for you, ensuring to simplify your operations and help you gain a competitive edge.

Case Study: Success with OnPrintShop's Franchise W2P Solutions

Shapco Printing, a customer of OnPrintShop acquired 12-million-dollar B2B accounts, added 12 new large B2B & franchises as their corporate clients, achieved 360-degree automation in operations, and reduced IT overheads and developmental costs.

The printing company provides premium-quality print and mailing services to corporate clients and franchise chains with a customer focus on B2B and B2C.

By utilizing OnPrintShop’s rule-based personalization capabilities, Shapco Printing was able to print marketing collaterals of their franchise restaurant client for their multiple outlets at varied locations.

OnPrintShop also offered them a dedicated print order management workflow, third-party integrations, single sign on and punch out, ability to ship orders at multiple locations and much more.

Conclusion: Unlocking Franchise Growth Potential with W2PBy now you must have understood the importance of utilizing w2p solutions for the growth of your franchise business.Opting for a franchise-oriented web-to-print solution for printers like the ones offered by OnPrintShop, franchisors can scale their operations across multiple locations while maintaining a consistent brand image.If you haven’t implemented web-to-print technology for your business yet, now is the perfect time to get a head start.Look no further! Request a personalized demo with OnPrintShop right away to discover the high-tech capabilities it can offer for your franchise business, enabling you to achieve success and growth in this competitive era.