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Top Print Business Challenges & How to Overcome Them

Blog | 20 Jan 2025
Print business challenges & solutions

Summary: Modern print businesses need to adopt game-changing innovations for handling day-to-day challenges and standing out from the crowd. Discover the major print business challenges and the ultimate strategies to deal with them in this competitive world.

The technological advancement has made the custom print industry a booming sector with an expected CAGR of 4.3% from 2025 to 2029. This has opened up new opportunities for many print businesses to thrive.

However, the road to success is never that straight. Any print business that wants to grow sustainably must face the printing industry challenges and overcome them on a daily basis, which affects overall productivity and profitability.

Therefore, print businesses must know these challenges inside out and come up with creative solutions.

And to cut a few corners out of your way to business growth, we will be discussing the major complexities faced by print businesses and learning to tackle them using a powerful web to print software for printers. From impactful strategies for managing short runs to building valuable business partnerships, we’ve covered it all.

So, without further delay, let’s begin.

On this Page
  1. Major Print Business Challenges and Proven Tackling Strategies
  2. Wrapping It Up

Major Print Business Challenges and Proven Tackling Strategies

The digital era demands the adoption of next-generation technologies for the success of print businesses. Let’s discuss the major business challenges and impactive strategies to overcome them.

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Challenge #1: Handling High Printing Costs Efficiently

One of the most common print business challenges is high printing costs caused by manual processes, leading to a lack of cost transparency, frequent errors, reprints, poor resource allocation, overproduction and material wastage. Traditional approaches have several limitations that increase the overall printing expenses, hindering the productivity and profitability of the business.

Strategy: Invest in a robust web to print software that supports on-demand printing, provides automated order management with online approval workflows, precise cost estimations and optimized resource allocation. By automating repetitive print tasks and streamlining workflows with transparent print management capabilities like product-specific and shipping pricing logic, printers can reduce printing costs.

Challenge #2: Managing Short Runs While Maximizing Productivity

Print businesses struggle with short-run print orders due to their higher cost of production, frequent design changes, and the extensive time required for proofing and approval of unique designs. It can be overwhelming to track these orders and might require labor-intensive tasks like quality control and scheduling, which makes it challenging to maintain productivity.

Strategy: Select a W2P-enabled print workflow automation software that will enable printers to automate tasks like order entry, design customization, design approvals, job ticket creation, pre-press operations, production scheduling, order tracking, and delivery. This will simplify the management of short-run orders and ensure quick fulfillment while maintaining print quality, customer satisfaction, and increased productivity for businesses.

Know How Modern Web to Print Solutions Can Boost Print Business Operations

Challenge #3: Enhancing Customer Experience and Winning Repeat Business

A website user’s attention span is approximately eight seconds, which makes it important to catch customers’ attention with appealing products and easy-to-use print ordering features. In such a scenario, print business owners find it difficult to keep customers engaged on their storefront, and enhance the customer experience by enabling seamless design personalization, ordering, and ensuring customers retention.

Strategy: Opt for an AI-enabled web to print storefront that allows to instantly generate high-quality images and SEO-optimized product descriptions for launching products in the storefront, saving time for businesses and enabling informed decision-making for customers.

W2P functionalities like pre-designed templates, AI-based designers, 3D previews, quick approvals, and cost estimators can solve the complex challenges involved in product customization, simplify the print ordering process, and ensure customers keep coming back to you for making more purchases.

Challenge #4: Expanding into New Print Segments or Sales Channels

Print business owners utilizing traditional approaches find it difficult to diversify their product offerings and adopt multiple sales channels for increasing revenue streams. This drawback makes it challenging to meet the changing product preferences of customers, cater to customers with diverse demands and limits the opportunities for business growth.

Strategy: A modern web to print software centralizes order management from B2B/B2C storefronts, franchise storefronts, and more, allowing to accept orders from multiple sales channels like POS, print store branches, email/phone requests, external marketplaces, and sales representatives.

It supports diverse print segments like large formats, photobooks, canvas, packaging, calendars, and more while enabling businesses to stay on top of the latest print industry trends for competitiveness.

Challenge #5: Automating Print Order Management for Efficiency

Print businesses relying on outdated systems struggle with manual order processing, limited workflow visibility, and order tracking, which results in higher operational costs and miscommunication. These challenges make it difficult to manage bulk customizations, scale operations, and maintain print quality, ultimately harming turnaround times, customer satisfaction, and business reputation.

Strategy: Opt for a W2P-driven print order management software that offers end-to-end automation with simplified order creation, data entry, and unique tracking code assignment for each order as well as offers integrations for shipping, accounting, and more.

Moreover, the capability to centralize all sales channels and view the entire lifecycle in a unified platform, eliminates the need to switch between multiple platforms and achieve high efficiency in operations.

Explore Top-Notch Web to Print Capabilities to Solve Printing Challenges like a Pro

Challenge #6: Improving Print Accountability for Enhanced Workflow

Many print businesses find it challenging to track the responsibility for print jobs and allocate print costs to specific projects, which results in miscommunication, delays and poor workflow management. This inefficient system causes lack of accountability, thus makes it difficult to meet deadlines and hinders overall productivity.

Strategy: Leverage an innovative print workflow management software with capabilities like dedicated role-based access for print orders and defined workflows for different product profiles like product segments, product quantities, and numbers. This system ensures print jobs are tracked accurately, improves accountability, enables smooth communication across all departments, and optimizes workflow efficiency.

Challenge #7: Building Strategic Partnerships for Business Growth

Traditional printing systems have limitations in partnering with organizations and entities for mutual growth, which hinders the opportunities for success in the printing industry. Print business owners collaborating with other businesses find it challenging to centralize data and manage workflows, which results in missed deadlines and inconsistencies in orders.

Strategy: Adopt a robust web to print software that supports extensive integrations with third-party applications and providers like print suppliers, logistics partners, and resellers, enabling them to centralize workflows and achieve sustained growth in the printing business.

Furthermore, by leveraging robust web to print integrations with third-party suppliers like 4over, Sinalite, and PromoStandards print businesses can effortlessly expand product offerings.

Wrapping it Up!In conclusion, while print businesses face numerous challenges, the adoption of the right strategies and the implementation of innovative technologies like web to print software can help to tackle these challenges effectively.By partnering with a W2P-based online print shop management software provider like OnPrintShop, print businesses can automate operations from start to end and leverage AI-based functionalities to increase productivity.Don't wait any longer! Schedule a demo with OnPrintShop today to know how print businesses like you are transforming their operations using top-notch web to print capabilities.

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