Web to Print: Solution to Storage Issues

Cabinets brimming with registers, shelves stocked with files, archives overflowing with records – looks familiar? Of course it does! It’s the office of a traditional printer. Now what’s wrong with this scenario? That’s a lot of useful space taken up by storage adding to your cost. And add to it all that paperwork protruding out of corners!

Now take up another scenario. How about a printer’s office sans any files, paper records, and registers? Looks neat, right? That is what web to print can do for you.

Storage takes up a considerable chunk in a cost pie chart of a traditional printer. This cost is recurring as well as incremental in nature. It will keep on adding as your business grows. But now you can counter it by adopting a web based print solution like OnPrintShop.

So how can web to print reduce your storage costs? Let’s start by listing out what a traditional printer usually stores and analyze it in context of web to print.

The most common detail stored by printers is designs. A traditional printer can have shelves after shelves full of designs. He cannot discard them because they fetch him repeat business. With a web to print solution, customers create their own product designs online. This means no design revisions to store. The final output is a print-ready PDF which is again stored on the browser itself.

The second most common data stored by a printer is customer and order details. Here again, web to print can help. Web to Print Solutions like OnPrintShop give you a comprehensive customer portal. This portal stores all your customer details like their contact info, billing address, shipping address, their order history, designs they have bought from you, etc. You can offer them an image gallery to store images that they like for future use. All this again happens on a web browser which means no need for cabinets or shelves. Your customer management takes up online character.

As for the orders, OnPrintShop has an order management system which assigns a unique order ID to every single order. This ID makes it easy to track them through various phases. You can also issue order summaries using this system. The order management module will summarize product details, customers’ billing and payment details, shipping address, comments made by customers, etc. So here you have your customer and order details again stored in digital format.

Another very important detail stored by printers is invoices and billing information. Now here again OnPrintShop has a remedy. The system allows you to generate and issue invoices in digital format. As for the billing information you already have these details stored at multiple places like at customer portal, order module, etc. Moreover, since we integrate online payment gateways in your online print store, retrieving payment details is not an issue. And if you own a design services business which is affiliated with several printers, then we have a vendor management module which can migrate all your vendor details online.

Then there is correspondence that is often stored by printers. Given that OnPrintShop is browser based solution, you can have all your communication stored via emails and system notifications.

Now what we have discussed till now is a very obvious cut in storage cost. Now let’s talk about security of this stored material. The mere fact that you are storing these details means you intend to or expect to use them in future. Now when you store business critical information in traditional paper format, you expose it to fire, floods, theft, sabotage, etc. Storing them on your PC exposes them to virus threats and system crash. But with web to print, you are essentially storing these details on a browser which is relatively secure compared to your other options. Having them on a browser also makes them accessible from anywhere anytime. With web to print you also do not face any capacity limitations. This makes your storage cost equivalent to your one-time solution cost.

So now you have a choice not to spend incremental sums over storing and maintaining your business critical information. You have a choice to adopt web to print solutions.