Web to Print: What You See is What You Get

I just love attending print industry conferences! They bring you face to face with some real issues staring printers right in the eye. But what’s my personal favorite is the learning curve that accompanies such conferences. Every time I attend one, I discover a hidden trait of web to print. Let me mention here that despite promoting web to print for quite some time now, I am still not over the discovery process. And I don’t think I ever will be!

Recently, I was at a symposium where the printing industry think tank sat down to address customer grievances over design variations and cost ambiguities. They were mulling over how to make the customers see that color variation was unavoidable. As for the costing factor, they were looking for a way to engage customers in cost calculations.

And I thought to myself ‘wait a minute, this isn’t customers just whining away about petty issues. They want to know upfront what they are getting into. They have the right to know that. They are demanding transparency.’

Web to Print & Design Transparency

Web to print storefronts like OnPrintShop can lend design transparency to customers of print industry. What happens here is that customers use the integrated online designer studio and design their own products. They can use the readily available templates and personalize them or they can create their own unique artwork. Whatever the case may be, they are the ones who are designing.

Now the Designer Studio supports both RGB and CMYK color palettes. So if you have set the CMYK color palette they will see the colors in CMYK format only. And if you set the RGB palette, then RGB color tone is what they will have. The customers also get a PDF preview of the final design to approve before printing. This PDF will also reflect the CMYK or RGB color tone as per the settings. And finally the print-ready PDF file generated will be compatible for CMYK and RGB printing. All this ensures that your customer gets what he has designed online in your print store. And given the digital format of the print-ready file, the customers can preserve it for long time and have the same color tone in every reorder.

Web to Print & Price Transparency

Now let’s talk about costing transparency. Print industry customers often complain about costing discrepancies. That’s because they don’t know how their orders are priced. For this again, OnPrintShop has integrated a real-time pricing calculator. So when a customer selects attributes like paper type, lamination style, corner cuts, etc it affects the product price. This shows him how you derive pricing for his order. He can also see how much tax you have applied to his print order.

You can further declare your product tariffs on your website itself. This gives your customers an upfront idea about your pricing. The ones that find it reasonable can go ahead with the designing process. You can also disclose discount offers here.

Transparency in processes is what the print market is demanding currently. With web to print you can deliver this transparency without additional efforts. There is a lot more we can achieve with web to print. It’s only that we need to care to explore further.

Apparently, web to print is rapidly changing the landscape of global printing industry. Embrace this change wholeheartedly and lead your market space.