What Is Web-to-Print and How Does It Make Printing Jobs Successful?

In today's fast-paced world, technology is revolutionizing the printing industry. It has made print jobs more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable. Did you know that around 67% of print jobs are submitted through a web to print/online/e-commerce system? It is an excellent pportunity for the printing industry to scale their business online. With the right software solution, print businesses can now print high-quality documents and graphics in no time
and at a very reasonable cost.

As a print business owner, you can accept orders, interact with customers, streamline workflows, and avoid manual errors through a single centralized platform. Doesn't this sound interesting and easier? But you need in-depth knowledge before investing in SaaS-based web to print solutions.

In this guide we will let you know how implementing web to print solutions in the printing business is the key to success.

What is Web to Print?

Web to Print (W2P) software is a technology that enables businesses and individuals to order and customize print products over the Internet. It is designed to streamline and revolutionize the traditional print business model.

With web to print, you can automate your print shop operations to increase productivity and deliver customer satisfaction with great features. Customizing the print storefront and integrating tools helps to improve customer engagement. This advancement enables online print storefronts to offer a wide range of printing services, 3D visualization, and quality control before printing orders.

How Web to Print Works?

Depending on the W2P Software you have chosen, the implementation process might differ. However, we are charting out the most disciplinary features that you would need to ensure meeting customer demands and market trends. Let’s spell these out for you:

The Ideal Web to Print Process:

• Step 1: Build an Online Storefront

Get help from storefront experts and service providers to build a print storefront that follows your brand identity. Customize the print store and integrate all the modern features for faster print jobs.

• Step 2: Choose and Optimize Products

As a business owner, you can add a wide range of ready-to-use templates for printing products with just a click. Let your customers upload, design, or optimize print-ready files to place an order successfully.

• Step 3: Proofing and Design Approvals

With design proofing software, you get to automate the process of proofing and approvals, which saves you from costly printing issues. You can also share the design approvals or changes with the customer and catch any print errors before processing the order for printing.

• Step 4: Payments

Most print businesses have higher cart abandonment rates due to unreliable payment gateways. So, make sure you make payment processes simple and trustworthy. The best way is to provide multiple methods of payment for the customers to give them the convenience and security of completing transactions.

• Step 5: Accept Print Orders

Review the final print-ready file, payment status, and other customer requirements to accept the order successfully. Based on the availability of the printing machines, choose if the print order will be fulfilled by you or vendors like 4Over, Sinalite, and more to deliver a satisfactory customer experience.

• Step 6: Printing and Production

With workflow automation, you get assurance about the quality and accuracy of the printing and production process. There is no chance of overloading the printers, and it ensures optimal time management for quicker deliveries.

• Step 7: Shipping and Delivery

Sometimes, your customer might choose the shipping method or provider, which makes it easier to deliver the print orders. You can also select the shipping method based on customer expectations like fast delivery, cost, mode of shipment, etc.

• Step 8: Customer Support

You can offer 24/7 support to the customers, making their journey worthwhile. The software has intelligent tools to generate reports to know what your customer is looking for and when. It can strengthen your marketing strategies and deliver personalized experiences effortlessly to boost repeat orders.

• Step 9: Tracking and Updates

With workflow automation, you, customers, and vendors get automatic updates about the order status. You can also monitor and update the order status from the dashboard if required.

What are the Unique Web to Print Features?

Starting or scaling an online storefront for a print business aims for a smooth workflow and intelligent business solutions. There are several tips to choose right web to print solution, but you also need to look at the features and functionalities before making an investment of time and resources.

Here, we have highlighted the must-have features of web to print software solutions:

1. Print Order Management

Web to print will help you manage orders and workflow hassle-free by automating redundant tasks. You can also integrate tools like Optimus 2020, PrintIQ PrinVIS, Presswise, etc., to handle print operations while reducing manual data entry and the risk of errors in order processes.

2. Customization

Look for a web to print software that allows customizing templates, designs and adding branding elements. This will help ensure businesses, that the finished printed products are consistent with their overall branding and marketing efforts.

3. Product Variety

Another thing to keep in mind is the variety of products the web to print platform can handle. Web to print supports multiple printing products like calendars, large formats, photos, books, brochures, business cards, and more. Also, the service provider will have a collection of ready-to-use templates for print products that can be added easily for the customers.

4. Automation

As we know, automation is the need of the hour. Hence, look for a solution that offers automation features for order management, pricing, invoice generation, inventory management, and other tasks. This will save you time and reduce errors while delivering accurate print orders.

5. Integration

When it comes to maximizing your w2p capabilities, integrations are something that make a difference. You must look for a solution that offers ready-to-use print MIS, CRM, account, SMS/email, marketing, design tool and image library integrations. In this regard, you must also assess if the solution you are opting for, can be easily integrable into your existing systems.

6. Dynamic Pricing

Customer expectations have now evolved with time. They now want instant price calculations before placing the final order. To be more responsive towards their demands, you must choose a solution that offers dynamic pricing. This will ensure their decision-making process is fastened and you deliver error-free estimates for your print jobs.

Another super important factor to consider is customer support. You need to check the level of support the online print shop provides. You need to know if your service providers can assist you with setup, troubleshooting, and ongoing maintenance. You can check customer reviews and testimonials to verify the same.

7. Templates

Web to print has a wide collection of pre-defined templates and layouts for business owners. These speeds up the process of adding products in their store and customize them easily as per their brand requirements.

Now, you know the essential features required in web to print solutions. How do you know that you have the best print solution? Comparison. Let us compare web to print with other competing solutions available in the market.

Web to Print vs Web to Pack

Definition

Web to Print: A software solution that allows customers to pick, design, and order print products from the website. It is used for printing materials like Brochures, signage, flyers, posters, mugs, business cards, photo books, etc.

Web to Pack: A software solution built to let customers design and order custom packaging products from the website. Generally, this is
best for Boxes, bags, tissue, paper, labels, etc.

Customization

Web to Print: You can let customers personalize a wide range of print products with images, fonts, texts, or logos.

Web to Pack: Customers can personalize the packaging products with their size, shape, material color, text, and logos.

Target Audience

Web to Print: Organizations, businesses, and individuals looking for custom printed materials.

Web to Pack: Businesses and individuals looking just for custom packaging solutions.

Ideal Usage

Web to Print: Perfect solution for ordering personalized printing products with more varieties and faster turnaround times.

Web to Pack: Best for creating custom packages with unique designs, shapes, and materials for different brands.

Web to Print vs Web to Publish

Definition

Web to Print: Customers place an order, and they get physically printed materials like business cards, flyers, brochures, photo calendars, etc.

Web to Publish: This generally deals with digital content like websites, blogs, ebooks, etc.

Goal

Web to Print: Provide customization of pre-designed templates for print products.

Web to Publish: Create and share original content digitally.

Target Audience

Web to Print: Businesses, individuals, and organizations that need customization in print materials.

Web to Publish: Individuals, businesses, and organizations who want to share information online.

Best Usage

Web to Print: People who need consistency and quality in print materials.

Web to Publish: People who effectively want to share information, build awareness, and connect with an audience online.

How Does Web to Print Work for Different Industries?

With unique tools and features, getting the right software solution that understands your print industry is essential. When you plan to get a print management solution, you need to check the industries it can serve. It will help you scale your business quickly with time.

Here are some print industries that you can target with a web to print solution:

1. Web to Print for Large Format Printers

These businesses use large-scale printing machines that print on different materials like paper, fabric, and vinyl. Web to print will help you to let customers upload a digital print file and customize it according to your defined dimensions. A large format printing software will leave no scope for errors as every step goes for approval and saves you
from costly reprints.

2. Web to Print for B2B Printers

Ensuring consistency and accuracy in every print becomes crucial when you have corporate customers. So, a web to print software for B2B printers lets you create private stores for each corporate customer where they can purchase, design, and store their brand materials.

3. Web to Print for Marketing Agencies

You will have a strong eye on brand consistency and visualization of products. Web to print will help you focus on logos, color schemes, and fonts to ensure everything aligns with the brand. With customization and quality control, you can deliver accurate printed materials.

4. Web to Print for Print Resellers/Brokers

You might have a trade printer and customer base but keeping them on the same page is essential to delivering print orders on time. With web to print, you can handle all the workflow processes through a centralized dashboard and share instant updates with both parties. Offer beneficial services like design, print-file preparation, pricing, shipping, and finishing to make this journey easier.

5. Web to Print for Trade Printers

We understand that you specialize in wholesale printing for other businesses like print resellers, marketing agencies, and more with your equipment. Web to print solution for trade printers will ensure you fulfill customer requirements with high-quality printing, faster turnaround times, and a wide range of print materials at competitive prices.

6. Web to Print for Print Franchise

The main thing that a franchisee considers is the consistency in printed materials. The print franchise web to print solution will ensure you can focus on expanding and growing with quality prints for different brands as it has intelligent solutions for designing to approvals of print files. You can deliver highly professional and localized brand designs to franchisees on time by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks

7. Web to Print for Photo Product Printers

It will help you meet all the requirements of running a photo print business online. Web to print will let your customers pick templates, customize, follow dimensions, and share print-ready files. Also, the design approval process ensures that you have the correct resolution and file format, reducing any chances of print issues.

8. Web to Print for Packaging Printers

The packaging industry requires a solution for package visualization, design, and customization. A 3D packaging design software is fully equipped to provide your customers with a detailed package design experience. It will be easier for customers to get a 3D preview to understand the look in real life and make necessary changes before printing.

What are the Benefits of Web to Print Solution?

The business advantages help you understand the returns for your efforts and resources in a web to print solution. We are listing some essential benefits of web to print software to make it easier for you:

1. Consistent Branding

One of the most essential benefits of web to print software is maintaining brand consistency across all printed materials. This is because web to print storefronts often include customizable templates that can be easily updated with your brand logo, color scheme, and typography. It ensures that all your printed materials, from business cards to brochures, are consistent during branding and marketing efforts.

2. Save Time

Another critical benefit of Web 2 print software is the amount of time it saves. With a web to print storefront, you enable customers to easily create, edit, and order printed materials without any time-consuming manual processes.

3.Low Operational Costs

By automating many complicated and monotonous processes involved in creating and ordering printed materials, you can reduce labor costs and errors. The majority of printing operations are managed in the storefront, so there are fewer chances of issues, saving a huge amount of time and delivering quality prints.

4. Streamline Order Processing:

Web to print software also makes it easy to process orders quickly and efficiently. With an efficient print order management software, you can automate end-to-end print production. The storefront owner can set triggers to take necessary actions like This lets customers place orders quickly and boosts revenue as they get quicker and quality prints.

5. Enhance Business Security

SaaS web to print solution offers several security features that protects your print business with authorized encryption, secure logins, and access controls. It will protect sensitive information, such as customer data, order details, invoices, payments, and more, from unauthorized access. Additionally, most online print shops are hosted on secure servers, providing an additional layer of protection for your business.

6. Great Customer Experience

With web to print, you integrate tools to enhance customer communication. Your customers can share their concerns and get updates from your end instantly. Also, with a personalized experience, you engage visitors for extended periods and provide the convenience of ordering through any device.

7. Order Tracking and Updates

A centralized dashboard for you and the customers makes monitoring order status effortless. You can also set reminders for order status that will keep everyone updated. With automation, you no longer struggle with manual records for order tracking and updates.

8. Quick Turnaround

Automating complex tasks like order processing, design approvals, shipment, records maintenance, and other time-consuming tasks will ensure faster printing. It saves you time, which can be utilized to handle more print jobs and deliver quicker turnaround time for customer orders.

9. Design Flexibility

The Web to Print online designer will let your customers design print-ready files easily. You can also add pre-built templates for different print products to enhance your customers designing capabilities. It allows them to pick templates or create print designs from scratch per their requirements.

Explore the Examples of the Web to Print Solution

There are no limitations to adding products to your web to print platform. You should showcase the products that will help you boost profitability and deliver customer satisfaction. Here are some examples of products listed in print businesses:

• Commercial Products: Business cards, brochures, flyers, signage, and more to let corporate customers personalize them.

• Photo Products: Pre-defined template for photo products like canvas, photo books, frames, photo calendars, and albums.

• Custom Apparel: Trendy apparel like bags, t-shirts, caps, etc., can be added to the printed storefront.

• Promotional Products: Customers can easily add brand logos, fonts, and color schemes to create perfect promotional products.

• Packaging: This industry is moving fast towards personalization. So, you can grab the opportunity to let the customers design, optimize, and preview packaging products in your store.

• Signs and Banners: Empower large format printing orders by providing customers with custom and fixed sizes for such products.

• Stickers and Labels: Your customers can pick ready-to-use layouts to bring out the best stickers and labels for printing.

What are the Key Strategies for Maximizing ROI with Web to Print?

The ultimate goal of investing in any tool is, "How much will you get back?" Getting the ideal solution to handle ROI before investing considerable cost, time, and resources is always an intelligent approach. Here are some key strategies to boost ROI with web to print
solutions:

• Get the Right Print Management Solution

Ensure that your web to print solution helps you automate tasks easily and deliver excellent customer service. With a streamlined print workflow, there are fewer errors, no repetitive processes, and better productivity. This ensures efficiency in managing the print process's
resources, efforts, and time.

• Ease of Personalization

Customers are looking for platforms that let them customize pre-built templates or create print designs from scratch. So, deliver a personalized experience to your customers where they can effortlessly edit, update, upload, download, and store the print materials.

• Real-Time Price Estimation

With everything available at your fingertips, your target audience will look for quicker methods to estimate the cost of their print orders. Print estimating & quoting software will help you add a visual price calculator, enabling customers to get and share pricing quotations instantly with dynamic inputs.

• Maintain Quality & Consistency

Automate design approval processes to ensure no issues in printing and deliver high-quality outputs. Web to print provides you with tools to help maintain brand consistency and meet exact customer requirements with minimal effort.

• Analyze and Update

Web to print has a centralized dashboard that is updated in real-time with every action happening in the storefront. You can quickly generate reports to analyze store performance and make necessary updates wherever required.

What are the Web to Print Implementation Challenges?

Print businesses are moving towards online storefronts, and some pain points remain unaddressed in this process. Multiple reasons make print business owners hesitant in web to print implementation.

Here are some of the top challenges faced while dealing with web to print:

• Limitations in Customization: Customers seek a solution that provides excellent personalization and customization. However, many web to print platforms have too many restrictions to customize, affecting user experience and leading to losing potential leads.

• Security Breaches: The web to print does not follow the industry standards, leaving your printing store at a higher risk of data theft or loss. Your business holds sensitive customer information that can become an easy target for hackers or unauthorized users.

• Poor Quality Control: The web to print solution may fail to handle quality checks during the pre-flight process, causing reprints, delays, and unsatisfactory customer experiences.

• Limited Integrations: Sometimes, print businesses are asked to start from scratch, increasing migration costs and resources. Also, adding restrictions in integrating other tools into the existing platform leaves you with minimal features and functionalities.

• Training and Onboarding: Print businesses often start with the web to print solutions but fail to grow. The main reason is missing quality training and the onboarding process. Understanding a software tool that will handle your business's workflow without the training modules and resources is challenging.

• No Upgrades: It is essential to get regular updates to maintain the store's performance and resolve bugs, if any. This also leads print businesses to fail in meeting industry demands and trends, as you cannot access the latest features and functionalities.

Why Choose OnPrintShop as Your Go-to Web to Print Solution?

OnPrintShop is the perfect web2print solution for modern printing businesses looking to streamline their print operations and improve the customer experience.

When you want to make an online presence for a printing business, it is essential to customize the storefront as per your brand image, which is done seamlessly with our software. We give customers the power to decide the look and feel of their online print store. With over 300+ integrations, we ensure you have all the latest features and functions to meet web to print industry trends.

With over a decade of industry experience, we can provide the right solutions for your print businesses. We are helping our clientele to expand globally while maintaining the perfect balance between demands, expectations, and trends in the print industry.

OnPrintShop helps your online print storefront handle bulk orders, corporate requests, and customer queries from a single dashboard. With continuous updates, our storefront experts make it an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes while keeping unique business needs in mind.

Our main goal is to deliver a complete custom solution that lets print business owners design their storefronts and add unique products through existing templates. A vast potential in your businesses can be highlighted using just a single software solution. Try OnPrintShop today and see the difference it can make for your business.