Sell print and customisable products via a purpose-designed online platform

A Web-to-Print platform builds on the kind of features you’d expect from a good eCommerce platform, extending it with specialised functionality that ensures that both the customer experience and operational aspects of your online store can effectively address the specific needs of print and/or products with print on them.

From a customer’s perspective, this means ensuring that the website makes it very easy to find and customise the products they’re looking for, access templates, add artwork, instantly confirm pricing, place orders and quickly re-order previous jobs (including maintaining records of previous artwork and customisations).

From an operational point of view, this means adding functionality that makes it easy to define customisation parameters (e.g. size, finish, options etc.) for each product, apply a pricing model that will automatically calculate prices based on the options chosen and quantity ordered, and present that beautifully to the customer.

When orders are placed, they are automatically added to a fulfilment workflow specifically tailored to your print production process, making processing jobs quick and efficient, increasing scale, lowering costs and reducing the risk of human error.

Platform Features: The Essentials

A typical Web-to-Print Platform builds on the feature set of an eCommerce   platform to provide the additional functionality required to effectively manage and present more complex  products such as customisable print items and  products that can be personalised.

The key extended  features   of this include:

• Quantity-based   price breakpoints
• Dynamic pricing
• Customisation parameters
• Template manager
• Artwork upload
• Back office product  management system
• Back office artwork management 
• Customer account area   to   include  a quick re-order function

These are integrated into Web-to-Print enabled versions of:

• A customer-facing eCommerce website(s) with full content management capabilities
• A back-office product manager capable of managing the complexities of print/customisable products
• Order workflow tailored to your production and fulfilment processes

The benefits for your customers

A well-designed Web-to-Print platform makes it much easier for customers to buy print and customisable products. It provides them with certainty over what the finished product will look like, how much it’s going to cost and when it’s going to be delivered.

They can compare different product and customisation options and finalise orders in their own time, without the hassle of communicating back and forth over email to confirm quotes and artwork amendments. 

What’s more, they can track the progress of their orders and quickly re-order previously purchased items at the click of a button. 

In short, it’s quicker, more convenient and provides them with much more confidence in what they’ve purchased.

The benefits for you

The obvious benefit is the potential for more sales. If you’re providing customers with a service that is quick, convenient and provides them with confidence that what they’ll receive is what they think, and that it’ll be delivered when they need it, then that’s a great incentive to order from you rather than your competitor.

 That’s not all though. Allowing customers to self-serve is not only more convenient for them, but it also reduces the time, costs and human error associated with manually quoting for and placing routine orders (thereby freeing up your sales team to more effectively service complex orders and/or to give extra attention to key clients).

Likewise, processing orders becomes much quicker and smoother as orders will always have the right details associated with them, will have artwork, and are automatically placed in a production and fulfilment workflow designed around you.

This further reduces to manual time and cost of fulfilling each order, simultaneously increasing capacity whilst reducing cost of sale. This provides an opportunity to offer more competitive pricing without impacting margin, whilst also creating the extra scalability you’ll need to process the increased volume of orders that your more competitive pricing is likely to generate.