You've read by now, probably, the many statistics about people shopping, ordering and buying online. Some do this from websites and others do so from online catalogs. Imagine a catalog of print and marketing items specifically customized with your items that you and others in your organization can order from. Even items with variable information like names and titles on a business card can be ordered from such a catalog. Many printing companies can work with you to choose the items, design the items and to add the items to the personalized catalog. The further good news about this is the live online proofing and visual of the item being ordered, not only saving time but preventing error and in many cases, saving money.
The printing industry and many customers refer to this as a “web to print” solution. Web to print solutions are an efficient way to communicate customer needs to producing companies. It truly is your own personalized, customized ecommerce storefront/catalog, containing a variety of products, many with variable data fields for personalization.
Wikipedia describes web to print as follows:
“Web-to-print is a broad term that refers to the practice of doing print business using web sites. The growing popularity of the internet and the world wide web has opened up opportunities for commercial printers to communicate with their partners and customers to do things like submit print jobs, do online prepress reviews/previews, design things like postcards directly on a website using rich user interfaces, direct cross media marketing and offer services such as variable data printing, photo printing, booklets, marketing campaigns, etc.”
One benefit to customers and producers is that all marketing materials for a company is housed in one single area. This area can be set up for access by anyone in a company. This only streamlines the whole ordering process and automates a lot of manual activity on the producing end. No longer is there separate art files needed to submit manually, with approval from managers, needed. All of these former manual steps can now be automated. Sales, marketing and other management teams can access and implement marketing campaigns and fulfill needed printing and marketing items with just a few keystrokes.
Web to Print storefronts/catalogs allow a user to easily order and personalize a product. Imagine opening up the site/catalog and only seeing your items available to add personalized information, proof and order in a fraction of the time that it used to take.
It doesn't take a lot of items to set this up for a company. You can start with a single item and expand from there. Every item doesn't need to be personalized. Printed envelopes, for example, do not utilize variable information. Envelopes for different branch locations can be set up as separate items, along with pricing, quantity discounts and more.
Visit your
printing and marketing supplier and see how easy it is to have this efficient tool added for your business. For more click on the ONLINE ORDERING TAB HERE:
https://www.alphagraphics.com/centers/carrollton-texas-us376 (LOTS OF TESTIMONIALS TOO HERE)