Must have things for eCommerce website for Printer
what does an ecommerce print shop mean? Is it like a normal ecommerce website? What do print businesses sell on ecommerce websites? What features are necessary for an ecommerce solution for print businesses?
These and many other questions might haunt you if you have started your preliminary search to go online with your print business. In this blog, we would be giving you some great insights for starting an online print business and what features can turn your regular ecommerce website into an on-demand print solution.
What is an ecommerce print shop?
An ecommerce print shop is slightly different than an ecommerce website you see generally for brick-and-mortar businesses. The printing industry works on personalization. It runs as per the demands of the customers. And when you are wanting to offer your solutions online, you would not want to kill the thunder of your customers where they can come to you to get personalized service.
Thus a printing company can go online with a custom-built ecommerce website that allows customers to choose the products that they want to customize with their own design ideas. An ecommerce print shop is called a web-to-print service. It provides products via online storefronts, which are similar to providing remote publishing solutions, or print-on-demand.
Web to print offers solutions to the general public and businesses to order from their website and also use an integrated web-to-print editor to customize the print on the product. This is a convenient solution for businesses to find a range of print solutions and get them delivered to their doorsteps. Often businesses use these online print services to achieve a wide range of marketing goals. Furthermore, these services have become very popular since the world has become more connected with social media and people have been going crazy about DIYs and personalized stuff.
When web-to-print services commenced in the early 90s the customers would send out files through the mail. But today, we have advanced and automated processes that have replaced manual interventions and brought them down to a minimum. These advanced solutions are allowing print businesses to go online and expand their geographical boundaries and scale their service assortment. Today, the software solutions are allowing businesses to use the prebuilt templates for business cards, letterheads, brochures, newsletters, catalogs, and more. People can simply edit them, or also add their designs and place orders. From receiving orders, customizing prices as per the customer demand, and also getting final approvals – everything has been simplified significantly through the technical intervention.
As we are moving towards making the world more tech-driven more and more personalized solutions would be demanded from the customers. And a printing company runs on personalization the time is not to act and diversify your solutions with web to print. In short, web to print allows you to attract more clientele for your business while also providing a global expansion plan. It also improves retention and allows you to increase our revenue through personalized solutions.
Building ecommerce print shop
An ecommerce print shop has one primary goal and that is to provide personalized printing options for a range of products sold by the printing company. To achieve that there are certain features or functionalities that are absolutely necessary for your website or web application to make ecommerce printing not only successful, or profitable for your business but also to make your business operations smoother. Here are a few features that we find really beneficial for ecommerce websites.
- Managing the file uploads faster and easy
First and foremost, it is very important that you take good care of the user experience of your product. Customer experience can make or break your business. If people are finding it complex to upload their designs and customize products they are more likely to incline toward your competitors. It is important to be a consistent, easy, and user-friendly website where people can manage their designs and their orders to endeavor personalization. Provided the functionality of the product should be at par. Technology is moving at a great pace and you just cannot rely on primitive solutions. You should aim for a modern, seamless solution that allows your customers to easily come on board and create their designs to order a print from your provided products.
One of the biggest reasons behind this is to make sure that people are doing things themselves rather than calling your customer executives to place an order, send out their designs, make changes in it, or iterations in it. In short, the less intuitive solution you make more problems you create for your print-on-demand business. I would be the greatest buzzkill. Stop directing new and prospective customers, rather allow them to do things themselves with minimum intervention from your internal team.
Also, this helps you in reducing the cost of operations. The more you rely on people the bigger your team would be, more you would have to spend on salary and employee benefits.
- Robust processes for custom quotes and estimations
One of the biggest challenges comes when people are ordering in bulk from you. The wholesale and retail prices of the products and services would be very different and when you are offering both on your platform, you must hire an ecommerce development company or talk to your end-to-end web-to-print solution provider to make the customizations for the rate calculator, order cost estimations, quoting a price on the orders and more.
Not only do you have to customize the products for you but most importantly you need a customized solution to make it easy for you to operate in a harsh business environment. Although, the concept of the web-to-print store is fairly new in the market and a modern solution the market has a lot of competition.
You can easily achieve this customization. Technology gives you access to modern solutions. You can incorporate a robust price engine that is capable of providing price calculations faster and complex products can easily be provided through the web-to-print platform and also estimate the cost faster and on the spot for the customers to make solutions.
The robust solution enables you to provide custom prices for your services. It automatically estimates the cost and also allows your customer to request quotes, make customizations to the product to get automatic price suggestions, download and share PDF receipts of the quotations, receiving the purchase order and bill receipts from you, etc.
One of the other ways to do it is through an easy-to-use customer dashboard that allows tracking orders, getting messages, and other attributes of the business specifically easy.
- Downloadable artwork templates
Having a large library that allows your retail customers to choose the design of their choice is a great solution to streamline and speed up the project. The library should be limitless and should have artwork that is currently trending. It allows you to attract new customers. Also, a web-to-print editor can be used to make customizations to the pre-added templates. They can add new elements to the existing templates, make changes and adjustments to it and order them easily through your channel.
The advanced solution allows you, retail customers, to order your products faster and also reduce the error in the designs. Also, it helps you in reducing the approval times. It becomes so much more convenient for the customers that are not looking forward to designing or going to a professional to design for their products. This is a good way to make sure they are ordering from you and they are using your pre-existing products.
- Online price calculators for simple and complex products
Ecommerce is speed and convenience. Being in a position to offer the right delivery date, the right cost, other estimations, and more it is able to attract a large number of people to itself.
A logic given by businesses is that they don’t want to show their pricing because they have a fear of their competitors. But your primary focus should be the convenience of your customers. If you are not providing real-time price estimations to the customers it is going to backfire. It would show as you are not staying completely transparent with your customers. You will have more people losing interest in your services and moving to your competitors.
If you don’t want to put the price on your services, the best option is to make it available privately on registration or for selected or approved clients only. This will give you more flexibility in running your business and makes sure the customers are deeming you as a reliable partner.
The final price of printing can be hard to calculate ahead of time but often it also limits the ecommerce print store to offer the right price which is very close to the accurate price. The variety of solutions and services offered for complex products and designs, for different quantities is going to be very difficult.
There are a lot of things to manage such as multiple pages, large format print, different binding options, and cover stocks. Giving live prices for complex products is going to be really beneficial for your business. So you must talk to your service provider to make sure you are getting a custom solution to meet your needs.
Also, if your customers are being open about their services and prices, it is mandatory for you to follow the same suit. Customers like transparency and more control, atleast about the price. Especially when the businesses are online, it is important for you to make sure the communication is as seamless as you can relent and also in line with pricing strategy.
- Frequently asked questions section
Frequently asked questions are a set of questions that you most often hear from your customers. They can be about your services, products, or info about the company. As a business, there are times when your customer executive team is not able to provide faster resolution to queries of your customers. In these times, a customer can get frustrated because of slow services. If you don’t want to pick up an angry call, you must incorporate other solutions.
Modern technology offers you those solutions. AI-driven chatbots, chat communication, emails, automated email replies, and so many other options are there where repeated questions of the customers can be managed without any manual intervention.
Likewise, having a frequently asked questions section on the website allows your customers to find answers to their general questions easily.
Also, many customers may be hesitant to ask questions that they may think are lame. But you make a collection of these questions and answers you can attend to their queries and also convert them into your customers.
You can include questions about:
- Products
- Services
- Deliveries
- Returns
- Refunds
- Turnaround time
- Editing process
- Approval process
- Privacy policy
- Payment policy
- Payment methods
- Failed online payments, and more.
Having a frequently asked section on the website also provides you seo benefits which is the very requirement of the businesses today. Engaging your customers organically is not only a difficult task but also requires time and cost.
Wrapping Up
Starting your ecommerce print store requires you to have a robust technology system that supports you all the time. It helps you in meeting your business needs faster and also caters to a global audience. Most importantly, incorporate these 5 features into the website and you are all set to start your on-demand print business.
