Wide-format Graphics: Increasing sales with web-to-print

by all | 30 October 2015 10:08 am

By Rick Mandel
Many corporate customers of wide-format printing companies also buy smaller printed collateral from other commercial print providers through the web. This has raised the question: why don’t sign shops empower their customers to buy large-format graphics from them online, too?

After all, such an arrangement would add value in terms of shopping convenience for busy customers. It would also help the sign shops, given large-format digital printing in itself is no longer sufficiently distinctive an offering to prevent customers from looking around for other suppliers.

The evolution of WTP
The best-known example of e-commerce today may be Amazon, but web-to-print (WTP) has also been a reality for years now. In its simplest form, it merely involves a web-based storefront for purchasing specific printed items in various quantities. An artist, for example, might use a ‘static’ website to sell prints. As with Amazon, a customer simply visits the site, places an order and receives a delivery.

In a more advanced example, it has become common in the direct mail industry for customers to visit a website, choose a template, upload addresses and any other variable data, choose a number of pieces and have them shipped to their target audience. This allows some degree of customization.

More complicated project-input websites allow greater creativity. Customers fill in their information, get a quote, upload their own design files and pay for the printing and delivery of their requested projects. In some cases, they are even able to view their works-in-progress.

In these ways, the job-submission scenarios that are possible with web-based portals can enhance the relationship between print service provider (PSP) and client by making it easier and more convenient for both to do business. There is also an opportunity, however, to change the purchasing dynamics for corporate clients, driving the print business in a different direction than the classic process of ‘bid, transfer file, proof and print.’

A workflow advantage
Many corporate clients have invested heavily in graphic design content that can be used across a variety of marketing segments. WTP can tap into these imagery assets by repurposing them for previously underused applications. This is a highly beneficial service to be able to offer to brand marketers.

Marketing executives, after all, are tasked with protecting their brands, ensuring graphic consistency among logos, typefaces and predetermined layouts and leveraging target marketing. With a unique WTP portal that has been customized to their needs, they can accomplish all of these tasks in a smoother, more seamless fashion than was possible in the past.

To be sure, some types of business are still better-handled personally, but there are also many specific printed products that fit well into a web portal workflow. With the development of a client-specific WTP gateway, the customer can specify customized prints based on its own graphics and the sign shop’s format templates (e.g. a standard-size banner), eliminating some of the traditional pre-press and proofing steps.

By way of example, consider a company that needs to supply customized point-of-purchase (POP) graphics to a fast-food restaurant chain. A web portal would be designed to help it update ‘meal deal’ posters with predetermined images of main dishes, side dishes and beverages (which could involve co-op advertising with Coca-Cola or Pepsi), along with a dedicated space for the price to appear. The brand marketer in question could visit the site, build a new layout through a series of choices, approve the final version, activate payment and send the custom high-resolution file to the sign shop’s printer for production.

Choosing a provider
Ideally, the software engine behind a WTP portal would be custom-developed for a sign shop, as then it would be possible to communicate exactly how the workflow should be designed and to add more advanced modules as the business grows. This option, however, may be prohibitively expensive for a small to medium-sized PSP.

Most well-known proprietary software that has been developed for WTP projects in the past is also expensive for the sector, offering too little return on investment (ROI) for a small PSP. And beyond the price of the software (and periodic upgrades), there is the need for server systems to host it, which only a sufficiently large PSP could afford to set up and maintain with dedicated technical staff.

To address these issues, some PSPs have turned to WTP providers who host their software. Often called Software as a Service (SaaS), this option means the provider not only creates and enhances the software, but also maintains it as a web-based service and provides technical support. As its own systems and support resources can be spread across a large client base at little cost, this helps keep SaaS affordable for any PSP that wants to offer WTP portals to its customers.

Different SaaS options offer a variety of capabilities, but generally, they provide cross-platform compatibility, multi-user collaboration and live database integration for digital asset management purposes.

Seeing what you get
Another advance in WTP, which some in the industry have called a sign of things to come, is the provision of ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) design support.

WTP software provides this capability by allowing elements within a template to represent choices by the customer, who can insert or delete them, under strict rules established by the designer of the system. Generally, WYSIWYG is supported by Adobe’s Flash multimedia platform or Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language (XML) (AJAX) web development techniques, so as not to depend on any single browser or operating system (OS).

By enabling customers who are not themselves professional graphic designers to edit and proof customized artwork within a ‘safe’ environment, this type of system begins to blur the lines between past WTP portals and mainstream desktop publishing applications. The users can enjoy a range of choices while still protecting their brands and graphic consistency.

Further, due to advanced page processing on the web, many of today’s users have come to expect instantaneous visual changes after clicking their choices, rather than have to watch a page reload after making a change. The software behind interactive websites has evolved from web content management (WCM) to web experience management (WEM). And the web is a constantly evolving multi-device platform.

Ease of use
Indeed, for a WTP portal to be successful, the quality of the customer’s website experience must be a top priority. As with other applications on the web, the workflow should allow any user to proceed from password creation all the way to payment without needing outside assistance.

If the interface is clumsy or non-intuitive, the customer—which in the case of the fast-food restaurant chain could be an in-house marketer, a POP graphics representative, a restaurant owner or simply a tech-savvy restaurant employee—will not use the portal to create and order graphics.

The goal of customizing WTP portals for corporate clients is to ensure they come back again and again to use them. The benefits of customized graphics and target marketing must be accompanied by ease of transactions. Technology should serve the user, not the other way around.

It is important to remember WTP is a completely different method of ordering wide-format graphics to which most buyers have not yet been exposed. Further, the PSP will not have the chance to communicate directly with all possible users of its site, many of which may never have ordered graphics before at all.

Wide-format challenges
It can also be challenging to translate WTP’s success in other types of commercial printing to the wide-format graphics sector.

For one thing, as software providers in this field have less experience with large-format scenarios like POP and event graphics than they do with small-format applications like business cards and direct mail, file size can be a real sticking point. To a SaaS vendor, for example, a ‘large’ file may be around 5 MB, whereas a large-format graphic could easily require 500 MB.

Many SaaS vendors offer only 2 GB of free data storage and keep files on their servers for a year. Others offer larger, cloud-based storage and keep all data indefinitely.

Further, some WTP software has heavily focused on the e-commerce aspects of a website, including ordering, checkout and payment processes, for a well-developed storefront experience. In wide-format printing, however, there needs to be more emphasis on the pre-press stage, including the uploading, manipulation and customization of graphic files with templates and design tools. With this in mind, the best WTP SaaS providers are those that have experience working with the wide-format printing sector.

Starting with strategy
When beginning to consider WTP software, a sign shop owner will need to ask a few key questions.

1. What is the strategy?
Is WTP a good fit for all or some of the current client base? Is the goal to reach larger brand marketers or smaller customers who could not otherwise afford to invest in such technology themselves? What level of customization will need to be offered? All of these strategic factors need to be considered in determining the cost of developing WTP portals. A clear strategy will help maintain focus on business objectives and assist in budgeting. It is also important to start forecasting how big the WTP service will be (e.g. customized for 20, 200 or 2,000 clients).

2. Should the software be developed in-house or purchased from outside?
Developing software in-house may seem less expensive at first, but with the way technology is constantly changing, including updates to web browsers, it can easily become prohibitively costly to keep up. Hosting software will require the ongoing support of an in-house information technology (IT) department to perform regular upgrades and, for that matter, a customer service group to manage the client experience and answer e-mails whenever customers encounter a problem. It can get to the point where a sign shop owner wonders, “Am I a graphics provider or a software developer?” It is therefore important to decide which elements to handle in-house and which to outsource.

3. Is there sufficient dedicated manpower?
Even though SaaS providers can address many IT concerns themselves, any sign shop offering WTP still needs a basic understanding of the software. As WTP has the potential to process the bulk of a shop’s sales, it is important to back the service up with enough employees who have time to study the software and devote themselves to the service.

4. Is WTP being considered for hype’s sake?
If WTP is to be deployed, it should be with a focus on providing the easiest, most convenient and most competitive order entry option for a PSP’s customers, not just because the software exists. Further, those customers need to learn how the service will make things easier for them, not for the PSP. It is essential to focus on the right priorities, not simply buy the hype.

5. Where will content come from?
Another area involving significant time, effort and cost is the creation of engaging content for the website. Without the right content, the site will be virtually invisible to the potential new clients who could otherwise stumble upon it and become regular customers.

Once these strategic questions about WTP have been answered, the PSP can then consider and compare various SaaS providers:

• How do they manage content?
• What are their monthly traffic allowances and limits?
• Can they add new functionality in the future?
• What is the largest file size they can accept?
• How much free storage is allotted and at what cost can additional capacity be acquired?
• How long are files retained?
• How are their systems backed up with redundant data?
• Do they offer one unique website Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or multiple branded sites?
• Is there a cost for additional branded sites?
• How many users can be accommodated?
• How frequently do they update their software?

Testing the interface
It is also important to try the software out, as the interface should be both rich and simple. Graphic template generation, for example, should be possible within the software as a workflow/production activity requiring no design expertise, but while SaaS providers have increasingly recognized this need, in many cases template creation is still cumbersome.

Customizing graphics, too, should offer smooth throughput, without posing impediments to or additional costs for the customer. Populating each changeable area of a design template should become simply an upload function.

It should not take a lot of work to turn a design into a template. And when late changes are needed for a design, there should be a post-template-production ‘edit’ function, rather than having to start all over with the template.

With that in mind, templates need to offer a certain degree of flexibility for user input variations. While corporate designs certainly require constraints to preserve branding consistency, making the rules too strict can cause problems when special cases arise where those rules do not apply. If the system will not accept varying data, after all, then the user will give up and the sign shop will lose his/her business.

The software should also automate the pre-flighting of uploaded files. Advanced systems include dedicated modules to help evaluate Portable Document Format (PDF) files before PSPs’ employees have to spend time checking them personally.

Drop-down menus should be checked for their predefined values. Visual images in these menus can offer a more positive web experience than solely word-based descriptions, as people want to see what is being described.

Online design tools can offer very advanced features today, such as layering, transparencies and drop shadows, but caution and prudence are needed, as there is a danger that very large, complex files—as common in wide-format printing—can crash web browsers or cause delays due to long loading times at the client plugin side, i.e. when calculations end up being performed within the browser on the customer’s computer.

The following are more questions to ask when testing the software:

• Do you have full control over colour spaces and spot colours?
• What PDF versions and features are supported by the software?
• What are the minimum and maximum canvas sizes?
• Can you design wide-format graphic applications that go beyond the simple, limited design capabilities needed for rectangular business cards or posters?
• What parts of the design templates can you make variable for your customers and can they incorporate gradients, custom outlines and other filters and effects that are already part of corporate design agencies’ repertoires?
• Can you upload your own fonts and/or purchase new fonts as you go?

Finding the right balance
For sign shops, expanding into WTP has been a challenge of balancing software affordability against the ability to merge desktop graphic design tools with sufficient server-based technology. Fortunately, while proprietary software set the stage for major commercial printing companies to begin offering WTP services to their corporate clients and, for that matter, the general public, SaaS providers have edged into the market to offer viable options for smaller PSPs.

Ongoing challenges in the print-for-pay sector have pointed to the need for more technologically advanced, web-based sales processes, both to assist existing customers and to reach new prospects. Yet, while WTP can unite marketers’ and signmakers’ goals by simplifying pre-press and other processes, it is important not to underestimate how much work is needed to build, maintain and provide such services. A well-thought-out plan and new expertise will be needed if WTP is to truly yield value-added services in the wide-format printing sector.

Rick Mandel is owner and president of Mandel Graphic Solutions, which uses roll-to-roll solvent-based, ultraviolet-curing (UV-curing) flatbed and dye sublimation printers and digital cutters to produce point-of-purchase (POP) signage, stand-up displays, outdoor event graphics and fabric displays. The Mandel Company has operated continuously since 1892, when it specialized in wood engraving. For more information, visit www.mandelcompany.com[7].

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/wide-format-graphics-increasing-sales-with-web-to-print/

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