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For any web to print solution, the online designer tool holds the key to success. It’s the USP of a web to print business model. Your customers come to your online print store and design their products. If you can woo and charm them during their online designing experience, you win!

Precisely for this reason, the OnPrintShop team has always focused on steadily upgrading its Online Designer Studio. And now we are out with Designer Studio V2!

So then what’s new with Designer Studio V2?

Technology: Upgraded from Flash to Flex for Better Features & Performance

Look & Feel: Subtle and classic

Element Panels: For image, text, and shape editing

Rotate & Transparency Features: For enhanced designing

Alignment Settings: To get the design in sync

Layers: To better manage design

Integrated Support for Picasa & Flickr: To import personal pictures

Support for Direct Smile & Fotolia: For stock images and special effects

Print-Ready Output: 300 DPI PDF file which is CMYK & RGB compatible

Easy Studio Switch: Without loading time gap

Template Gallery: Organized with category hierarchy

Language Support: To support designing in local language

When we say upgrade, we don’t just mean addition of new features. For us, upgrade also means enhancing the usability of what we already have in place. Thus, the change of technology from Flash to Flex. Flex has improved the studio’s loading time and speed.

Our studio is also now robust in terms of performance and cutting edge features. The upgraded studio is flexible enough to support integrations with third party APIs. It can support stock image providers like Fotolia and special effect providers like Direct Smile. And Fotolia and Direct Smile are just examples. You bring us the API of your preferred stock images provider or special effects provider and we will integrate that for you. So, your customers can use high-end designer images and add special effects to their designs. They can spread the wings of their imagination wider and explore beyond the rudimentary designs.

The next best thing about this upgraded studio is integration with social networks like Flickr and Picasa. This means the customers can directly import their personal pics from these photo sharing platforms and use them in product designs. Just think how cool it would be to design T-shirts with picture of your friends or how wonderful it would be to send out party invitation cards with pictures of your baby on it! A real treat for your customers we would say!

And we do not stop here. We have a lot more popular social network integrations coming up in the future. So you might want to keep an eye on us!

We have also enhanced the look and feel of the upgraded studio to make it look subtle yet classy. This look goes well with any kind of branding. So whether you position yourself as a corporate print service provider or a hip and happening design team, the studio gels well with your brand.

And then we have added the element panels for text, image, and shape. These panels along with layers make it very easy to control and manage all the design parameters. And of course, you have the rotate and transparency features that can make a real difference in a design.

In addition to these new features, the studio carries other important features like safe and cutting margin, fold margin, grid lines, design guides, upload image, and design preview from the previous studio version.

Our studio presently delivers a print-ready 300DPI PDF file as final output. This PDF is both CMYK and RGB compatible which in and of itself is at par with the global standards. But we are looking to take it a notch higher by integrating PDFlib Library as well. So once again, an upgrade to look out for in the near future.

We also understand that local language plays a very critical role in print business. Your customers would certainly want the luxury to design their products in local language. For this we have developed support for different languages in the upgraded studio. The studio now supports Latin languages other than English. So now your customers can design their business cards and local marketing material in their local language.

So now our Online Designer Studio packs double the punch by combining best of both worlds in this upgraded version. On one hand it has improved on performance and delivery standards. On the other, it has added a whole new meaning to online designing with rich integrations.

You can now not only make your customers smile, you can excite them as well. And an excited customer will keep coming back to you!

To see more details about the feature upgrades click here.

What looks more appealing, a print service that follows generic way of operating or a service that can be personalized for every single customer? Personalized print business without any doubt! Given the age old traditional processes, personalization of print business can seem a long lost cause. But now that’s not the case!

We do agree that traditionally print processes were rigid enough with little scope for personalization. But introduction of web to print technology has turned the tables around for print industry. Personalization of your prepress process and your print service as a whole is now possible with web to print. Let’s see how.

Personalized Greeting

When a customer walks into a traditional print store, your people greet and welcome him. There is absolutely no reason for you to stop these pleasant greetings when he accesses your online print store. You can set up a personalized welcome message for him. So when he logs into your website, he sees a personal greeting note. This can make him feel well treated and bring a smile to his face.

Product Personalization

This is one hard to beat attribute of web to print. Solution providers like OnPrintShop integrate a designing interface called Designer Studio in your online print store. Your customers can use this studio and create their own product designs. They can use their logos and brand identities during this product designing. If they are not too creative then they can use a pre-hosted design template and edit the credentials.

Now this is about the business print items like business cards and letterheads. Personalization takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to designing merchandize products like coffee mugs, caps, t-shirts, greeting cards, etc. Here the customers can import images from their local hard drives and use them for designing. This means they can design birthday bash invitations with photos of their baby. They can further import images from their Picasa and Flickr accounts. So a customer can design t-shirts for all his friends using a group photo stored on Flickr. The possibilities are endless here.

Personalized Emails

Personalized emails represent personal attention. It shows that you are paying attention to your customer. OnPrintShop gives you a comprehensive customer portal that stores all your customer information. It stores their personal information, contact details, order histories, and even special instructions doled out by them. You can use this information to carry out personalized communication with them. You can send them emails to inform them about certain offers, schemes, discounts that would interest them. You can wish them on their birthdays or anniversaries. Such attention to personal occasions can win you a place in your customer’s heart and lend you a competitive edge.

Personalized Offers

You can further use the stored customer information to set up personal offers for your customers. So now you can float a special discount rate or gift offer for a customer on his birthday. Or else, you can offer him special price for bulk order to encourage him to buy more. You can even offer premium rates or membership discounts to corporate customers.

Notifications to Customers

If you are running a subscriptions based online newsletter program then you can keep a personalized track of every single subscription. You can send email notifications to your subscribers to intimate them about subscription expiration. You can send personal renewal requests. You can even set up personalized alert messages for special subscribers.

Festival Packages

With web to print, you can run special festival offers for your customers. So you can have special packages for your US and European customers on the eve of Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving. Similarly, you can announce special offers for Indian customers for Diwali. Such packages very obviously encourage festival buying. But they also help you build a better bond with your customer segment. You can appeal to your customers’ emotional quotient through such offers and connect better with them.

The competition is growing tough in the print industry. Cost cutting and reduced prices can only take you so far. After a point, low prices lose their appeal for the market. What can really help you beat the competition is the quality of your service and customer communication. How you treat your customers and interact with them will determine your fortunes. So get web to print and get personal with your customers.

How long do you operate your print business? 10 hours a day? 12 hours? 16 hours? And we bet you also have a weekly off! Now here’s the thing. Have you ever felt that these time constraints were limiting your growth? Have you ever wondered how much more your business could be if kept up and running 24 hours? Sounds intriguing, right?

What if we say you can now operate your print business 24x7? What would you say to an order collection mechanism that has no time constraints? And here’s the absolute kicker – what if we say all this is possible without adding to your resources and infrastructure?

We are not playing out any utopian fantasy for print industry here. What we have in front of us is a scenario made very real by web to print.

Web to print storefronts like OnPrintShop essentially help you migrate your processes on a web browser. So first of all, this means that you are free of any location constraints for your business. Your print service gets a new residence – the internet – and we know that the internet doesn’t sleep. Your business can keep ticking even if you sign off for the day. Your online print store’s order collection system keeps your registers rolling on the web. You don’t need to hire additional people and have them working in shifts to collect business orders round-the-clock.

Secondly, a web to print solution automates the manual processes of quoting, negotiating, invoicing, payment collection, etc of order collection and processing phase. The solution takes care of them on a web browser. So here again you can free your people from manually handling these things.

Instead you can allocate them to activities where human intervention is a must.

So what you have now on hand is an opportunity to expand the operations of your print business to round-the-clock in true sense. And you can actually do this without adding to your people or resources. Think about it. It’s almost like never having to flip the “closed for the day” sign on your print business. How good would that be huh?

I have a confession to make - I have never been a part of the Starbucks crowd. I daily ditch a good Starbucks shot in favor of a dark, at times incomprehensible, amber liquid of a small diner on my way to work. While they call it coffee, I am sure the Starbucks fans will call it a sham. But I like it there. You know what keeps me going there again and again every single day? The kind of attention I get showered with.

Every morning, I get greeted by my first name at the counter. I don’t have to tell them my order. They know it. I don’t have to wait in line to get my coffee delivered. And this is not just me! They treat all their customers the same way. They know what their regular patrons are fond of. The heartwarming thing about this place despite being small and dingy, may I say, is its personal service. They know their customers.

Now let’s learn a trick or two from this place. Can our printing business be personal for a customer? Can we know our customers’ orders beforehand? Can we make our customers feel special when they interact with our print business? Can we reduce our customers’ efforts when placing orders with us? Yes we can with web to print!

Web to Print & Customer Management

Web to print systems like OnPrintShop come along with a very comprehensive customer portal. This portal stores your customer’s profile and acts as his dedicated account in your system. It stores his general details like contact info, shipping address, images that he likes to use, etc. This way, you get to know your customer.

The customer portal furthermore stores order histories of customers. You can peruse their accounts and see what orders they place in your online print store. You can see whether they get business cards printed from you every quarter or two quarters. You can find out what kind of designs they find appealing and what is their buying pattern. This will give you an idea of what your customer likes and buys from you.

As for personalization, you can set personalized welcome notes for your customers. You can set your online print store to display a personalized welcome note to a customer on logging in. You can send personalized email notifications to your customers. You can inform them about special discount offers you have going on for products that they typically buy from you. At the same time, you can dig out personal information about your customers like their birth date from their profile and greet them. Just imagine how thrilling it would be for them!

And you can do all this with least amount of storage and efforts. You don’t need to have huge shelves stacked up with all the designs ordered by your customers. You don’t need to maintain bulky registers to store customer details. You can have it all stored in your web to print solution.

So now with web to print solution like OnPrintShop, you can be a proactive and personal printer with absolutely no efforts. And just like that small diner, even you can have loyal clientele and beat the toughest of competition.

The printing industry is poised at the threshold of dawn of a new era – web to print. The convergence of internet and consumer market has given rise to interesting business models for various industries. Print industry is no exception to this. Printers and designers are exploring web to print possibilities like never before. So what is it that is attracting print service providers to this technology like moth to flame? Let’s examine.

Convenient Service Delivery

Customers today are drawn not only by quality and price but also by convenience. What web-to-print storefronts like OnPrintShop do is they automate your prepress processes and make them web-enabled. This means your customers can create their own product designs online, have a digital preview of the design, and place their order – all without having to leave home or office. What could be more convenient than that?

Agile Print Processes

The online platform is accompanied by a certain level of agility. So when you as a printer migrate your prepress to OnPrintShop’s browser based platform, your traditionally rigid processes become flexible. You can thus scale them easily to accommodate business growth. You are also better equipped to respond to market changes and better manage them.

Fresh Business Leads

Internet holds a very large and active pool of people seeking print services. A web to print savvy printer can tap into this pool and generate fresh business leads. Additionally, an online print store is accessible to a global customer base. You mix this accessibility with right kind of products offered at right kind of price and you have global level business expansion within reach. So irrespective of your operational size, you can spread your wings and win global print orders.

Excited Customer Base

What could be more exciting for print customers than the ability to design their own products? As a printer you can use OnPrintShop’s Online Designer Studio and grant your customers the freedom of designing their own products. They can pick a readily available template and personalize it or create a design from scratch in this studio. It becomes easy for them to just put on their creative hats and create designs with a flair.

Optimized Operations

A web to print solution like OnPrintShop automates the manual processes of quoting, negotiating, proofing, and amending in your order procurement cycle. Streamlining of these processes makes it easy for you to track them, identify redundant activities, locate gaps, and address them accordingly. This results in resource savings and optimized operations.

Incremental Sales

Ability to design products online and order them makes life easy for your customers. They can track their orders in your system, use discount coupons, and have protected storage space for their digital assets in your browser based print store. All these are reasons enough to get them excited about your print service and earn their loyalty resulting in incremental sales.

Product Diversification

OnPrintShop’s Online Designer Studio allows designing for traditional print products like business cards and letterheads. But it also accommodates merchandize products like T-shirts, coffee mugs, fridge magnets, etc widely used by corporates and individuals. So web to print gives you an opportunity to expand your product range with great personalization possibilities.

With so many advantages, it’s fair enough that the industry roots for web to print. It’s just a matter of time before web-to-print driven print stores start mushrooming all over the place. You can either embrace the change or have it forced upon by the market because adoption of web to print is no more a question of if but when.

Diversification – the word rings a bell, right? Everybody is talking about diversification and how it’s the key to growth. While some talk about diversifying a business in terms of products, others propose diversification at service level. And then there is diversification of operational market or customer base.

Let’s talk about customer diversification here. What does customer diversification mean to you? It can mean adding newer geographical markets to your operational area. At the same time, it can also mean adding new type of customers to your client sheet.

Typically speaking, what kind of customers do small and medium sized print houses entertain? Individuals and print resellers. But what about the cream of the print market – the corporates? They almost always prefer the bigger print vendors. But now you can change the game. With web to print, even you as a small or medium printer can have corporate clients gracing your client sheet. Let’s see how.

What do corporate clients look for when ordering print material? Firstly, they want convenient and smooth workflow. They do not have the time or the patience to make repeat visits to a printer’s workshop for revisions and amendments. This is where web to print steps in. With a browser based print shop, your corporate customers can proof and amend designs online. They don’t need to beat the city traffic and pollution to visit your print workshop. Neither do you need to make repeat visits to their office. You can manage it all from a browser.

Corporates are also very particular about branding. They hold branding material like logo, color scheme, images, etc close to their hearts. They do not accept discrepancies in them. Web to print system can award them near flawless design consistency. They can import their logos and images in our online designer studio and create product designs. So a corporate client can easily import his logo and design his business card in the studio. He can also use the studio’s color picker tool and replicate the logo’s color in his text.

OnPrintShop can further allow you to set up a streamlined workflow for your corporate clients. You can create an on-the-fly storefront for them in your system. They can access this storefront via secure login process. This storefront will display products specific to them. So if a company uses business cards, letterheads, envelops, and flyers its storefront will display these products only with templates. The company can also have its own admin managing these products and templates on the storefront.

This admin also reserves the right to lock certain items in a template and make them non-editable. For example, he can make items like logo, company name, tagline, company website, etc non-editable in a business card template and leave other fields open for editing and personalization. This leads to consistent branding for the company.

The solution can also have an approval process mapped for corporate clients. Every time an employee of a company places an order, his order details and product design go to his immediate superior for approval. Only when the order is approved by the superior, are you as a printer informed about it with a copy of order approval. This protects you from loss caused due to unauthorized print orders. Your system can further securely store the intellectual property and digital assets of your corporate clients.

Along with this workflow, you can offer discounted or special prices to the corporates without revealing them to your other customer segment. You can run special promotions or coupon programmes for them. These corporates can also avail your bulk ordering facility. Moreover, given that this entire setup is browser based, they can have their regional offices access the same without any software installations or system upgrades.

Now that your web to print laced business can address all their concerns, there is no need for corporate clients to pay big bucks to big print vendors. They can have a small or medium sized printer offer them the same quality of printing and service at not-so-high rates!

Cabinets brimming with registers, shelves stocked with files, archives overflowing with records – looks familiar? Of course it does! It’s the office of a traditional printer. Now what’s wrong with this scenario? That’s a lot of useful space taken up by storage adding to your cost. And add to it all that paperwork protruding out of corners!

Now take up another scenario. How about a printer’s office sans any files, paper records, and registers? Looks neat, right? That is what web to print can do for you.

Storage takes up a considerable chunk in a cost pie chart of a traditional printer. This cost is recurring as well as incremental in nature. It will keep on adding as your business grows. But now you can counter it by adopting a web based print solution like OnPrintShop.

So how can web to print reduce your storage costs? Let’s start by listing out what a traditional printer usually stores and analyze it in context of web to print.

The most common detail stored by printers is designs. A traditional printer can have shelves after shelves full of designs. He cannot discard them because they fetch him repeat business. With a web to print solution, customers create their own product designs online. This means no design revisions to store. The final output is a print-ready PDF which is again stored on the browser itself.

The second most common data stored by a printer is customer and order details. Here again, web to print can help. Solutions like OnPrintShop give you a comprehensive customer portal. This portal stores all your customer details like their contact info, billing address, shipping address, their order history, designs they have bought from you, etc. You can offer them an image gallery to store images that they like for future use. All this again happens on a web browser which means no need for cabinets or shelves. Your customer management takes up online character.

As for the orders, OnPrintShop has an order management system which assigns a unique order ID to every single order. This ID makes it easy to track them through various phases. You can also issue order summaries using this system. The order management module will summarize product details, customers’ billing and payment details, shipping address, comments made by customers, etc. So here you have your customer and order details again stored in digital format.

Another very important detail stored by printers is invoices and billing information. Now here again OnPrintShop has a remedy. The system allows you to generate and issue invoices in digital format. As for the billing information you already have these details stored at multiple places like at customer portal, order module, etc. Moreover, since we integrate online payment gateways in your online print store, retrieving payment details is not an issue. And if you own a design services business which is affiliated with several printers, then we have a vendor management module which can migrate all your vendor details online.

Then there is correspondence that is often stored by printers. Given that OnPrintShop is browser based solution, you can have all your communication stored via emails and system notifications.

Now what we have discussed till now is a very obvious cut in storage cost. Now let’s talk about security of this stored material. The mere fact that you are storing these details means you intend to or expect to use them in future. Now when you store business critical information in traditional paper format, you expose it to fire, floods, theft, sabotage, etc. Storing them on your PC exposes them to virus threats and system crash. But with web to print, you are essentially storing these details on a browser which is relatively secure compared to your other options. Having them on a browser also makes them accessible from anywhere anytime. With web to print you also do not face any capacity limitations. This makes your storage cost equivalent to your one-time solution cost.

So now you have a choice not to spend incremental sums over storing and maintaining your business critical information. You have a choice to adopt web to print solutions.