Comparing Traditional Printing and Web to Print

In an era where people look for fast fulfillment of their demands that come with good quality and are cheap, web-to-print is a boon for printers and printer service providers for reducing print production cycle time and lowering the cost of printing while maintaining reasonably good quality. Interesting? Then keep on reading the article.

Let’s prove this with an example. Let’s say you have a conference to attend in 2 days and want to get your business card designed, printed and shipped to you as early as possible. Now this is what happens when you go for a traditional printer:

  • Contact the printer and give them the details of your business card and possibly an idea of how you want your business card to look like.
  • If your printer does not offer a catalog of business card designs to choose from, you have to trust his designing team to design one specifically for you.
  • The designers in your printer’s team get started on designing your business card with a software program such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop.
  • They send you the design for proofing in an image format i.e. JPG or PDF. That you can open and proof read.
  • Now begin the rounds of corrections and proofing until you are satisfied with the design of your business card.
  • Once design is ready, you approve the print order and ask for invoice including printing and shipping. Remember, you have to pay for the hard work done by the design team as well.
  • Once invoice is paid, your order is scheduled in the print job queue.
  • Once printed and packaged, your order is dispatched to your address.

Hmm..quite lengthy. And chances that you get your business cards before you set off for a conference are slim.
On the other hand, let’s think of a web-to-print scenario:

  • You go to your printer’s web-to-print store and look for business cards.
  • You are presented with an online catalog of professionally designed business cards divided into several business categories to make it easy for you to locate designs of your interest.
  • You choose the design that best fits your profession and taste, or choose to design your card on your own provided you have that creative instinct.
  • Just fill-in your information in the business card template and download print-proof in an instant.
  • Satisfied with the design, you place the order online specifying the delivery time as per your urgency, and pay. And you are done!

Pretty easy and fast. And at the end, you can have a sigh of relief that you will get your business cards before you set off for the show.

For an example, on most of the popular web to print stores, you can get 500 full color business cards (2-sided with full bleeds) on 14pt Ultra-Thick Cardstock for $40. For a 3-day turnaround, you can get them for $30. But for the same specifications, it can cost you $130-$200+ for business cards at a traditional printer, and it will take you a week longer to receive them.

That’s the power of web-to-print. It makes the process faster and efficient for printers thus reducing the in-house cost and delivering customer orders at very competitive rates. On the other hand, it empowers the customers to design, proof and place orders online as per their convenience and urgency.

So, web to print delivers all 3 key aspects of any business being FAST, GOOD and CHEAP.

If you are a printer or print service provider, don’t wait. Call our sales team and get to know the advantages and benefits of adopting our web-to-print software and revolutionize your printing business with ever growing sales charts.

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