From Business Cards to Billboards: Why the Web-to-Print Business Model Still Draws Debate

Online printers have captured a sizable share of standardized commercial print such as business cards and letterhead in recent years. When a company can process a high daily volume of comparable jobs, it usually signals strong use of proofing—an advantage built on technical know-how in data preparation, positioning, prepress, and shipping. Wide-format and advertising printing business models are similar yet not identical. For small-format items like business cards, the edge for an online printer can lie in making smart use of proofs and assembling print data into production-ready PDFs. In certain cases, web-enabled wide-format and advertising printing can accommodate final-product data from as many as 100 different sources.

Advertising products span an enormous format range, from mouse pads to massive outdoor billboards. The first challenge is systematizing a vast array of possible end products and then identifying the profitable ones; after that comes standardizing them as much as possible so prices remain within what the market will bear. The next question is what kind of partnership structure makes sense when partners must produce items you cannot.

Offset vs. Digital: Which Route?

True web-to-print, from a technical standpoint, should mean a continuous data stream: job data ought to move from order intake to dispatch with as much automation as possible. Every manual touchpoint chips away at margin. In commercial sheet-fed offset, however, this may be little more than a substrate-selection step; in LFP and advertising printing, the picture is far messier. That is why offset presses remain so comfortable with poster work. Heidelberg’s Speedmaster XL162 handles a 1190×1620 mm format, while the KBA Rapida205 covers 1490×2050 mm, and both can print cardboard up to 1.6 mm thick.

This shows that conventional offset workflows still have a role. Yet when advertising materials or large posters vary widely, the technology set becomes fragmented. Substrates such as textiles, films, and glass enter the mix, requiring different machines—from flexographic and screen presses to large-format inkjet printers. These variables must be catalogued carefully so that data stays accurate and the entire process runs error-free, delivering the customer’s required size and quality on the specified substrate. At the same time, printers must keep service breadth wide enough to satisfy clients and stop them from defecting to competitors.

Different printing vendors are fragmenting the market further. At one end, traditional web-to-print service providers have widened their offerings into LFP and advertising printing; at another, many companies deliver an even broader range of wide-format advertising print work. Beyond them, container-printing specialists such as glass printers—and providers of 100-square-meter value-added print services—are also in the game.

Business Model Comes First

Regardless, the business logic behind web-to-print is critical to success and to other operational areas. Industry leader Flyeralarm.com invested years in developing and refining its back-end software. Today, customers contacting its call service center can check the live status of production jobs at any time; the system automatically flags error messages, including font-embedding failures; and product distribution across Flyeralarm’s production sites is largely automated.

That said, there is no need to build everything in-house. A wide range of web-to-print solutions is available, and many can support LFP effectively through add-on modules. Smooth operation of the customer relationship interface and inventory management system is equally important. Alternatively, a company can ask its software vendor to create proprietary open-interface modules tailored to connect with web-to-print software.

In essence, a web-to-print application should let customers choose process elements such as run length, materials, and product composition, then convert their print specifications and data. The back end must verify customer details and pass them into the CRM and inventory systems; it also needs to check print-data consistency and feed that into the product system. To enable online design or editing of product text and image data, web-to-print should provide the relevant add-on modules. Visual simulations such as WYSIWYG can also help—previewing a large banner on a building exterior, for instance, is far more intuitive. All of this indicates that the commercial form of web-to-print need not be an obstacle for laggards in wide-format and advertising printing.

—Reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn); original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-361967.html