As a traditional print shop your business has been built on relationships that you have nurtured for many years, but like many businesses, most of your revenue is generated by the top 5 to 10% of your customers and the rest is generated by the larger proportion who are typically the low-revenue, casual print buyer — also known as the typical online shopper. For the past two to four years, etailers (companies who sell retail products online) have posted double-digit growth in their online stores — and it’s not just the big box retailers such as Walmart and BestBuy, you can buy a car online, a house online, and, yes, even print online and those markets are showing phenomenal growth as well.
It’s easy to see why you would want to enter this market. What a great way reduce the touches for a group that doesn’t generate the majority of your revenue, but who are still very important to your business.
As appealing as low-maintenance online shoppers are, adding eCommerce to your company’s business model is no easy decision. It’s much more than simply adding a shopping cart for print products to your company’s web site. If you want success online, you must market online — and for many, that’s a much bigger and longer-term challenge than selecting a web-to-print solution.
Most web-to-print buyers look at Vistaprint’s model and believe that if they build an online-print system that customers will flock to their site and that they can capture a big share of the online shoppers in their area — or across the web.
Vistaprint does have a great model, and one to which you should aspire, but you should also be realistic. You have a small- to fair-sized market; one that has sustained a steady revenue or even grown over the last decade or so. If you could garner your store another 4500 print jobs a day, would you actually have the resources, manpower, and equipment to produce those jobs? Probably not. So, given your current business strengths, what can you sustain and what can you do to get there?
The maximum throughput for your shop is probably a number that comes easily to you, what you can do to grow an online store to reach that number may not be.
Adding a web-to-print solution is smart. It will give you a competitive advantage and the opportunity to capture new customers and offer new services to existing customers, but keep in mind that if you do not market your online solution online, the only people buying from your site will be those who stumble across it by sheer accident. It is not likely that you will reach an online customer through strictly offline events (direct mail and such). To reach them, you need to meet them on their turf: the web.
There are many great web-to-print solutions but generally speaking these companies are specialists in building software, not on bringing visitors to your site, selling print to that visitor, or even in marketing the online solution they build. You are specialists in printing and probably not in ecommerce. Spider Trainers is the intermediary: decades of experience in print, go-to-market strategies, and capitalizing on all that the web has to offer for online-marketing opportunities.
As you consider or launch your web-to-print solution, remember that it’s not build it and they will come. It’s build it, tell everyone, and lots will come — and many will come back again and again.
For more information about Spider Trainers’ services, call 303 862 8951, email info@spidertrainers.com, or complete our Spider Trainers’ contact form.