A lot of our prospects and customers ask us how to market their web-to-print solutions. More specifically: what should they charge for it. There is no clear-cut best solution. It depends heavily of the audience of your web2print solutions. The following gives an overview of some of the possibilities for business to business web to print applications.
Types of Fees
For starters, there is the possibility that you don’t charge your customers anything. You might do this to fill a printing press, offer superior service to the customer, attract new customers, …
If you do charge, there are many ways to do this:
• start cost for the project
• periodical fee for use of the system. (E.g. monthly or yearly)
• start cost for new configuration/content. (E.g.: new InDesign templates, new users, new assets, ...)
• usage fees. (E.g.: amount of users, amount of assets, amount of orders in the web to print application, ...)
• cost for additional functionalities (development)
Digital Asset Management
Especially for asset management, usage fees are very popular. Even more: they make sense. A user with 50Gb of used disk space will consume more server resources that one with 20Mb. And he will also have more use for an asset management system.
Content Management
Content management services (eg: hosting a website) might be charged on a usage base, but typically consist more of a monthly fee (sometimes even including future configurations/changes in the form of a SLA). But if you want to provide content management services to a larger audience, you might decide to price the monthly fee based on some types of usage (eg: the amount of Mb that the site contains, the amount of pages, the amount of visits, etc…).
Web-To-Print Solutions
When considering to charge your customers for the use of a web-to-print application it’s very important to realize that a lot of your competitors will be offering similar services free of charge. At least when it concerns usage. Because using a web-to-print application means more prints.
Obviously for most projects the operator time will be charged for startup and configuration costs. But actual usage often pays for itself. In cases where the end-result is not printed (eg: ads, or large formats which can’t be handled by you), usage fees are more common. But even then they are sometimes considered to be a free added value. The use of e-cards is quite often offered for free. It doesn’t directly result in more revenue, but it does increase the usage and acceptance of the web2print site with the dealers or agents who have to use it. And more logged in users will probably result in more prints.