Top 5 Benefits of Web-to-print Offer for Packaging Businesses

Abhishek Agarwal
5 min readOct 4, 2023

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With the growing demand for packaging in the e-commerce and increasing population of the world, many packaging industries have been meeting the increasing packaging demand with Industry 4.0 and web-to-print automation.

While automation machinery helps automate the packaging production processes, web-to-print provides design and pre-production workflow automation capabilities to the packaging industry. Along with process automation, web-to-print and its abilities of seamless integrations and advanced functions have helped packaging manufacturers with increased collaboration, and traceability across departments and others.

While the automation market reached a whopping $64.84 billion in 2021, expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.85% during 2022–2030 and reach $108 billion! This indicates that with the growing demand and increasing labor problems, digitization and automation have become the need of the hour.

To help packaging businesses understand how they cannot only automate certain design workflows but also create seamless processes and ensure delightful customer experiences during the entire pre-production process, this blog covers the top 5 benefits that Web-to-print businesses bring to the packaging businesses!

Top 5 Benefits Web-to-print Offer for Packaging Businesses

Web-to-print technology has revolutionized the packaging industry, offering numerous advantages to businesses involved in packaging design and production. Here are the top 5 benefits that web-to-print offers for packaging businesses:

1) 3D Preview: Revolutionizing Packaging Design Visualization:

One of the biggest hesitances of online packaging orders previously was the lack of visualization in the designing processes. Since customers couldn’t understand how their final product would look, they preferred physical packaging design processes.

But, with packaging design software , not only can customers design their own packaging; they can know exactly how their product will look with the 3D preview for packaging designs. F web-to-print solutions provide a live preview of the packaging designs to the customers and thus provide a realistic view of their final product improving the overall experience and converting the challenge into an experience-enhancing function!

Along with design preview, the 3D preview of packaging designs also ensures minimal design errors as customers can check each aspect of their packaging design with zoom in and zoom out features and ensure that their design is as per their expectations. All packaging businesses have to care about is the quality of production and that would result in increased customer satisfaction as they get their desired product, desired design and that too in minimal turnaround time!

2) On-the-Fly Die-line: Streamlining Proofing and Pre-Production:

With the increasing demand for custom packaging designs, conventional businesses that do not have web-to-print or packaging design tools had to interpret customer demands and make product die-line diagrams with flattened pictures using graphic designers and caricatures.

The traditional die-line process not only limits the design creativity, but also increases iterations due to manual efforts and results in customer irritation as well as increased design turnaround time. With web-to-print software integrated into packaging platforms, customers can design their packaging in real-time by creating their own die-line templates!

With this feature, packaging businesses can digitize their entire die-line process and ensure streamlined proofing which not only reduces the manual effort, but ensures error-free designing with an accelerated timeline. Explores how packaging designers streamline the artwork creation and prototyping process .

3) Print Ready: Accelerating Pre-Press Preparation

Another drawback of online packaging design for the packaging business was the lack of specifications in the print file. Due to the lack of instructions or vague instructions, packaging production often leads to problems where it led to wrong productions or increased iterations with the customer in the pre-production process.

To solve this problem, when packaging businesses use web-to-print with online packaging design it comes with print-ready file capability! This means that once customers are done designing their templates, they can generate a print-ready packaging file in any format such as PNG, JPG, PDF and others along with settings that serve the unique requirements of packaging printing machines.

Not only does web-to-print define the design areas and cuts, but with hot folder configuration in Web-to-print, customers can directly send the file and packaging businesses can just send the print-ready files to the desired destination of machines.

4) Ready Boxes: Seamless Integration from Design to Production

For customers that have standard box demands and have defined requirements, for such customers’ web-to-print not only accelerates the design process, but it eliminates the requirement of the design process with the ready-to-order packaging boxes feature.

Many web-to-print software tags along various standard packaging box designs that customers can choose, define the design areas and just push to production with print-ready files. This helps packaging businesses gain seamless reorders and delightful customer experiences for those who have standard demands!

5) Online Pricing and Checkout: Enhancing Customer Convenience:

Conventionally, the packaging price was one of the biggest reasons for order abandonment as packaging businesses couldn’t provide the price till all the customizations are finalized and that often lead to customers leaving the designs altogether due to the price disparity.

Web-to-print solutions provide real-time quotations as customers choose the customization and thus, it allows customers to design their packaging in their desired budget! This not only solves the pricing problem, but it also ensures that customers make an informed decision and create their desired product at their desired pricing which ensures an increased lead conversion ratio!

Conclusion:

In a nutshell, with web-to-print solutions on their side, packaging businesses can not only introduce process automation, but also ensure increased lead conversion, customer satisfaction and reduced administrative costs as well as accelerated order timeline!

For those packaging businesses who wish to serve the fast-paced market and have a long-term sustainable business goal in the competitive market, web-to-print is an essential capability for them that enables them to serve the diverse markets while improving the entire customer experience during the entire pre-production process.

Rethinking The Future (RTF) is a Global Platform for Architecture and Design. RTF through more than 100 countries around the world provides an interactive platform of highest standard acknowledging the projects among creative and influential industry professionals.

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Abhishek Agarwal

Abhishek Agarwal, CMO & Co-Founder of Design’N’Buy, Mobicommerce & OhoShop, comes with more than 14 years of experience in Web-to-Print & IT.