Start Your Own Custom Product Printing Business with LiveArt. Part Two.

Now that you have planned how your online web presence website will be it’s time to think of the online design tool for your customers. This post would be more like a checklist to go through before looking on the online design tools market and choosing a right tool for your custom product printing business.

First off, you need to decide which products you will be printing on. Visualize, at least in mind, how the blank online design template would look. As the primary goal of online design tool is proofing the custom design made on a product, people should see clearly where and how design will be applied. Try to avoid low quality or images that are showing product as 3D.

Next, once you have decided the on products, think of design printing process that will be used for certain product, product line or the solution in all. The printing process will affect another two important aspects for online product designer system, such as pricing calculation and applying online design restrictions.

Example: a tshirt online designer allows user to prepare design on front of the tshirt (front blank image prepared, check) and order it for screenprinting. From experience, you know that such process requires colors counting to be accurate and the price to be calculated as variable that will depend on product, number of colors and quantity ordered. Additionally, a user should be restricted to upload full color images like photos as they would require completely different process.

Finally, think of how user will be able to select additional options, which of them should be present in designer, and which could be included into checkout. Therefore, the final checklist would look as follows:

• Blank product templates - prepared and checked.
• Design printing process - decision made and documented.
• Pricing calculation process - documented.
• Online design restrictions - outlined and documented.
• Additional options - checked.
• Checkout, administration, maintenance - requirements documented.

Having a summary document with the above, you’ll be able to select the applicable solution easily on the market, whether this is hosted system which you can rent on monthly payments basis or an out of the box component, which can be customized per your requirements.

You are welcome to share ideas and let us know if this post was useful. Share your stories to us!