While you can go with a free open source solution or purchase a product that suits your needs, there is always an option of subscribing to a prepaid service, such as popular Deconetwork.com. Such services became very attractive as they give shop owners a very easy way to start. While most of the products allow try-before-buy experience, having ability to try the service before subscribing is a very good incentive, especially if you don’t have to care about own hosting infrastructure. What’s more, you can always unsubscribe from the service whenever you prefer, or upgrade to more expensive plan as your business grows.

However, there is a downside to an online designer services which you personally cannot control. While these may not be as dangerous for small shops and startups, a middle to large enterprises should be aware of certain risks that come with moving their online design business into the cloud.

Hidden fees

Most of the online services offer a pay as you go scheme, trying to fit in a number of payments you cannot grasp while evaluating. There, along with certain monthly fee, adds up a transaction commission, necessity to pay in quarters rather than strictly monthly and insignificant discounts for loyal clients. Hidden fees became a normal fear of each shop owner from decoration industry when it comes to replenish the account.

Downtimes

If your online decoration shop is in the cloud, be prepared for downtimes which you won’t be control. While you can be confident in the host of your choice, with online services you would have to trust in system administrators of your vendor, thus not having opportunity to select one host or another and scale the website performance during high loads and seasons (Christmas, for instance).

No customization

Remember 1984 of Orwell’s, a unified society was an utopia and so is online decoration market today with hosted solution. To win your customer, your website should have good SEO and design, and stay easy for the customer and have streamlined fulfillment of the orders. At the same time, so can be your competitor’s who would use same service, same fonts, same templates and same website design! Once you are feeling pretty much confident with the settings of the service and like to be more unique, you suddenly bump the wall - you can’t go beyond standard features, templates and experience. SaaS services make customization not possible beyond most popular settings that will suit everyone.

On the contrary, a standalone ecommerce solution with integrated online product designer offers a full independence from fee changes or the above disadvantages.

One time license and no hidden fees!

Look for a product or service that clearly states and means all the TCO (total cost of ownership) required to start a website with online designer or integrate online designer with your existing website. For example, all of LiveArt products consist of one time license fee and there are no additional fees unless you prefer customizing your online design tool.

Unlimited options for customization

A standalone solution is always customizable. Built with open HTML and server code (e.g. such as .NET ASPX or PHP) it allows you, your technical team or anyone from freelance market to customize your website as you need it in specific business situation. This makes your business unique, flexible and always prepared to change!

No downtimes

With an ecommerce solution and host of your choice, you can always control reliability of your server performance. Being dependent on online services would also mean you trust them with host selection and stay sure they will bring their servers back up in time during high seasons.

The SaaS services are good for startups and companies that would like to have a cheap and fast start of their decoration ecommerce. The low TCO of hosted solution is a good start to test a strategy or quickly collect orders from a fair using the solution as a kiosk. On the other hand, be prepared to look or develop a standalone portal as your business grows and needs to stay flexible on the market.

Gallery of business cards. Courtesy of Zazzle.com

Since early releases, we have been frequently asked if LiveArt HTML5 Online Product Designer tool could be used to offer users selection of pre-designed templates from template gallery. The answer is yes, LiveArt HTML5 can be integrated in a way to allow users start with some ready design rather than blank template.

The blank template are normally plain product images which are loaded to designer. Whether they represent a t-shirt, a banner, or sign, its template can be loaded on the background of working area to show where customer can place their design.

Now for the pre-made templates, a certain design should be created first and saved into your eCommerce website before it can be offered to the user. Technically, a saved pre-made template consists of descriptive information like title and date and the template file itself which is either XML or SVG. The advanced templates may contain information on whether a certain area could be moved or not and which parts should be filled with text fields. Depending on the eCommerce platform of your choice, the ability to save pre-made templates should be developed during the integration of online product design tool.

Next, a page with ready templates should be populated somewhere on your website. In the simplest case, this can be just a page with a list of available templates. Each template record may constitute of image, title, and stay linked to product designer with a certain parameter, indicating which template should be loaded.

You can always extend the functionality of your catalog templates by adding tools like search, categorization and showing additional average pricing of the pre-designed product. A quick search would be essential for user to locate their idea quickly. Respectively, usable and quick navigation would shorten the time between moment user came to your website and the moment user will be checking out with a modified pre-made template.

As users became more technologically savvy, the online personalization tools offered more and more features. At a certain point, they almost started to resemble professional software like Adobe Photoshop. Such tools offered users lots of buttons and options increasing both complexities of UI and CPU load at the same time. The online design tool right for the user had to choose now between sophisticated tools on the one hand and simplicity and load speed at the other.

The mobile interfaces for iOS, Android, Windows 8 devices came along with the simple concept that had to exist in all applications people would install. Respectively, users would expect same experience from HTML-based web applications for online product customization. The fact of expected simplicity has shifted the paradigm of complex and sophisticated features for the sake of clean and neat UI that would allow customers to quickly apply custom text and images to the product and checkout without lengthy and complex processes.

Are you still using old and complex online personalization tools? Need a replacement to quick and neat online product designer that would work on both desktop PC and all mobile devices? Request a demo today to get advice for the right online design software for your website.

The common format which is offered by most of the online designer software vendors is PDF. In the marketing messages this is communicated as being an applicable format for both backend office as proof and production for printing. However, how does a printing company knows if a manifested information about PDF would be of sufficient quality? What are key aspects to evaluate about the output from online designer?

The first thing we normally do at LiveArt is requesting an example of pre made design from our client. This could be an Illustrator, CorelDraw or an EPS file we can open and decide, whether additional tweaking might be required for our standard vector PDF output. Normally, there’s a standard set of tweaks which are requested more frequently than others. These can be split in groups:

  - Format. While the common format used over the output is PDF, sometimes the printing requires different suitable formats like TIFF or EPS. In such case certain additional development might be required to let this happen.

  - Resolution. Most of the resolution questions are covered with the vector PDF LiveArt is providing as this allows rasterizing the mockup to the required resolution, whether it is 300 or 600 dpi. If the required format is raster, the resolution should be indicated explicitly in LiveArt Online Product Designer configuration files; 

  - Bleeds. In most cases the output mockup does not require any additional bleeds placement. Yet still, the software has to support ability to place extra layer of the necessary bleed areas. This type of output files modification is popular in signs printing.

  - Post-processing. The post-processing may include application of raster filters to output raster image, including product image into design mockup, put additional information directly into mockup, e.g. SKU and product color in text.

Taking output image requirements into account might be the most important part of the online design software. So when deciding about the vendor of online design software, make sure they are totally ready to match your business needs for online design output.