WhatTheyThink

Premium Commentary & Analysis

Collaborative Commerce: The Necessary Evolution of Web-to-Print

Web-to-print technology and the customer facing resources working in print today need to evolve together so we can support online “collaborative commerce”: a procurement process that requires collaboration between the buyer and the seller.

Monday, November 24, 2014

Customer preference for self-service is growing, yet most printers run their businesses as if their customers prefer to interact with them for every order (full-service). If you don’t believe me, read this great article in Harvard Business Review, Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You.

Running your company as if customers want to talk to you isn’t just expensive; it’s potentially undermining your efforts to build longer-term loyalty.” Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff, Harvard Business Review, July 28, 2010

Today the print industry uses e-mail, phone, web forms (e.g. request a quote), and FTP as the tools of choice for managing what I call “collaborative commerce”; a procurement process that requires a back-and-forth (collaboration) between buyer and seller in order to finalize specifications and pricing. The majority of print buying requires “collaborative commerce.” The tools we use to conduct this business process today are familiar, essentially free from a technology standpoint, and grossly sub-optimal for the following reasons:


Continue reading your article
with a WhatTheyThink membership.

WhatTheyThink Annual Membership

Less than $4/week.

Get unlimited access to in-depth commentary and analysis covering the latest trends, emerging technologies, operational strategies, and key events across every segment of today's printing industry.

Stay informed. Stay competitive. Stay ahead.
WhatTheyThink Day Pass

$5 for 24 hours

Unlimited access to all of WhatTheyThink. Get your Day Pass

Already a member?
Sign In

About Jennifer Matt

Jennifer Matt is the managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Print Software section as well as President of Web2Print Experts, Inc. a technology-independent print software consulting firm helping printers with web-to-print and print MIS solutions.

Recent Articles from Jennifer Matt

Utilizing CRM Tools to Sell Print

A CRM tool needs to deliver value to your sales team in the form of time savings or differentiation in how fast they can get quotes out to their customers. Read More

Manual Steps are Piling Up in Customer Service

When the power dynamic is uneven across the functional areas of your print business, more powerful areas (production and sales) tend to shift manual steps to the less powerful areas (customer service). Read More

Stepping Over Dollars to Pick Up Pennies

We tend to discount the time of our full-time employees because we are paying for it already—looking at them like sunk costs. So, when we ask them to do things that are non-value add (aka a complete waste of their time), we don’t see it as a cost. Well, it has real costs. Read More

Deciding What’s Important

In a print plant, it is easy to come to work and fall into the drama of getting jobs out the door. There is always something you can focus on in your day-to-day work life. The art of moving your business forward happens when you direct your focus to areas of your business that you can impact the most. Read More

This Plant Wouldn’t Run Without Me

In conversations with a label converter recently, the General Manager told me that more than once in the last few years key employees had voiced the core belief that “this plant wouldn’t run without me.” Now, you can take this statement a lot of different ways. My initial reaction is concern for the business because the employee that says this is both likely a key player and potentially a risk. Read More