In an earlier article entitled Web-to-Print: The Best or Worst Investment?, we discussed a survey that considered the importance of various software investments. When the respondents to this survey were asked about web-to-print, 140 respondents considered this to be one of their best investments while 40 considered it to be one of their worst. Although web-to-print technology was often considered to be a good investment because it can help increase sales and profitability, some respondents considered it a poor investment because they had difficulty motivating customers and staff members to embrace it.

This particular survey included commercial printers as well as in-plant respondents, and there were similarities as well as differences between these two groups. For example, both groups responded similarly when asked about increasing sales and profitability. Furthermore, respondents were generally optimistic about their businesses—almost 40% of print service providers expected a 1% - 9% revenue gain this year, while another 20% expected a 10% - 19% gain. When asked about their top challenges, however, commercial printers reported more problems with customer adoption and customer training. Meanwhile, in-plants reported more difficulties with template design and addressing overlooked features.

Because of these differences, we decided to dig deeper into the unique ways that commercial printers and in-plants use web-to-print technology. InfoTrends’ recent research report entitled U.S. Production Software Investment Survey 2015 offers insight into the experiences of commercial printers and corporate in-plants that use web-to-print solutions. Of the 120 respondents that qualified for participation in this survey, 77 were commercial printers and 43 were corporate in-plants.