If you are shopping for a web-to-print solution, you have business challenges you are looking to solve. I am supremely more interested in learning about what you think those business challenges are than looking at a spreadsheet of required features. What’s the difference?

What I find is that people make feature lists, and generally the feature lists prescribe solutions rather than describe business challenges. In the prescription of solutions, you dictate a specific solution and then assume the solution solves your challenges. This isn’t always the case; often a feature on a spreadsheet doesn’t tell the story of how the business challenge is solved but describes a button or control within the application which is misunderstood because it requires context to properly understand. I have heard the following statement more than a thousand times: “the vendor said they supported this during the sales process.”

Web-to-print solutions on the market today solve specific business challenges. The primary big picture challenge that web-to-print solutions address is the need for a community (often geographically distributed) to place orders for print on demand, variable (versioned and personalized), or inventory/fulfillment products online. Maybe the first question when shopping for software should be, what business challenges does your software solve? Or, better yet, present a list of the top three most important business challenges you have and ask the vendor how their software solves them.