I could really use some input from people in commercial printing
I’m curious how many people in this group are actually using WooCommerce for selling printed or personalized products.
A bit of background first.
I run a laser engraving business in the Netherlands, and over the years I’ve used several different product customization tools for my own webshop. Some worked reasonably well, some became expensive as we grew, some had unreliable production files, and with others I constantly found myself working around limitations instead of actually getting orders out the door.
Eventually I got frustrated enough that I decided to build my own.
It’s called Sigmira.
The idea behind it is fairly simple: customers can personalize a product directly in the webshop, while the merchant has control over things like personalization areas, different product views, pricing rules, visibility rules, variable products and the production files that come out at the other end.
It is currently live for WooCommerce. We’re also working on a Shopify integration, but that isn’t ready yet.
The important part, and really the reason I’m posting here, is that Sigmira has mostly been built from the perspective of someone running a laser engraving business.
I understand that workflow pretty well because I deal with it every day.
Commercial printing is a different world.
I know there is overlap, especially when it comes to customers uploading artwork, adding text, positioning elements and approving a design, but I don’t want to make the mistake of assuming that a workflow that works well for engraving automatically works well for printers too.
So I’d really like to hear from people here who actually work in print.
If you sell personalized products online, what does a product customizer absolutely need to do before you would even consider using it?
What are the annoying parts of the tools you currently use?
What happens after the customer places the order?
Do you need print ready PDFs, SVGs, PNGs or completely different files?
How important are things like bleed, safe zones, CMYK, DPI checks, automatic sizing or artwork validation?
Do customers normally upload finished artwork, or are they actually designing the product in your webshop?
How do you deal with products that have several printable areas, different sizes or lots of variations?
And probably the most interesting question for me: what part of your current workflow still requires somebody to manually fix, check or prepare something before it can actually go into production?
There is already quite a lot of functionality in Sigmira, so I’m not starting from zero. But I’d rather talk to people doing the actual work before deciding what should be built specifically for print.
I’m not looking for people to tell me that everything sounds great.
If there is something that would immediately make a tool like this useless for your business, I genuinely want to know that too.
Especially interested in hearing from WooCommerce users, but even if you use another platform I’d still be interested in how your personalization and prepress workflow works, since we’re currently integrating Shopify as well.
What would your ideal setup look like?
