Web to print is a powerful tool. It allows printers to streamline operations and improve customer experience. Still, there’s some nuance to web to print. If you don’t get the balance right, you could end up losing customers.
Printing is a relationship business, but the automated capabilities of some web to print software can, in some situations, cause relationships with customers to quickly lose meaning. That’s why PageDNA provides a multi-tenant eCommerce platform approach to help printers treat their customers as unique organizations, each deserving special representation and treatment.
What Is A Multi-Tenant eCommerce Platform?
A great way to imagine multi-tenancy for web to print is to picture an apartment building. Everyone enters through the same door, but once they get to their apartment, it’s entirely personalized to them. Similarly, multi-tenancy allows a printer to offer each of its customers a unique landing page for users to browse, shop, and order from.
Rather than giving every client the same experience, multi-tenancy allows printers to build distinct and specialized catalogs for each client!
PageDNA’s View of the Commercial Print Market
Printing is a person-first business. Success relies on creating strong relationships with clients and providing them with carefully curated services that fit their needs. Unfortunately, many commercial printers we meet don’t understand where the largest profit margins are in the commercial print sales market.
While selling to Fortune 500 companies and individuals with a home office may seem like the best strategy, selling to other small-to-medium-sized businesses is the most advantageous option for commercial print companies.
That’s because business-to-business (B2B) sales are the most lucrative in commercial printing. They’re also one of the largest categories to sell to. There are almost 6 million businesses in North America that have a logo, a brand, and a few employees – or more. Most importantly, they want to buy from people.
To sell to other businesses, it is essential to build relationships with clients and give them personalized experiences. Serving them requires a unique approach, which PageDNA provides through multi-tenancy.
The Key to Multi-Tenancy: Division
PageDNA’s multi-tenancy allows every B2B customer (and even retail shoppers) to log in at the same place but have a completely different experience. How does this work? Through one of our most distinguishing features: Divisions.
The Divisions feature ensures each customer or customer group feels special and that their unique needs are handled. With these capabilities, each customer gets a unique ordering page where they see:
- Their logo at the top of the page
- Their own users and roles
- Unique products and configuration options
- E.g., business cards and their imprinted locations
- Different options for shipment, payment, and taxes
- Approval options
If you’re still having trouble imagining just how Divisions works, the case study below provides more detail on the efficiencies of a multi-tenant eCommerce platform and the advantages it brings not just to customers, but to your print operations team, too.
Multi-Tenant eCommerce Platform: Renaissance Printing Case Study
Renaissance Printing is an employee-owned company that uses PageDNA for its web to print solutions. They have over 200 clients in their PageDNA system, ranging from the pediatrics department at a large hospital to pet supplies stores to local governments. Each customer has unique needs, products, templates, and users – and each has its own Division inside PageDNA.
How It Works
When any of these clients or their users visit the Renaissance Printing webpage, they log in using their details and are immediately taken to their organization’s personalized ordering page. The pediatrics department staff will be taken to their department’s landing page with their forms, the marketing executive at the pet supplies store will be taken to their specific products, and so on.
Once a customer is on their unique landing page, Renaissance Printing provides them with a catalog of products tailored to their organization.
Clients (the organizations themselves) can customize which materials their team can order, from forms and business cards to wide-format posters, custom orders, and more. Renaissance can also upload templates and save them to that customer’s portal – a feature unique to multi-tenancy. With a multi-tenant eCommerce platform, you upload a template once, and it’s there forever for your customers to use.
Users personalize these templates further by adding their name, title, contact information, and proof. They can also pay directly through the PageDNA system. Clients can even use the Approval feature to route orders through an approving manager before sending them into the web to print flow. And, each customer can have their own approver.
One Place for Everything
While multi-tenancy provides hundreds of unique experiences for clients, Renaissance Printing is able to control everything from the same place. They only need to adjust material prices or change hourly rates in one place, and it will update to their hundreds of B2B customers and retail clients all at once.
Turning B2C Into B2B
PageDNA’s multi-tenancy feature isn’t just for satisfying current customers. It also allows Renaissance to turn their individual retail B2C (business-to-customer) customers into long-term, lucrative B2B clients!
When individual customers order from the “walk up” or retail catalog, Renaissance’s sales team analyzes these orders for signs that a firm could benefit from multi-tenancy. For example, if a seemingly small, one-time customer orders multiple sets of business cards where they upload their own “flat” artwork files, the Renaissance team will reach out and ask if the customer requires more long-term print solutions. For example, Renaissance can offer a template for that business card that locks in branding and makes it faster and easier to order next time.
And just like that, they’ve converted what seemed to be a B2C client into a B2B account that feels uniquely supported – having their own template and even imprint addresses ready to go the next time they log in!
Build Your Multi-Tenant eCommerce Platform with PageDNA
By using PageDNA’s unique multi-tenancy capabilities, Renaissance Printing personalized its web to print operation. Walk-up customers and long-term B2B customers can now log in at the same place yet be quickly taken to their own unique experience.
Equally as important, PageDNA allowed Renaissance Printing to treat each customer the way they want to be treated without adding unnecessary and expensive overhead into the management of their eCommerce system. All of this was done through the power of multi-tenancy.
You, too, can build a site that works for walk-up customers and allows you to convert them to lucrative B2B clients, all under the same storefront – with PageDNA’s multi-tenancy. One door. One log-in. Hundreds of unique experiences.
Ready to get started? Schedule a demo with a member of our team today.
