What can your website do for you in 2025?

When someone in the industry asked us recently about our predictions for what 2025 will bring, we didn’t need to think particularly long or hard about the answer. So many of our conversations at the moment point to one trend - without a doubt, 2025 is going to be a big year for software integration and automation.

It makes sense that as more and more print businesses come to rely on software, people are also getting more savvy about what they want their software to deliver for them. It’s no longer about having one product to do one job; printers are looking to their software setups to help them reduce the mundane elements of their workload and free them up to focus on tasks that deliver real value.

We’re certainly seeing a lot of that in many e-commerce implementations that we’re working on with customers. They don’t just want an e-commerce website that can take orders. They want an e-commerce website that can take orders, enable personalisation or customisations, integrate seamlessly with their production workflow, both in-house and through outsourcing, and then take payment or generate an invoice with as little manual intervention required as possible.

The drivers behind this are coming from two directions - a business need to streamline operations to squeeze every possible drop of profit from each transaction, and end-user demand from customers who, whether they are consumers or business buyers, are all increasingly accustomed to operating in an always-on, all-digital transactional environment.

As a result, print businesses, and some non-print businesses too, are increasingly looking for new ways to sell print anywhere, anytime, including outside of traditional office hours and beyond their in-house capabilities. The growing number of online print marketplaces allowing print businesses and other ‘makers’ to tap into the consumer market without needing to establish their own direct-to-consumer offering really serves to illustrate this.

Print, signage and design businesses’ websites today need to be so much more than an online leaflet listing their capabilities and showcasing their plant list. So what should you be asking of your website in 2025?

E-commerce is no longer a nice-to-have in the print industry. With research by Smithers suggesting that web-to-print will account for more than 7% of global print volumes by 2028, it is vital that every print business’ website can facilitate user-friendly print buying. For many, that entails sufficient automation that orders can be placed, prepared, produced and dispatched with as little manual intervention as possible.

With ever-increasing demands on print businesses’ time, automating as many mundane and repetitive tasks as possible can make a big difference to the bottom line. To enable this, it is important that online order systems integrate as seamlessly as possible with everything from job management software and invoicing processes through to management information systems.

With personalisation and customisability increasing the value of print, many print businesses are looking to these both to increase their profitability and retain customers. And with many of today’s print buyers expecting online customisation options as standard, print businesses are finding that they need to offer at least basic individualisation features as part of their online ordering process.

If your website can’t do everything you need it to, then perhaps your New Year’s resolution should be to make sure that it can. This means committing to the time investment it deserves; in order to get the most out of your site and meet the growing demands for personalisation and customisation, you will need to take the time to really hone your site. If you’re willing and able, there is no doubt that it will prove fruitful as you tap into the lucrative opportunities in this area of print.

Like so many other New Year’s resolutions, it doesn’t have to be difficult if you start with a single step. If you’re ready to take that step to find out how your website can make your business processes easier and help you sell print anywhere in 2025, book a demo.