By Pratik Shah, Creative head, PrintXpand
Three in four UK print companies employed fewer than ten people in 2024, according to figures from the British Printing Industries Federation. That number ought to shape how a print business chooses an online product design tool. It rarely does. Most buying advice looks at what the shopper sees, which means the canvas, the clipart library, the fonts and the 3D preview. A shopper spends a few minutes on that screen. Your staff will spend years working behind it, and in a business of eight people, those hours come straight out of somebody’s week.
So this guide starts from the other side of the screen.
The Customer Uses It for Minutes. Your Staff Use It for Years.
Every product in a design tool has to be built before a customer can touch it. Somebody draws the print areas on each side and sets the bleed and safe lines. They upload mockup photos, choose which colours are allowed, mark which parts of a template can be edited, and tie each design choice to a price. Then the catalogue moves on. A supplier discontinues a colour. A corporate client changes its logo in March and expects every saved design to follow.
You won’t see any of this in a demo. The vendor shows you a product that one of their own people spent an afternoon preparing, and it looks effortless because the effort happened off camera.
The sums are not complicated. Say one product takes 25 minutes to set up properly and you carry 300 of them: that’s 125 hours of work before a single customer opens the designer. At ten minutes a product it’s 50 hours. For a small shop, that gap is worth more than any number of extra fonts, and I’d weigh it above almost everything on the vendor’s feature page.
Write Down Your Awkward Products Before You Book a Demo
Before speaking to anyone, list the five products in your catalogue that are hardest to personalise. A hoodie printed on the chest and down one sleeve is a common one. So is a mug whose wraparound print has to stop short of the handle. Folded or die-cut items belong on the list, as does team kit with a different name and number on every shirt. If you sell to businesses, add the business card template that a client’s staff must not be able to break.
Vendors nearly always demo a t-shirt. T-shirts are easy. Your list is how you move the conversation from their easiest product to your hardest one.
Think about next year as well. In our experience, DTG shops almost always launch with front-only printing and add back and sleeve zones once a few hundred orders have gone through. Ask how adding a print zone to a live product works. Is it a setting you switch on, or a rebuild of the whole product with its saved designs?
Run the Trial With Your Own Staff
The single most useful thing you can do during a trial is hand one of your awkward products to a member of staff, ask them to set it up from scratch without the vendor’s help, and time them.
Tasks worth timing:
- Set up a new product with two print areas and a choice of colours.
- Change a price rule so a second print location adds a fixed charge.
- Add a new colour variant to a product that’s already live.
- Build a template for a business client, then lock the logo so customers can only edit their name and job title.
- Find a customer’s saved design from last month and put it through as a reorder.
Plenty of vendors will configure a trial around your own catalogue, and that’s worth accepting. PrintXpand, for one, sets up its online product design tool with a print business’s own products and print zones so the trial reflects the real range. Seeing your stock working is useful. But still insist on building at least one product yourself. After go-live, the vendor won’t be there every Tuesday when a new garment lands.
Watch the person doing it, not just the clock. Where do they get stuck? Which screen makes them open the help pages? That’s where your future support tickets will come from.
Templates and Locks Matter More for Business Customers
If you sell to companies, templates are where a design tool earns its keep. A firm ordering business cards for 40 staff wants every card to look identical, with only the name and contact details changing. That needs a template with locked elements. It also needs someone to look after it.
Ask who can edit a template. Can a client’s marketing manager update their own, or does every tweak come back to your team? And when the client rebrands, can you change the template once and have saved designs follow, or are you rebuilding them one at a time? The second answer is common, and it’s the one that turns a profitable account into an annoying one.
This won’t matter much for a shop selling mostly to the public. For one with a dozen corporate accounts it can decide the whole purchase.
Check What the Customer Is Agreeing To
There’s a UK legal wrinkle worth knowing here. Under regulation 28(1)(b) of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, goods made to the consumer’s specifications or clearly personalised are excluded from the usual 14-day cooling-off period. That sounds like good news for the printer. It’s only half the picture, because the Consumer Rights Act 2015 still requires goods to match their description.
For a personalised product bought online, the preview in your design tool is a large part of that description. A preview that places the artwork on a flattering lifestyle photo, bigger than the real print area allows, is setting up an argument you’ll probably lose. I’d rather see a plain mockup with the true print area marked than a beautiful one that overpromises.
Questions to Ask Before You Sign
- If we leave, can we export our product setups and templates in a usable form?
- Do customers’ saved designs come with us, or stay with the vendor?
- After go-live, who makes setup changes: our staff, or the vendor through a support ticket?
- Does it run on our current store platform, such as Shopify or WooCommerce, or do we have to move?
- What does it cost to add products or change pricing rules later?
- How do finished print files reach production?
The first two questions tend to get the vaguest answers. Push on them. Saved designs are what make reorders quick, and reorders are where a lot of personalised print margin sits.
When the Simple Option Is the Right One
Not every print business needs a deep admin panel. If you sell 15 products, all printed the same way, a basic plugin may be perfectly adequate. The setup work will be small whichever tool you pick, and you can spend the savings elsewhere.
The decision shifts once the catalogue grows or business clients start asking for templates. From that point the right online product design tool is the one your own staff can run without phoning the vendor.
At PrintXpand, the print businesses we see happiest with their design tool are usually the ones that judged it on the admin screens rather than the demo canvas.
About the Author
Pratik Shah is Creative head at PrintXpand, a cloud and on-premise web-to-print and print automation platform serving 350+ print businesses across 40+ countries. He works with print shops and decorators on how products are set up for online personalisation and how those designs reach the production floor. Learn more at printxpand.com.
