Growing Investments in E-Commerce Enablement Technologies in the Printing Industry Drives the Web-to-Print Market

The global Web-to-Print market is forecast to reach US$1.3 billion by 2022, driven by the importance of e-commerce business enablement for survival in the printing industry which is ravaged by the impact of the Internet and digital technologies.

The emergence of the Internet has had both positive and negative impact on the printing industry. While declining print volumes was the most notable impact on the industry as a result of increased migration to online marketing and digital content, the industry also witnessed cost reductions and operational efficiencies as a result of e-procurement and execution of print jobs. Utilization of the Internet for print quotation management, online ordering & order queue management, customization of print projects and enabling self-service engagement with print customers, has pushed the printing industry into a new era of technological excellence. Companies, publishers, direct mail providers among others are on the lookout for a simplified way of acquiring printed work and Web-to-Print (W2P) being essentially an e-commerce tool helps streamline the print buying procedure. Defined as the provision of a wide variety of print related offerings online through an interactive self-service portal/user interface, W2P enables the printing industry to take advantage of e-business tools to compete effectively in the current era of digitalization and create significant opportunities for profit improvement. In this era of economic pressures, tight budgets and cost constraints, the Internet plays a dual role of both a technology enabler and a cost reducer. Few of the business benefits offered by W2P include agility, flexible workflows, reduce inventory and administrative costs, cost effective delivery of print services, shorter turnaround and time-to-delivery.

Few of the factors driving growth in the market include semi positive outlook for the world printing industry and need to fight disruptive technological changes; growing demand for Print-On-Demand (POD) services; growing trend towards personalized print adverts and the ensuing focus on variable data printing; and growing popularity and acceptance of cloud hosted W2P services. The market is also poised to benefit from the growing prominence of web-enabled portals for large-format digital printing. A growing number of W2P available in the market are developed to handle wide format printing. Modern W2P have successfully resolved few of the challenges traditionally associated with large format printing such as customization and variable pricing. Hosted W2P services are additionally helping push up adoption as it eliminates the need for IT infrastructure and collaboration with an ISP to provide back- end support. Also, wide-format printing/imaging feature large file sizes, storage needs and high bandwidth capabilities which are better handled by a hosted service provider.

As stated by the new market research report on Web-to-Print, the United States represents the largest market worldwide. Asia-Pacific is forecast to emerge as the fastest growing market with a CAGR of 11.5% over the analysis period, led by factors such as a robust advertising industry,  increasing investments in direct mail advertising, strong demand for packaging printing, and growing literacy rates and ensuing increase in consumption of printed media such as educational, professional, business books, newspapers, and magazines. 

Major players in the market include Agfa-Gevaert Group. Aleyant Systems LLC, Avanti Computer Systems Limited, B2CPRINT Ltd., Electronics for Imaging Inc. (EFI), HP Inc., InterlinkONE Inc., MarcomCentral, PageDNA, Pageflex, PagePath Technologies Inc., Print Science, Quadient, Quark Software Inc., Quarterhouse Software Inc., Racad Tech Inc., Radixweb, RedTie Limited, Ricoh Company Ltd., Rocketprint Software LLC, Vpress, and Xerox Corporation, among others.

The research report titled “Web-to-Print – Market Analysis, Trends, and Forecasts” announced by Global Industry Analysts Inc., provides a comprehensive review of market trends, issues, drivers, mergers, acquisitions and other strategic industry activities of global companies.  The report provides market estimates and projections for all major geographic markets such as the US, Canada, Japan, Europe (France, Germany, Italy, UK, Spain, Russia and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Rest of World.

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