Most e-commerce businesses reach a point fairly quickly when they outgrow their ability to fulfill their own orders. Once there are more than 100 or so orders to be packed and shipped each month, partnering with a third-party fulfillment provider becomes almost a necessity. But not all of these e-commerce businesses take into account the powerful advantages that they can enjoy if they integrate print with their fulfillment.

Of course, not every fulfillment provider offers in-house printing. This is one service that every e-commerce startup should look for when they are interviewing potential fulfillment services, especially if they want to establish a long-term partnership that will support them through rapid, sustained growth. Here are our thoughts at Spectra about why integrated print and fulfillment is one of the most powerful features that you can have behind your e-commerce business.

Marketing Efficiencies

You don’t necessarily want your fulfillment provider to conduct marketing campaigns for you, but what if your print and distribution partner were also your fulfillment provider? At Spectra, we operate two divisions, our print facility and our fulfillment facility. 

Our print facility has many clients that use us for high quality printing for marketing campaigns, short runs of books and educational materials, and even large format printing. Our fulfillment facility helps B2B clients and e-commerce businesses store their inventory, then ship it out efficiently when orders are placed. 

But Spectra’s services shine most brightly when they are combined. In the area of marketing, our fulfillment clients have a unique opportunity to capitalize on their most valuable opportunities: relationships with customers who already enjoy their products and are positively oriented toward marketing messages.

With Spectra’s in-house print facility, these clients can very easily print flyers, inserts, postcards, and even catalogs that are then incorporated into pick and pack activities prior to shipping orders. These marketing pieces can advertise upcoming sales, new product offerings, or loyalty programs that customers can sign up for. This is an incredibly efficient and cost-saving way to market to existing customers without spending more on postage.

All-In-One Fulfillment

Some of our clients actually have Spectra manage all aspects of not only the fulfillment of orders, but the production of their materials as well. This is possible when the products being sold at the client’s website are printed materials that Spectra can produce in-house. Quality is not an issue, since Spectra operates an advanced print facility with two HP Indigo 7K digital presses and regularly updated finishing and binding equipment. 

With our expert team printing materials like textbooks, workbooks, and visual aids, then storing them in our warehouse and shipping them to customers, our clients enjoy an incredibly streamlined process that gets orders to their customers very quickly.

Spectra’s wide-ranging print capabilities also make our integrated print and fulfillment services perfect for franchise clients. This area of B2B fulfillment works best when a franchisor can offer many different types of materials to franchisees, and most of those materials are printed. Spectra can print things like menus, pamphlets, brochures, posters, and even window clings, banners, and yard signs that can be shipped to franchisees. Once they are printed, these items can be directly placed in the client’s inventory in our fulfillment center.

This is the step that requires the most time and communication when the print provider and the fulfillment provider are two different organizations. There is an entire shipping and receiving process that can be skipped when printing and fulfillment are being handled by the same team, meaning less cost and time overall for getting materials into inventory.

Customization Capabilities

Customization is a very popular feature for customers in e-commerce. In B2C e-commerce, customized items often take a long time to produce and ship, given the fact that those items cannot be printed and stored ahead of time, but rather must be printed on demand. What can accelerate that process and minimize the time it takes to produce individualized versions of print products? You guessed it–integrating print and fulfillment under the same team.

From subscription boxes to apparel to printed materials like books, fully customized products can be printed on demand at Spectra and then immediately shipped to the customer through our fulfillment department. Clients love being able to give customers faster service on these personalized items than they are able to find elsewhere.

As was mentioned with marketing, printed materials can be inserted into shipments to enhance the relationship with the customer. Customized printed materials can make an even greater impact, as the customer notices that the print collateral inside their shipment was created and printed with them in mind.

Spectra uses powerful variable data printing methods to achieve speed and flexibility in customizing printed materials. Even large volume direct mail campaigns can use customer databases to personalize each piece to its recipient.

Make Spectra Your E-Commerce Business’s Secret Weapon

With Spectra producing your print materials, you enjoy high-quality, beautiful collateral that gets the attention of your customers. With Spectra handling your inventory management and shipping, you enjoy efficiency and accuracy in your shipments to customers.

When you combine both of those services in one, you get a combination that can power your e-commerce business as you pursue growth. Our capacity is as broad as the ideas you and your team come up with, and we’re ready to help you offer your customers everything they need, at quality levels and shipping speeds that they didn’t expect. Through services like our online storefronts, we make you look amazing to your customers and enable you to give them a level of customer service that you wouldn’t be able to maintain in-house.

At Spectra, we love sharing case studies that show how we’ve helped real-life clients solve their fulfillment challenges, meet their printing and mailing needs, and integrate their print and fulfillment into one incredibly effective service. Just send us a message to set up a consultation, and we’ll be happy to sit down with you and show you how we use our solutions to help each client reach the next level in their organization’s development.