Web To Print Services

The catalyst for this article is a site called ZetaPrints. I got an email pointing the site out to me in which the site was touted as "new", but a little research let me know ZetaPrints has been around since about 2006, and has had a recent upswing in popularity. It made me think about other web to print services and wonder which ones were worth your time.

As for ZetaPrints, this service is geared mainly toward photographers and graphic artists. It seems to offer a space where you can upload your most recent photos, artwork and designs for people to download. They offer a basic file download, giving people a chance to grab your files and use them however they want to, and they offer a way to put your artwork and photos on various products for people to buy. They also offer a way to set up a web page for your products.

It seems that you get a commission of some kind for selling your work, or that you can offer it for free. The site is reasonably attractive to look at but has a murky navigation structure and no clear delineation of prices, commissions or percentages offered for the artwork sales. I had to dig pretty deep to even discover that they offered more than one price structure for the designer or photographer to choose from. I was overall disappointed with how hard the site was to use - sites like CafePress, an older web to print service, do a much better job of navigation and relaying information.

ZetaPrints has stiff competition in the web to print market. The fact that they are competing with established sites like CafePress and others should make them up their game and create an easier to navigate site with a more transparent price structure and clearer information pages on each of their features. not only are they competing with CafePress, they also have to contend with sites like Printable, MRM, PageFlex, 123Print, EasyCreateDoc and other more limited web to print sites like VistaPrint.

ZetaPrints could have an edge over these competitors because of its ability to place your actual graphic files for sale in various web and print ready formats, but if you can't find the information on how to use it, and they don't make it easier to understand, they won't be able to capitalize on that edge. In addition to that edge, they also have a nice design, in spite of its murky navigation, that they could be leveraging to bring in consumers tired of looking at the plain jane interface of some of the other options out there, but they aren't.

Overall ZetaPrints lost points from me (and lost my interest) because it simply took too long to get a handle on how the site worked and what it offered. In this age of instant gratification and competition for the short online attention span, you have to work harder than that to grab your customer's attention and keep it. ZetaPrints definitely needs to revamp some parts of its site so it can bring its A game to the table and make it for the long haul.