The Penny-Wise Path to Printing

I'm going to teach you how to save a lot of money on printing for your small business. There's a catch - you're going to have to put in some legwork. Like most money saving strategies, the more effort you put into it, the more money you stand to save.

Tip #1 : Stop paying a local printer for large runs of non-complicated products. 
Local printers are great for a few things. They are easily accessible and flexible, as opposed to having rigid standards and no physical location that you can stop into any time to check the progress of your project. They are great for small/prototype runs. Need 50 temporary business cards to tide you over until you move into that new location next month? Go local - you'll be hard pressed to find an online print retailer that will be willing to run such a small order. And, local printers are great if you're working on a more complicated project in which you need to have some control after you place the order.

For example, I regularly designed programs for local high school sports teams while working at a local printer. These were constantly evolving projects. Often times, I would need a lead time of a couple of months on these projects due to their size and complexity. However, much of the content would not even be available to I, or the client, until much closer to the due date - usually advertisers who were taking their time or procrastinating students who couldn't be arsed to turn in their "profile" pages until a week past the due date. I'm sure you can see how it would be very difficult to facilitate such a project online with some large printer.


So, when should you use an online printer? 

• As a very broad, general rule of thumb, when you need 500 or more of a single item. That doesn't mean 100 business cards each for your 5 employees. That means 500 of an identical item. These large companies are using printing presses which take a little bit more time to set up than a digital printer. If it takes a press operator 15 minutes to set up the press for each of your 5 employees, they'd either have to take a loss on labor (which they are not going to willingly do) or charge nearly as much as a set of 500 cards would cost in the first place. This is a real basic explanation of why many online retailers require you to purchase more than you may feel like you really need.

Oftentimes, especially, with business cards, online retailers are so much less expensive than local printers that you won't even mind having to order a little extra. It is not uncommon, depending on the specifications of your product, to be able to order thousands of a particular product online for the price of 500 at a local printer.

•  If you're ordering any product that is either printed on anything other than paper or being printed in anything other than standard ink, you would probably be best off using an online printer. This includes, but is not limited to UV Coated products, any type of plastic stock, foil printing, raised ink (thermographed) printing.
  
  Why? That local printer down the road is going to outsource these types of jobs anyways. Basically, you're going to be paying somewhere on the order of 20-50% more