A Digital Printing Network

Adding A T-Shirt Design Program To A Website

We are currenlty re-designing our website to show more of our work and services that we have added. At this time we do not plan on doing any online sales of our products. However I have been thinking about adding a t-shirt designer program so our clients could go to our website, design a garment and send it to use so we can work on their quote and get their art work at the same time. I don't want them to be able to get the quote from the site, just get me the design of what they want. My thoughts here is this should give us the majority of the information we need to do a more accurate quote, get a preview of their artwork before we do the quote (nothing drives me nutts faster than they tell you simple design for the quote and then they bring in something way past simple and expect the quote to stand) and to have a quote ready when they come in, not I will call you back later with the quote.

Two questions in this: 1) what do you'll think of this idea? 2) I know there are numerous programs out there, which one is better suited and priced for this if you will limited useage of a designer program?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Larry

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by irving donaldson on March 19, 2012 at 11:17pm

I have gained enough experience to quote on site or what I want to do a particular job - that will handle that part of the question. As to the other part - I have an online program for design shirts that I might put in the shop and go from there. As far as offering online - I often get designs that are designed on other sites and brought in for quotes and end up with the job. my HO.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Eric Adler on March 20, 2012 at 12:26pm

I've also been wanting to do something like this but I am really not familiar with any programs that will do this. I thought I heard at one point Stahl's Cadworx was going to offer a consumer based site but I have not seen anything happen with that yet. I know Transfer Express/Easy Prints transfers allows customers to build designs. Many of their fonts and clipart logos are available on Cadworx.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Zakk L on April 1, 2012 at 10:37pm

We have looked at several of these, but most of them are either really expensive upfront (thousands) and then a couple to a few hundred per month or they are inexpensive upfront (a couple of hundred dollars) and then they add a small monthly fee ($60 - $100) PLUS a percentage of your sales (3-10%)! I think the percentage scheme is non-sense myself since I don't see why it is their business what I am charging for the product being designed with the tool that we are producing.

We are strongly considering developing our own system to do this, but would like to gauge the interest first. If anyone has any input on what they would like to see this do, feature-wise, and what price point is being sought, feel free to let me know and we may move this forward sooner than later.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ray on April 3, 2012 at 8:24am

I have been watching the development of this open source designer add on for websites.

www.opentshirts.org

The designer has it in beta right now. The guy that is writing this software writes macros and design add ons for CorelDraw. He has released a design base add on for free and you then add art packs for a fee.

Ray

www.digitalcrayonprintshop.com

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Larry Turner on April 3, 2012 at 8:17pm

Ray

I think we are following the same thing here. On t-shirt forums these is a member advancedartist that is developing a ope source program. bet it the sameone.