What's the best photobook maker or mockup generator for a new print shop?

[Store-NYRP]

Hello all,

I am working on to build a print shop and I am looking for a plug-in or Shopify app to create personalized products for my customers. I am inexperienced in terms of programming so APIs or SDKs are going to be difficult for me.

I want to work with only a few products along with Photobook, which is going to be a primary product for the first phase of the website.
Basically, customers would

> select the product (for eg.: photobook)

> upload their personal photos of choice

> do basic editing like cropping & sizing, select layout to arrange photo(s), add texts, maybe add clipart

> finalise the photobook and place order

> backend team receives a print-ready file and customers receives a mail

Other products I want to include for first phase are photo cards, canvas, printing on wood panels, acrylic, metal, posters, greeting cards, post cards, stickers, calendars and similar products.

Currently, I do not want to completely rely on print-on-demand dropshipping model because I would like to take care of some of the orders (maybe local orders).  So a flexible option to forward the orders for dropshipping or fulfill myself is needed. This is for a succeeding steps.

Can someone help or suggest how to go about this I mainly want the product customiser or the mockup generator for the mentioned products? I see lot of print-on-demand apps that have customiser but they don't provide option who fulfills the orders which is a bummer in my case. 

Really looking to get this sorted and proceed with building the website. Open for ideas and suggestion.

Thank you in advance.

[Store-NYRP]

Can any one please provide some inputs for the above topic.

[PageFly-Richard]

Hi @Store-NYRP ,

This is Richard Nguyen - CRO Expert from PageFly- Advanced Page Builder.

Your request is kinda hard to find a solution for it, honestly. You can try to use Podify - A Print on Demand app that allow customers to customize their product. And you can ask their support team for more customization.

Hope that they can help. 

If you want more flexibility to personalize your pages, I'd love to introduce our product PageFly Landing Page Builder with 24/7 support live chat. PageFly has a Free plan where you can use all features and create different page types. If you wonder how PageFly helps you build high-converting page, explore here.

All the best,

Richard.

[Store-NYRP]

Thank you for your response Richard.

This is really unfortunate that my requirement is hard to find. My website project standstill currently as I cannot find a solution. I am contacting different POD apps but there are very few that offer product customisation for photobooks. On top that they won't allow me to fulfil the orders which doesn't allow me to have control on the print quality. The ones that offer are quite expensive!

Maybe I need to jump to Magento or Wordpress to explore more options.

Thanks again, I will definitely try PageFly once this is resolved .

[richardcharnley]

Hi,

Not sure if you found anything - there are a number of solutions out there. As you may want to take care of manufacture yourself/non dropship then the ones I can thing of are:

Taopix

Mediaclip

GetPrintBox

All the above can be integrated with Shopify. I have some experience the first two along with a lot of experience in the subsequent routing and manufacture and the complexities it brings with it!

There are a couple others out there which don't integrate to Shopify. Happy to help point you in the right direction.

Thanks

Richard

[Store-NYRP]

Thank you Richard for your input I really appreciate that.

I have already got in touch GetPrintBox and MediaClip. I really liked both of their offerings and they would be perfect solution for my requirement. Only bottleneck is the price, their solutions are quite expensive and I might definitely consider one of them in the future when I expand with bigger investments.

MediaClip tool looked amazing and would be good fit for my requirement but it was quite a task to get in touch with them. Once I did get in touch, I shared information about my project they asked for and requested for a demo, MediaClip never bothered to revert for a demo nor shared their pricings. Apparently, they work with website who target revenues of at least a $1 million within the first 2 years. Fair enough, that way both parties saved their time. I would reach them once I hit those numbers and have a bigger team in the future.

Great communication with GetPrintBox in all fairness. Their tools are impressive and just like I wanted them to be. Never got to work with them but their responses are always prompt. They would revert with additional information if we asked for it. They even offered to arrange a programmer at a small cost to help me sort out integration process if my team wasn't ready. I don't know if their support team is as efficient as the sales team in terms of communication. So just their communication was a dealbreaker for me. Again, in the future I can work with them hopefully.

I will get in touch Taopix, I haven't heard about them nor came across them during my search for the personalisation tool. 

I was also in touch with other companies who provide similar personalisation tools again pricing was another factor, some tools looked good but they suggest me to switch away from Shopify because of some limitations. I considering to pause or deactivate Shopify account until I find a proper tool for my website. 

Would you like to share your experience with Taopix and MediaClip since you have mentioned. Not only for me this will help anyone in the future who are seeking answers.

May I also ask if you can suggest other companies that provide similar tool outside Shopify? Like I said I do not mind switching platforms to make this work. I am more than happy to take your inputs to guide me in the right direction. That will be kind of you.

[richardcharnley]

Hi,

Am surprised about Mediaclip - if you want to see a front end that that uses them then:

https://inkifi.com/

It pretty easy to get temlates connected to Shopify. I have not seen how to do templates (which can be very time consuming!) but believe they are set up in Photoshop. I quite like their 3D rendering.

GetPrintBox has come along way since they started and they have some v good features. I cant see that they do 3d rendering (ie Mugs") which the only downside other than price.

Taopix - I know them and have integrated a back end for production a while back. They just released a shopify plugin. You can speak wit Neil @Transeomedia - they are associated with Taopix and are the distributors.

There is another Company whom I know of who are looking to release a app for Shopify in Q2 this year (i only found out yesterday) - Pixfizz. They have their own front end ATM.

I am sure you probably are considering this by the production side is a different headache!

Any other questions feel free to ask!

Thanks

Richard

[Store-NYRP]

Hello again Richard,

I like how Inkifi website looks, its so clean. I would literally would like to have a carbon copy of that website. The editor is always impressive!

On your suggestion I got in touch with Taopix - they are similarly priced along with the likes of MediaClip, GetPrintBox.

There are few others that offer the editor but we need upload the product template which is not easy and I felt their system has higher chances of errors and print issues. This also needs a dedicated designer in the team. I think I would prefer a readymade yet customisable editor in the first phases to make it easy to launch and handle the website.

Actually, I can say I like Pixfizz I have been in touch and the pricings seem okay. I wanted to see how their Shopify app will look like and take a call, their pricings seem to be okay to me. The editor is not bad either fits my description. I may even just go with their own platform if the Shopify app will take longer. Do you have any opinion on their own platform?

I have spoken to local printshop who will be taking care of the printing. I know them personally as well so this way I can get more control on lot of elements during the production. I considering to stay away from branded delivery boxes for now to cut the shipping costs. This is temporary as I would eventually focus more on branding, prettier packaging boxes and so on. I will have to put a lot of thinking here as I shifted my focus on the personalisation tool and the other part of the project is not moved. Hope things will change once appoint an personalisation tool. I am bit eager to get this going at the same time I am trying to be prudent.

[richardcharnley]

Hi - did you every move this forward?

[Store-NYRP]

Yes, I am taking this idea forward. Thank you again for your suggestions Richard.

[Kuali]

Hi!!

I'm trying to do this for a shop, do you mind sharing the name of those apps for print on demand of a Photobook?

Thanks!

[sandy-wtpbiz]

Hello all,

To all people who are looking for a good photobook design tool for your Shopify store, we have recently developed one.

We have built it from a mobile-first approach as most of the traffic will come from mobile devices. We have taken this into consideration and created a very minimal looking tool that allows your customers to design their photobooks effortlessly.

They can upload their pictures and change layouts for each page, different layouts for cover and inner pages, spine option, edit texts, add captions etc. It has its own admin panel where you control all design tool related things and it gets integrated with your shopify store in few steps only. You receive print ready output files.

We can provide it in two ways- Either as Subscription or one time license fee. We don't have any transaction fee.

Feel free to contact us at WTPBiz and we will be happy to demonstrate you this.