When NAPCO Research asked 182 printing firms in 2018 how their customers placed orders, email requests topped the list at 87%, followed by phone calls to a rep or CSR at 76%. Face-to-face meetings with a sales rep came in at 58%. Those same printers expected web-based ordering systems to reach just 26% of their volume within two years. Seven years later, NAPCO’s 2025 study of print sales leaders found that among printers reporting sales growth, 47% offer a dedicated online ordering system. That’s the growing number of shops. Roughly half of them still don’t run one.
So why do most feature checklists for print order management software start at the web checkout?
They start there because that’s where the demo starts. A clean online order flows through a clean system, and everything looks automatic. But the orders that cost a print business time and money usually arrive some other way: an email with a PDF attached, a rep’s notes from a client visit, a phone call that ends with “same as last time, just 500 more.” The features worth paying for are the ones that handle those orders as well as the web store handles its own.
Count Your Doors Before You Read a Feature List
Before comparing vendors, pull your last hundred orders and sort them by how they came in. Web store, email, phone, rep, B2B portal, walk-in. Then sort them again by type: new job, straight reorder, reorder with changes, multi-item order.
That count tells you which print order management software features actually matter. A shop taking 80% of its work through a web store needs strong checkout validation and not much else at intake. A commercial printer whose best accounts email a PO every month needs something very different, and a promo distributor taking multi-item orders through reps needs something different again. I’d go further: if you can’t say roughly what share of your orders arrives through each door, you aren’t ready to evaluate software yet. You’ll end up buying for the demo.
One Queue, Whatever the Door
The first feature to test is whether every order, regardless of source, becomes the same kind of record in the same queue. Not a web order in one screen and a “manual order” in another with half the fields missing.
Ask the vendor to enter a phone order in front of you. Does the manual entry form enforce the same required fields as the web checkout (stock, finish, quantity, artwork, delivery date)? Or can a rep save an order with “see email” in the notes field? The second version is how specs go missing. The web order had validation. The phone order had a person in a hurry.
Email is harder. Some order management systems can parse incoming email into a draft order, and that’s useful when a customer’s email is structured, like a PO from a procurement system. It’s much less useful when the email says “can we do the flyers again but on the thicker paper.” No parser turns that into a clean job. A person still has to. So the question to ask isn’t whether the software parses email; it’s what happens to the order after a person has read it. Does it land in the same queue, with the same required fields and approval steps as everything else?
PrintXpand’s Print order management software takes this approach, with manual entry forms for phone and walk-in orders and email orders feeding into the same queue as web orders. Whichever system you look at, that’s the behavior to check for.
Reorders Deserve Their Own Test
Commercial print lives on repeat work. Business cards, letterhead, menus, event materials, forms. And a reorder is where many shops quietly lose margin, because “same as last time” gets rebuilt from memory instead of from the last job.
The feature to look for is a reorder that starts from the previous job record, carrying its specs and approved artwork forward, with any changes tracked against the original. Ask the vendor to reorder a job from six months ago during the demo. Can the customer do it themselves through a portal? Can your CSR do it from a phone call in under a minute? If the answer involves re-uploading the artwork, the software is treating a reorder as a new order, and you’ll pay for that in rework.
B2B portals matter here too. A corporate client reordering from a B2B corporate storefront with saved, approved designs isn’t really a new intake at all. It’s a click. That only works if the portal writes into the same order queue your production team already watches.
Orders That Don’t Stay One Shape
A single order often isn’t a single job. A promo order might pair embroidered polos with a pad-printed pen run, each going to a different decorator or vendor, each on its own timeline. A commercial order might ship to three offices on two dates.
Look for status tracked per line, not per order. If the whole order shows “in production” while one item is waiting on a proof and another has already shipped, your CSR will still be phoning the floor to find out what’s actually happening. Look too for split shipments that stay tied to the parent order for invoicing, so a partial delivery doesn’t create a billing mess.
This is also where I’d be skeptical of polished dashboards. A dashboard showing forty orders “on track” is only as good as the line-level data beneath it. Honestly, I’d trade the dashboard for reliable line status every time.
What Matters Less Than the Demo Suggests
Some features look impressive and won’t matter much for most shops. Marketplace connectors for Amazon or Etsy are worth nothing if you don’t sell there. Elaborate customer-facing tracking pages help less than you’d expect if most of your customers are repeat B2B accounts who’d rather get a short email when the job ships.
And here’s the limitation nobody selling software likes to say out loud. Even good print order management software won’t fix intake discipline. If reps routinely take orders on the phone without confirming stock or finish, the software will faithfully record an incomplete order. It’ll just be an incomplete order in a nicer interface. The system can refuse to save an order without required fields. It can’t make someone ask the customer the right question.
It depends on your mix, too. A shop with one dominant, well-structured channel may get more from a better web store than from a multi-channel order system. That’s a fair call to make.
At PrintXpand, the pattern we see most often is that shops underestimate how much of their work arrives outside the web store until they actually count it. Once they do, the feature list sorts itself.
Author bio
Pratik Shah is Creative head at PrintXpand, a cloud and on-premise web-to-print and print management platform used by 350+ print businesses in 40+ countries. He works with commercial printers and promotional products distributors on how orders move from the first customer request through production and delivery, including the orders that never touch a web store. Learn more at printxpand.com.