How to start selling online without hacking off your existing customers

I’m a printer, how do I start selling online without alienating my existing customers?

You know what I’m talking about. Your online prices are significantly cheaper than your offline prices. How do you explain that to your existing customers?

It’s not that you’ve been ripping them off. You are charging a fair price for an excellent service. Still they might not see it that way when they go on your new shiny website and see how much you are charging for the same flyers and business cards.

In fact this dilemma is big enough to stop a huge number of printing companies going online. Why risk peeing off your existing customers and possibly losing them?

But at the same time, more of print is going online. More buyers want to buy their services online and with more millennials joining the market, the demand to be served online is just going to go up. As one of my friends said if you want to survive in print “Get online or die.”

Ouch! So what do we do? How do we get out of this vicious circle? Here’s my suggestion. It’s not bullet proof, but it gives you a fighting chance of opening up an online side to your business without losing your offline side.

The first thing I would do is create your online shop on a totally different domain to your existing site and promote it as a different business.

Did you know that Route 1 one of the leading online printing companies is part of a group tha also has a company called Kingsbury Press in, which focuses purely on providing high quality print with an offline service.

If they can do it, so can you. Make your existing offline service the premium high quality service and your online service your no frills budget 'Ryan Air' service.

You’ll have to decide how to market the differences between your two brands, but if I was you I’d focus on promoting the offline service as being a highly personalized and bespoke service with the focus on producing print of the highest quality.

And the online service, I’d promote as being efficient, cost effective and simple to use.

These are just my ideas. I’d love to hear what you think about this particular issue. Come on. don't be shy!

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