Hey printing folks,
I am a digital product manager who normally works on software and am starting to explore a physical product that is an extension of something we normally sell digitally.
I'm trying to understand what sort of service I'm even looking for, or if the service I'm looking for exists and has a name. I'm at the point where I don't even honestly know what to Google and I'm wondering if folks here can help.
The basic idea is that we normally distribute a digital product (digital media asset that people consume typically on a smartphone). Starting to explore bulk purchase solutions, and surprisingly we have a lot of interest in live events. Many event organizers and participants are seeking to distribute our digital product as a giveaway at events. Typically we do digital distribution via email for gift purchases, but this doesn't scale well to events where they want to have a sort of Oprah moment where they say look under your seat while you get this digital gift. We've designed a nice premium physical card that is a representation of the digital item and has a QR code integrated into it along with a manual code that can be used if the QR code doesn't work for some reason. Each of these cards is unique to the digital item, think a different song or a different movie or a different book.
We are working on some initial runs with a small local printer, he's awesome, but he's not going to be able to scale to potentially thousands of these units a week.
What I'd love to find is a print partner who can dynamically take in orders as they're placed by our customers. Ideally if you an automated system we put in place at our point of sale on our website. Customers would check a box saying they want a physical card, we would apply a premium to their transaction to cover the costs, and we would automatically send a digital file over to the printer with quantity information. This file would be printed to the required specs, and ideally shipped to our client directly (though I guess we could intermediate and have it shipped to us and then to the client, but that seems inefficient).
each physical card order will be for the same piece of media, but on the back of each card there will be a unique QR code and the backup promotion code/redemption code. so we would need the ability to dynamically that in. orders are going to be in the hundreds to thousands per run.
What sort of services am I looking for? What sorts of firms provide these services?
The closest I found was lob, which looks like it has a neat API interface which I like as a developer, but I'm not sure if they're really optimized for what we're doing.
Trying to keep it relatively vague here on my personal Reddit account as I'm just trying to get my grounding so I can do a more formal procurement search.
Does this make any sense? Haha