Selling personalized calendars online - what´s important

Christoph Clermont

Calendars offer great potential for high-value personalization but there are a few traps. Learn why calendars can quickly lead to more complexity than expected and why using individually programmed solutions may not be the answer. In addition, you can try out three great samples that show you how smoothly a sophisticated calendar can be configured.

Calendars - you may well consider them the oldies but goldies of the personalized gifts market! Coming in an excessive variety of shapes and sizes they are easy to sell and remain a reliable way to generate recurring revenues ahead of the festive season.

Selling calendars online vendors provide editing options for a multitude of elements ranging from variable text and upload of customer photos to highly individualized designs and even personalized images. Basically, today, any personalization option that is used for photo books can, and will, also be used for calendars.

Yet, selling and producing calendars, there´s one tricky issue that sets them apart from other personalized gifts, and that´s the calendar part itself.

Mastering the challenges of complexity

Every new year requires a different calendar as weeks and days shift. In addition, the dates of public holidays can change every year, and if you are selling internationally there are not only different holidays but also different ways to structure a calendar. For example, weeks start on Mondays in some countries and on Sundays in others. To offer customers an especially appealing mode of personalization, some vendors also provide the possibility to highlight a birthday or anniversary during the configuration.

All this can easily amount to a lot of work for the designers and, if they finished their job, a big headache for everyone else to manage a huge number of documents for online display and printing.

Don´t fall into the programming trap

The hidden complexity of calendar configuration has led many vendors to resort to individually programmed solutions instead of using standard web-to-print software. Though this may result in one customized system that perfectly does the job, there’s a clear downside to this approach: You will need developers. As everyone knows, first of all, they are hard to come by, and secondly when they leave nobody knows how the thing ever worked.

So when you start your calendar business, or plan to add calendars to your existing web shop, think twice. You may brace yourself for more programming hassle than expected, or go for a solution that requires no coding at all. Actually, Printess is one of them.

Calendars don’t have to start on January 1
One of the few downsides of selling calendars has been the very seasonal nature of the business. To extend your calendar business year-round, Printess will give you the ability to start a calendar at every chosen month with no extra coding required.

Learn more, get in touch Find out more about Printess - your solution for design, publishing, configuration and production of personalized gifts. Call us at +49 337 66 469 886, send an e-mail, or register for our free trial right away.

Good to know: All sample templates you find on this page are also included in the Printess license. You may use them as a simple basis to develop your own products, or as an inspiration for your designers.