Most print shop owners can tell you what an order costs to produce. Fewer can tell you what it costs to enter into their system. That number is usually bigger than they think, and it's spread across so many parts of the business that it never shows up as one line on a P&L.
Manual order entry means someone on your team is taking an order that came in by email, phone, or paper, and keying it into your system by hand. A roster pulled off a PDF attachment. Garment specs read off a voicemail. Each one takes a few minutes. Multiply that by hundreds of orders a month, and the labor is just the beginning.
You'd expect automation to have taken over by now. It hasn't, mostly because switching feels riskier than sticking with what already works, even when what already works is slow.
Some of it comes down to the tools. A lot of print shop software wasn't built to talk to modern web stores or order portals, so someone on your team ends up bridging that gap manually, order by order.
Some of it is cost. Automation has a reputation for being expensive or complicated to set up, so shops stay with the process they know.
And some of it is just old habits. "This is how we've always done it" is a hard habit to break, even as the hidden costs pile up month after month.
The real issue is that those costs are scattered across labor, materials, customer service time, and business you never got the chance to chase. Nobody's adding it all up, so nobody sees the total. Once you do, the case for changing something becomes pretty hard to ignore.
There are three layers here: the labor itself, the errors that slip through, and the delays that back everything up. They hit different parts of the operation, but they all land on the same bottom line.
Wasted labor hours. Keying in one order can take an average of 10 minutes for most shops, longer for anything personalized. Run 1,200 orders a month and that's 200 hours of entry work alone, and that's before anyone deals with a blurry photo of artwork or a roster missing three names.
Errors and the rework that follows. Someone types L instead of XL, or gets a Pantone code wrong, or misses a name on a roster. By the time anyone notices, the shop has already run prepress, burned a screen, printed the garments, maybe even packed them. Now you're not just reprinting. You're covering materials twice, labor twice, and often rush shipping to keep the timeline intact. If the order already shipped, you're paying freight twice too.
Delays that squeeze your production window. Manual entry puts a gap between when an order lands and when it actually gets worked. An order that comes in at 4 p.m. might not get touched until the next morning. So if you advertise a three-day turnaround and lose a day to entry and back-and-forth, you're either running your team on overtime or quietly padding your quoted lead time to five days.
The costs above are the ones you can measure. It’s harder to see what your team isn't doing because they're buried in entry work.
Customer service reps shouldn’t be order processors.
When someone's spending hours a day transcribing emails and PDFs, they’re not:
Across a full team, that opportunity cost starts to rival the direct labor cost.
Even shop owners who see the number clearly may hesitate to act on it, and the reasons are usually fair ones.
Setup is the big one. Nobody wants to find out three weeks in that staff can't adapt or that in-flight orders got lost in the switch. Choosing a platform with easy store setup can be a game-changer to smoothing out this process.
"Chipply made it such a seamless transition and it really fit so well into what we were already doing in our business. We didn't have to mold what we were doing to work for the platform." — Kami Stroope, Midwest Sporting Goods (read the case study)
Integration is another. Some print shops already run platforms with clean connections to web stores; others are on older systems that don't talk to much of anything, and the path forward isn't always obvious from the outside. But the right platform can offer seamless integrations to keep the transition easy.
"We migrated all of our 24/7 stores to Chipply over about a two-month period. The support at Chipply is second to none. Anytime we had questions, there was always someone there to hold your hand to get you through it." — TJ Ciaravino, Worldwide Printing (read the case study)
Timing doesn't help either. Back-to-school hits in August, spirit wear carries through the fall, holiday corporate orders take over by winter, and spring sports picks up right behind it. There's rarely a quiet stretch to make a change in. "After the busy season" has a way of never actually arriving, because the next wave is already on the calendar.
None of that changes the math, though. Every order processed manually carries the same inefficiency, every error that reaches production costs about the same to fix, and waiting another quarter doesn't shrink the problem.
Fixing this doesn't mean tearing out your whole operation. It means removing the manual step at the point where orders come in.
Generic e-commerce tools weren't built for the way custom apparel actually works. Platforms built specifically for apparel decorators and team dealers handle that natively. A customer configures their order online, everything from size to decoration placement, and it lands in your system already structured and ready for production. Nobody has to type any of it in.
"The system ensures that work orders match what was actually ordered, which eliminates a lot of human error. That wasn't something I initially prioritized but has made a huge difference in our day-to-day operations." — Jesse Pike, IE Planners (read the case study)
Inventory syncs in real time too, so you're not finding out you're out of youth mediums when a customer calls asking where their order is.
The bigger shift is in how you think about taking orders at all. Instead of processing individual orders, you're opening stores, one for each team, school, or company, with products, pricing, and a close date already set.
Parents and employees order for themselves. The store closes on schedule, and everything batches for production automatically. Your team's job moves from data entry to store setup and handling the occasional exception, and a store that brings in 50 orders takes the same setup work as one that brings in 200.
"There are no errors when it comes to Chipply because there's no human error. You hit go, and that exact information is sent over." — Stephen McCammon, Macco Promotions (read the case study)
Manual order entry costs more than the hourly rate of the person doing it. For most print shops, the real number runs into six figures a year, and it chips away at margin every single month it continues.
The move to something better doesn't happen overnight, but it doesn't require shutting down for months either. Most shops run new orders through an automated online store while finishing out legacy orders the old way. Within a few weeks, most of the volume has shifted over, and the savings start showing up in less overtime, fewer error-related calls, and room to take on new business.