Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Selling Prints Online

The time has come for me to learn how to sell my prints online. Once I started learning more about online proofing and print ordering for customers I realized how much revenue I had lost out on and the huge amount of additional job opportunities that would have been available.

I will write a little about the opportunities that I now see with selling prints online then I will go into a little detail about the options I looked into and why I picked the one I did.


Opportunity

As for myself most of my paid shoots are cheap for friends or family and I just hand over a CD of the final images. I think this is something many people trying to start out in the business end up doing and sometimes never end up moving out of. Even with jobs such as these the person/people will for the most part never get around to printing the images due to the inconvenience that it seems to them and they definitely never get around to making and distributing extra copies for families and friends to make print from. By getting your images online for proofing and print ordering even for customer you provide with the digital copies you will most likely not only generate more revenue directly from them by giving them a quick and easy options for ordering the prints but you open up even more doors with all the family and friends who probably would never have gotten any prints in the first place. So you can turn a simple $100 portrait session into a $100 session plus $200 to $300 in print sales. We beginners also tend to shoot a lot of events for or friends or relatives but nothing ever becomes of the photos other than maybe one person gets a burned disk of the images and it gets tossed into a drawer in their desk. For example my girlfriend is on a dance team and last year I photographer the performance and loaded the images onto my flickr site for the dancers. Most of them uploaded the photos to their myspace but aside from that nothing. Imagine the income potential from from the 300 people in the audience who for the most part are all friends and family. Your friendly favor goes from taking some photos for fun to $1000+ in print sales. You can bet that when I shoot their first show for this year in 3 weeks I will have my cards handed out to everyone in the audience with a log in for that particular proofing page and I will make darn sure all the direct family members and the dancers themselves know where and how to order prints. I will still give the dancers a couple digital files for myspace etc. but I will wait about 2 weeks after I upload them for ordering to do it. Once you really start thinking about it there are so many revenue opportunities through print sales.


Options

First I need to mention I have not yet tested or used any of these services and I am going purely with the info I found on their websites so I may have miss information about some of the details. Sometimes things get lost in translation. I looked at these three different options for print sales.

Smugmug.com
Photoshelter.com
Thephototool.com

Not only was I looking for online proofing and print ordering but I wanted to be able to sell stock images from the same service in the future where I could set my own price based on the usage of the image but that is another topic that deserves it's own attention at a later date. I just wanted to point out that it was a feature I looked for when picking a company.

I will start with Smugmug. I did not personally feel that they were offering a service that was at a top professional level. This site looks like a great place to share photos with your friends and family but in the end the standard account is $39.95/year and works pretty much the same as Flickr but I find Flickr to be a much better options for something at this level plus it's only $25/year for a pro account and free for a basic one. If your looking for custom ad free galleries you can jump up to the power user account for $59.95/year but I still wouldn't choose this over the the Flickr community. Now for the Pro account. This is the only account level that allows print sales. The cost is $149.95 and year and is the cheapest of the 3 options but at a loss. After looking over the site and reading all the information I just feel this site just does not scream professional and does not offer many options that the other 2 sites I will talk about have. Although being the cheapest if your just looking for a simple affordable place to get your images online for print sales this could be your best options.


Photoshelter. I will start off by saying this is the site I am choosing to use. This site I personally felt had the most professional feel and had the most complete set of options. It seems to have a pretty straight forward and versatile print ordering system, you can outsource to a print lab of your choice if you choose, they have royalty free licensing options, and Right managed licensing using fotoQuote® which is a tool I had been planning to purchase at some point anyway. That alone is a $140 value but I will have to wait and see if there version will actually be able to replace the stand alone copy. If you get an account under the $30 a month options there is a one time $50 fee to set up a merchant account. They waive this fee for all the account levels $30/month and up. All in all Photoshelter offers a top notch product with all the features a professional photographer would need with a fairly simple to use system. The downside is that you pay a premium. The $30 a month account only includes 35GB of storage which is enough to get you started with selling your prints online but once things start moving or if you decide to use there service as a backup hard drive to protect you images you will be looking more at adding their 500GB option for $600/year or 1TB for $1000/year, they offer extra storage at monthly rates but you pay a huge premium over paying by the year. Also you will still be paying your monthly account fee on top of the extra storage fees. More importantly they charge %10 flat transaction fee collected each month for all your sales. Depending on business I will have to wait and see if these costs exceed their worth.

Finally we have ThePhotoTool. This site is the creation of Don Giannatti who is not only an amazing photographer but has given back to the photography community in many ways. Don and his business partner Daniel Magallanes developed this site as an answer to photographers needs. There are only a couple reasons I did not choose this site. First they are not an online backup hard drive. They list their storage space at 400mb but are happy to allow a little more space as long as you are keeping your content fresh such as not leaving galleries from 3 year old weddings. I personally want more space, first, for backup of all my photos and second, I want to keep things up for a long time just in case for those down the road sales. Then again I am willing to pay for those options also. Second, at least for right now I wanted a more automated system as far as payment options, print ordering and photo licensing. As for right now I don't want to think about those things I just want a complete turn key solution. Now for the benefits. First I need to mention that you probably wont fend better customer service anywhere else. You will be able to get help with just about everything you need, your questions will be answered quickly, h*** you can even call Don himself on the phone if you have a question. There site seems solid and professional. A huge benefit that they offer is a free web site along with your account. They have many different layouts to choose from and you have decent customization control. This is an immensely great feature if you don't have a website and the idea of designing one yourself is not possible or commissioning someone else is out of your budget. Plus like I said the customer service is top notch so you will be able to get direct help with putting your page together. You also can't beat the price for what you get. They charge a $100 setup fee when you first get started and $50/Month for all their services. No other monthly fees and no percentages on your sales. If Photoshelter does not work out I will be making a hasty switch over to ThePhotoTool and probably once I get things moving along will sign up to give the site a more thorough testing and see if it would work better for me. This is also a new service and site so I am excited to see what new features they end up adding as the develop the site.

If you read this I hope you got something from it and I am sorry for the length of the post I just felt there was a lot to cover.



Alleh Lindquist | Portland Fashion & Advertising Photographer

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