Selling Prints

I'm redesigning my site to include an option to purchase large prints of my work.

Does anyone know a good website that I can link people to from my site to be able to purchase these?

I'm looking for something where I can set the markup for each print and where I don't have to do anything other than upload the print file, and then let the company take care of the orders. It would also be cool if they would offer different sizes.

So let's say someone wants to purchase a specific print, I want them to be able to click the link for the print, and that link direct them to the ordering site.

Any ideas?

Try Smugmug they have this facility a few of the members here use them.

http://www.smugmug.com/pro/

Thank you for your reply. I'll look into that.

Does anyone else know of other services I could compare that to?

Smugmug is raising the price from $100 for the pro account to $150 in a month and some. And from what I hear, the current price will be grandfathered to existing members for a while, so if you do go with them its in your interest to do it soon.

I know of www.pictage.com that can do it, but its $50 a month for the basic package.

I dont know of any others that just let you upload your pictures and they take care of the ordering for you.

You can save $5 on your smugmug account with a referral code, since William posted it first it sounds fair he should get the credit. You make $10 credit with each referral you send out, towards future smugmug bills like the following year's tab. So if you refer enough people you can get it free the following year.

No Gerry I was only passing it on I don't have a Smugmug account, thanks for offering.

In that case I would appreciate if you used
http://www.smugmug.com/?referrer=5bQxXhVZY6En2 then, hehe. Or enter in 5bQxXhVZY6En2 in the signup stage.

Its a good community and you get really fast responses from thier forum, www.dgrin.com.

If you have any questions about thier service, I may be able to answer. :0)

Well, I won't be able to make a commitment to a paid service like that soon.

I've had a little indirect experience with cafepress.com, and I know they let you have an online store to sell your products for free. However, I know the quality of the products they put out are not near the level I'm looking for. I guess I was looking to see if there was a service that I wouldn't have to pay a monthly/annually fee, but rather that they would take a percentage of the sale. I'm not expecting to sell a large volume of my prints, so paying for that service at this point would not be financially sound for me.

With smugmug, you can only markup the picture prices in the pro account. The basic and power accounts leave the print prices to thier default. You can turn the ability to sell prints off though, if you didnt want to sell them at cost.

The $100 fee is mostly for the storage and bandwidth. You can virtually fully customize the page and even link it to a domain directly *dns or what ever its called*. You get like 8gb's of bandwidth a month as well as unlimited storage. So you can upload your 20gb's of picture's, set it so people can only view the medium size and nothing larger so you dont have to worry about people steeling your work. Then if they make an order they use the original size to make the print. Then later if for some reason you loose your original files, you can order a backup cd from smugmug, so its also a backup resource.

I havent seen thier prints, but from what ive read on thier forum by thier users, they are quite happy with them. I just wished they offered metallic prints.

Then smugmug takes 15% of your profit from the print sales to cover the costs of taking cc's, etc. And if you were to do the work yourself you would probably spend more than the 15% in gas to take the print to the post office.

Its an expense, but for what they offer it seems rather cheap. I would have the pro account now if I had the money.

I would say www.pictage.com

Why not print them out locally and ship them yourself?

If I'm going to do that, then I figure I might as well go with someone like www.mpix.com and have them sent to the customer directly, and the customer could pay me through paypal.

I'd love to be able to cut out the middle-man and let the customer order whatever size they'd like and not have to give anyone their personal information.

Soooo.....why don't you just do that? I prefer my personal lab for many reasons. One, they're really good and I know I can expect nothing but superb results and quality from them. Any error is by me at the time of the shoot.
Secondly, it's just as cheap, if not less than some of these online deals.
Furthermore, I am able to view the print in person prior to shipment so I am aware of the exact results that I may approve or diapprove of prior to shipping and make needed changes. This ensures greater customer satisfaction.
Finally, I get to personally package my photos, often sending other information consisting of coupons, price lists, referral programs, etc. I can personally mail it off and know that it gets there by a certain time.
Most of all, I can personally hold that image and give it my approval.
I beleive you can obtain your own paypal payment buttons for your website through paypal's site.

Yeah, I've already got a paypal account to accept debit/credit cards and the buttons to put on my site. I'm just shopping around to see what my options are. If nothing else, I probably will do that. I'm just hoping to see if there's a site that can take care of the prints for me. Anything I consider, I will order sample prints of my stuff to see what their quality is like.

Good idea. Quality is one thing, consisteincy of the quality is another.

http://www.expressdigital.com/products/prstorefronts.shtm Gives you a store with no monthly fee, and you can fulfill the orders yourself or let one of their labs do it for you. Although personally I find their website templates are more suited to event photographers than fine art.

Matt

Honestly, that might be something of interest also. I've got an archive of over 8,000 party pics and still going.

Thank you for that. :)

Be sure to check all their pricing and make sure your within your budget. Some sites you would need to sell quite a few prints per month just to break even.
Although I know of one who has pretty good pricing, I just cant advertise it :LOL:

If you want to host your own site and know a little about building a site, you can try Exhibit Engine 1.5 (http://photography-on-the.net/ee/). PM me if you want to see an example, in a process of creating one now.

If you want to invest some money into a program, Lightbox Photo (http://www.lightboxphoto.com) is another path to go.

Regarding selling online does anyone have a sustainable revenue from say Smugmug or other sites?

I have a substantial revenue :-) its the only way I make money.
I will say though that you do have to market it, I have some photographers on my site that make heaps and others that dont make a cent.
If you think that you can just post images to a site and they will sell then you will go broke really fast. If you treat it like any other business and maket you work correctly then you will make money.
Its up to you