Selling pictures online

dinneenp

Hi,
If you sell pictures online:
how do you do it (what's the process, do you use link to a site e.g. photo4me or how exactly does the person buy the picture?)
any tips and advice?
Thanks,
Pa.

PopeBuckfastXVI

I use Zenfolio, hosting & fulfillment in one package -> www.hughwphamill.com

If you are looking to link sales to your photo blog you could look into something like fotomoto

Fajitas!

Do people get many sales from it?

PaulieC

I use zenfolio too...apart from sales where i do family portraits (where I would expect sales) I get the odd random sale of some landscape stuff...

Teferi

You could also use one of those stock sites. I know many don't like them but I know a chap who earns an extra couple of hundred euro a month from them and he seems happy.

the_monkey

Well he must be lucky, stock sites are a cod, they will rip you off and unless you have a name most (if not all) of your pics will be refused.

the_monkey

PopeBuckfastXVI wrote: »

I use Zenfolio, hosting & fulfillment in one package -> www.hughwphamill.com

If you are looking to link sales to your photo blog you could look into something like fotomoto

This seems good, do you set your own prices and zen take a cut ?
or do they set em and you get a cut ?

sasar

the_monkey wrote: »

Well he must be lucky, stock sites are a cod, they will rip you off and unless you have a name most (if not all) of your pics will be refused.

Well, that's not quite true. My acceptance rate is between 55 and 95% (differs from site to site) and I am by no means a well known photographer.

And when you say you'll be ripped off, what do you mean? When you register on a stock site, you know what you sign up for and what % of the sale you'll be getting.

AnCatDubh

I'm not sure its what you mean but you can sell quite easily from your own site using simple paypal integration.

Get your account with paypal, update it to a business account (for free) to let them know that you are intending to take orders through it. Then go into their merchant tools and generate your paypal button for your image. Copy the resulting code and paste it onto your website under the image which you are selling. Through this paypal will handle the money exchange, and you must handle the order fulfillment. Paypal presents you with the individuals email and postal details.

This is fine for small number of images or adding as you post new images but would be a pain if you wanted to do 50 or 100 photographs at once.

Does you web software have paypal integration available? for example, there are plugins available for pixelpost photoblog software to do a paypal integration (no idea how good they are).

TinyExplosions

Fotomoto is most likely what I'll be going with in the end, simply because it's easy to integrate with your existing site, and they handle the order fulfillment (which is always the tricky part in my book). The only downside I've found thus far is that shipping is a little steep, but apart from that it looks good!

AnCatDubh

if people are interested in checking out stock sites here are 15 of them presented/reviewed

SerialComplaint

Are any of these sites geared up to handle school photos, where you want to allow the parents to buy shots of their own child, but yet protect the privacy of all the other children?

PopeBuckfastXVI

With zenfolio you can set up galleries that are locked at the gallery level, and also lock individual pictures with a password - so someone would have to enter the password to view the image, you wouldn't even get a thumbnail without it.

Here's a referral code that'll give you 5$ off and me the same
BDF-UGH-M7A

Top Dog

Question for those using Zenfolio - what sort of handling fees are you talking for getting photos posted to customers?