Website to Lab - Sales Workflow Question

[Edward Bussa]

The web is a remarkable venue for marketing a product - especially for photographers.

However, it seems like the pro photographer services marketplace is still surprisingly immature. Though, not being a pro, perhaps I am just uninformed!? My final question for everyone is are there services out there that support what I want to do?

I have put some thought into the kind of sales workflow I would like if I were selling photographs for a living. Here are my criteria:

I want to have complete control over the presentation of my images. This means I will host my images on my website at my domain without having to credit another business (like smugmug).
I expect my prints to be color-managed via an ICC profiled printer.
The process of sending a user-purchased image off to a lab for printing needs to be completely automated.With those three criteria in mind, here is the scenario I envision for purchasing an image, from the user's point of view:

The user browses my website and finally purchases an image named "The One" in a 20x30 gallery print.
Then they use my sites cart to specify quantity, shipping and payment details.
On my website, there is a color managed image optimized for printing at 20x30 ("theone_20x30_mylabicc.jpg").
Scripts/software running on my website correctly picks "theone_20x30_mylabicc.jpg" and submits the image to MyLab.com, automatically placing the order to have "The One" printed as a 20x30 gallery print and shipped directly to me or the customer, depending.Currently, out of the providers I am familiar with, the one that comes closest to this workflow is smugmug.com. They offer a cart that you can integrate into your own site and users can order prints that way.

However, from what I understand, you must put "Powered by SmugMug.com" on your pages, they don't offer ICC color management and they don't offer premium prints.

I think I can implement this workflow if I can find a lab that offers ICC profiles and quality prints and backend services for automatically submitting orders!

Does anyone know of a lab that offers this? How do you manage this part of the sale?

[Kathy Rappaport]

Hi Ed,

I am in the process of researching similar solutions for a website. I am currently posting images on Pbase and I bought a Pro Smug Mug site to back end with my domain name. I have a bunch of catalogs and info for various website solutions for photographers that link up with labs that I got when I went to WPPI's tradeshow a couple weeks ago. I will probably go through the pile of stuff I have next week and report back.

[Ron Mason]

Kathy:

Any of the larger photo hosting companies have lab fulfilment options. I've used Photoreflect, PrintRoom and Exposuremanager and there are many more. Photoreflect give you a long list of labs you can use for order fulfillement and PR and EM use a dedicated lab. All have their pluses and minuses.


Ron

[Kathy Rappaport]

Ron,

What are the plues? and Minuses? I would be very appreciative to have as much input as possible to make my choice since uploading photos and designing a web page (even using templates!) is time consuming. It's also one of the most important aspects of setting up a photography business!

[Ron Mason]

Kathy:

Photoreflect, which to be fair, I haven't used in about a year has horrible customer service. When I had a problem, which granted wasn't everyday, the only method of contacting them was e-mail, which they didn't answer about 3 out of 4 times.
Their upload interface works well, occasional hiccup but they all have them. They charged the most 15% + 3% for cc. You can preload all your images in a directory tree and click upload and walk away.

Printroom has the best customer service. They actually have a phone number answered by, are you ready" people! You have an account manager assigned to to help with logistics and to grow your business and they are very helpful and get back to you right away! Their webuploader that they advertise as 20X faster is really comparing the speed to a full rez jpg, so the reason it's 20 times faster is that the image you are uploading is 20 times smaller. I didn't see an increase in speed compared to the others. The user interface looks old, needs to be redesigned, looks very simplistic, not intuitive. Their lab does a great job, especially with the B&W stuff.

Exposuremanager: Best look to the storefront as far as I'm concerned. They charge the least. 10%. I have had problems with their FTP uploader, and a lot of settings aren't intuitive, poor written documentation. No phone support but they are pretty responsive via e-mail. Their web uplaoder was resdeigned and is better but you can only upload 1 subgallery at a time unless you want to use FTP.

You really need to take a look at each and see what works best for you.

Hope this helps.


Ron

[Edward Bussa]

I looked at your recommendations, Ron, and I ended up thinking ExposureManager might be closest to my criteria.

One their sign-up page, they offer a discount on the sign-up fee if you already have an account at one of the following:

backprint
collages.net
eventpix
pictage
photoreflect
photoshelter
printroom
smugmug
shutterfly

I take it these are the competition!

After checking THOSE sites out, I found another viable service provider - Photoshelter. Customization info here (http://www.photoshelter.com/tour/feature/customize).

Both ExposureManager and Photoshelter allow you to do what is called Domain Mapping (Smugmug offers this in one of their packages as well, but I think they still make you state "powered by smugmug"). The Domain Mapping feature makes it appear that your user never "leaves" your main site. However, your images are still hosted on "their" site.

[Kathy Rappaport]

Thanks for all that info. Collages.net and Pictage were on my list of sites to check. A lot of the wedding/event guys use them.

[Ron Mason]

As I said, there are many companies out there, all offering a little something different. None of them in my experience is perfect (what is). Just last night a good freind of mine ran into a problem with the way his images appeared, a lot of noise. He e-mailed customer serive and got a reply back, which on a Saturday on a holiday weekend was pretty impressive in my opinion. We must have had 20 e-mails going back and forth between the customer service rep. till almost midnight but the resolution to the problem finally came from us, not the company.

Many of these companies are new, they saw a large increase in the use of digital photography and recognized an undeveloped niche. Many suffere growing pains and need to sacrifice things to keep their costs down. Most don't charge an upfront fee and the ones that do, it's totally negotiable. Some are better geared towards weddings, some sports, some landscapes. So the answer which is best is; it all depends. I rotuinely upload 10 -12,000 images from a single event. What's important to me might not be important to the person who is uploading 600-800 images.

Most are free or cheap upfront. It's a worthwhile investment of your time to find one that "works" for your model.

Ron