[RAILhead]

Hey all

Just gathering opinions/insight on how some of you guys show proofs and sell prints online. All the stuff I'm finding online looks like pure crap to me, but I know there have to be reputable, intuitive online shops for this.

What I'm looking for are the basics: I upload my proofs, clients can login to see just their shots, and from there, they choose what they want and I get them printed.

What do you guys use or recommend?

Thanks,
Maury

[Railroader]

SMUGMUG!!! I love them. If you get the "Pro" account, you can personalize your pages quite a bit and you set the prices. You are only limited in pricing by the wholesale price that you buy them at, but you can raise them as high as you want. Customers order directly through smugmug, pay them, and smugmug takes 15% of your profit.

You can right-click protect your photos, automatically apply water-marks, set default proof sizes, set gallery types, unlimited storage, unlimited traffic. You can order complete backups of all of your pictures. Very powerful features.

Right now, if you use the code "flickr" you get 50% off the first year. "Pro" accounts are normally $150/yr. Plus, they have an app that lets you import all of your flickr account pictures over.

Non-Profit groups get free lifetime Pro accounts as well.

Customer service is very good.

The CEO has a very good blogs too SmugBlog: Don MacAskill

[boy8cookie]

If you're going to "get them printed" anyway, why not just make your own web gallery where people can browse your photos and purchase prints right from your site. Use an online payment service (like paypal) to receive payment. From my experience doing free lance web design, galleries and 'buy now' buttons are pretty simple to set up. Most online payment services will have prebuilt code that you can just stick into your site, or you can hire a web designer for a more complete setup (cart, etc). The hard part is getting traffic to your site.

[mduell]

Gallery 2 + the plugin to do web commerce

[torsoboy]

Instaproofs of course. Nothing better out there.

Though I am quite biased, you can read unbiased reviews here (and anywhere else there are threads about this): Re: Instaproofs: Pro Digital Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review
Instaproofs - OpenSourcePhoto

[Mastrap]

For amateurs (and I use the word without menace, I classify myself as one) smugmug looks great, especially if you are worried about the future of flickr. I am trying them out myself right now.

If you're a pro then Instaproofs seems the way to go. Many of my pro friends use them, with great results.

[RAILhead]

Thanks for the ideas, keep them coming! I'm going to be digging into these sites this afternoon.

[torsoboy]

I made a spreadsheet the other day looking at the different prices on all of the services, and you can check that out if you want to. Of course you shouldn't look at price only, but it will give you a place to start, and a bunch of web addresses to look at.

http://www.awkwarditems.com/temp/feeComparison.xls

[RAILhead]

Man, instaproofs looks awesome. If I'm understanding correctly, they take 15% of the total ordered -- and I get to choose whatever pricing per shot or per package I want, right? So if I charge $15 for an 8x10 and they order 1, IP is going to retain $2.50 and send me the rest when they mail payments.

Not bad.

[torsoboy]

Yep, that's how it works. There is a fee change that is coming up in the next week or so also (don't tell anyone), but it might not affect you if you don't sell high dollar items. Think lower fees for higher priced items...

[mduell]

Originally Posted by RAILhead 

Man, instaproofs looks awesome. If I'm understanding correctly, they take 15% of the total ordered -- and I get to choose whatever pricing per shot or per package I want, right? So if I charge $15 for an 8x10 and they order 1, IP is going to retain $2.50 and send me the rest when they mail payments.

Math is hard, but yes it appears that way to me: they just take a flat percentage of gross.

[Peter]

A few of my photos i've been tempted to sell, but I have always felt there are so many people trying to sell their photos it isn't worth while.
Let me know how you get on.

[RAILhead]

Well, I'm selling directly to clients that I took photos for -- not just my random shots.

[Mastrap]

If you've got random but high quality images to sell try and get them accepted by a stock library.

[Peter]

what are some big stock libraries?
Getty doesn't appear to buy images. Or license them.