Selling photos online couldn't be easier

Today it is easier to sell your images than ever before.  I wanted to share what I am using to sell images online.

I have been posting images in galleries online for people to purchase since 1993, so from all this experience I chose PhotoShelter as my online gallery.

Here is what my clients see when they go to the home page of my gallery:

I could probably use this as my website.  It has everything pretty much here in addition to the galleries clients want to go to for their images.

Security

Now I can create a private gallery that with just an email and password people can access. I prefer doing this with most clients since they are less likely to pass around their email address with a password.

I can also create a gallery that has access with a password.

What can you order?

There are four things I offer on some of my galleries. Depending on which ones I turn on I have the option to sell: 1) Prints, 2) Products, 3) Downloads and 4) Rights managed Downloads.

This is an example of once a person likes a certain photo and clicks on the +Buy button they will see something like this screen above. The three colored arrows I added to help you see there are three of the four things I offer here with this photo.

Prints are highlighted here by the red arrow. My clients can order just about any size print that my supplier offers. I just go through the form when setting up my price and just those that I put my price on will show up.  I can have as many price lists I want and choose the list for any group of photos. I may have print prices really high since the photos might be rare or they are for fine art work to display in galleries.

The products tab which is highlighted by the blue arrow lets the customer order things like coffee mugs, mouse pads, t-shirts and more things like this. Again, only those item I choose to price will show up.

So many of my customers just want the digital image for usually two reasons. First of all most people want an image they can use on social media. They just want to display it for their Facebook friends for example.  These are low resolution and you cannot do too much with this size image other than social media.  I also offer a full high resolution download as well.  This is for folks that want to make their own prints. Since this means they will not be order a multiple print package and I will loose these sales the price is much higher to offset the sales I am loosing.

Rights Managed Sales

I also have media outlets and companies that want to buy my images to use to help their business. Depending how they want to use them they pay a different price. Now this is where the online website does so much for me that I would always prefer the customer buying online rather than the phone call.

The prices for stock sales go from really small amount to rather high due to how they plan to use it. PhotoShelter has built into their system FotoQuote's pricing for stock. You can make modifications to the pricing structure. You can lower or raise your rates in different categories by percentage of fotoQuote's rates.

The client just picks from the pull down menus and when they are done they have a price that they can agree upon and quickly pay and get the download right then.  No phone calls or negotiating.  Of course they can send an email and let me know they want to pay me double the price if they like, or as many will try and do get me to lower my price. Either way they now have a starting price based on parameters. Gives us a starting place for negotiation.

As you can see in the screen grab above, the client made choices and ended up with a quote of $126 for use of an image one time in the magazine and digital version.

What the photographer does to make all this work

I upload the high resolution images to PhotoShelter. I must pick a vendor to fullfil my prints and products. I then set the prices for the vendor.  I setup the prices for download for personal usage and also setup the rights managed prices.

After I upload and set of images then I normally select all the images in that gallery and price them choosing from the price lists I created.

I then set the security for the galleries and then send links to the customers I need to see the images.

The only other thing I can do is then also promote stock images I have for sale.

Once they are up I just get notices when an order is made and then payments online to my PayPal account. Now that is super easy for me.

Check out PhotoShelter yourself.