Category Archives: Shopping Cart

Shopping Cart

Selling Photos With Shopping Carts: Are You Taking Full Advantage?

selling photos with shopping cartsWe know that being a photographer can prove quite challenging and competitive at times, especially if you’re selling your work online. A dynamic photo gallery is not the only factor that determines the number of customers you have online.

Today, shopping carts are every photographer’s number one priority for selling photos online.

Why are Shopping Carts Important?

What makes shopping carts such a necessity for photographers? Here are four key reasons:

  • Their design improves the user experience.
  • The way your products are featured can make them look more sellable.
  • They help you keep track of your sales and overall performance.
  • You’ll have an online marketplace and a website at the same time.

Let’s take a look at the key features online shopping carts need to include. By the end of this post, you’ll be one step closer to selling your photos online.

1. Responsive Design

Today, online sales from mobile devices cover a big spectrum. In fact, mobile commerce accounts for more than 31% of total online sales.

As a result, your website needs to display clearly on a portable device as well. In order to avoid creating a second, mobile website, make your desktop version look great by choosing a responsive template.

Your sales (and your visitors) will thank you later!

2. Effective Product and Order Management

No matter how good shopping carts feel and look, your end-goal is to have happy customers. The best way to do so is by managing your products and orders in a way that will help you both keep track of your sales and never lose an order.

Fortunately, our platform does offer a system that will make you and your customers happy.

3. Alternative Payment Methods

Debit cards, credit cards, PayPal – the Internet of 2018 is full of different payment options and if you cannot offer them, you’ll likely lose money.

Why risk losing dollars just because you can’t integrate alternative payment methods into your shopping cart?

Your platform needs to support all these methods and create a customer experience that makes your website shine with an effective e-commerce shopping cart.

4. Tracking Buyers’ Behavior

Selling is definitely the point but monitoring your buyers’ behavior is equally important. By analyzing the exact way they’re performing when they’re visiting your online photo gallery will only help you grow your sales.

Get to know what your customers want more of, monitor what they’re buying, determine where the link they have clicked on is located, then repeat the exact same steps for each visitor to your site to multiply your revenue.

Choose the Right Shopping Cart Today!

If you’re looking for an online platform with a variety of templates to choose from that will make your shopping cart stand out, you have definitely come to the right place.

See for yourself. Click here and request your free MorePhotos 30-day trial.

MorePhotos offers online solutions that include professional websites and a powerful e-commerce shopping cart. With our friendly and knowledgeable staff, we can assist you in creating an online presence that will attract traffic to your photography website.

Protect Photos, Shopping Cart

Photographers – How Can You Stop People From Stealing Your Images?

By Michael Connors
President and Co-Founder

strategies for protecting your photosHow can photographers stop people from stealing their images? That’s a million dollar question! So let’s talk about different ways to deter image theft.

The only way to completely prevent image theft is never to upload your images. The problem with that solution is that you cannot sell them online! Here are some answers:

 

1. Watermark the images.

  • A watermarked image has far less appeal to a thief. Who wants a print with a watermark on it?

 

2. Limit the time the images are online to only a few days.
Limiting the time helps in a couple of ways.

  • It creates a sense of urgency to order.
  • There’s less time potentially to have your images stolen.

 

3. Encourage your customers to purchase the minimal package BEFORE the images are displayed online.

  • This can be done by setting up a pre-pay event.
  • If feasible, have your customer visit the studio for a one-on-one presentation of a password protected event. Only you know the password. This way, your customers still get the fantastic purchasing experience our cart offers, with no chance of image theft. After a sale, you can always share the password with your customer so that they can share with friends and family.

 

4. Pay to Enter the event

  • With a “Pay to Enter” event, your customer must first pay a fee to view the images. You can even offer a gift certificate that your customer can apply during checkout.
  • The Pay to Enter fee could be the amount of a minimal package. Once your customer pays for access, our software can automatically issue a gift certificate in any amount you desire.
  • Pay to Enter allows you to put any price on the event to enter it. You can offer them the credit of the initial price they paid to enter or not.

 

5. It’s about the numbers

  • Shooting a marathon: perhaps you charge everyone $10 to $20 to enter the event and they can download any image for one day.
  • At this point, it’s all about the numbers. Have 200 runners? 20% pay to see the images you make $800.

 

6. Try a combination

  • Post for two days for free. After that, the customer must pay a fee to enter.

 

Want to learn more helpful tips? Check out our blog each month as we share strategies for your online photo business.

MorePhotos offers online solutions that include professional websites and a powerful e-commerce shopping cart. With our friendly and knowledgeable staff, we can assist you in creating an online presence that will attract traffic to your photography website.

 

Back to Businss by Michael Connors & MorePhotos Staff, Sell Photos Online, Shopping Cart

Post images online to gain exposure

3 Comments

There is no better way for a photographer to gain exposure then when they post images online for customers to view and buy!

It’s an amazing benefit that photographers have over almost every other type of company. The cost to purchase Ad Words to gain website traffic would be more than most photographers make in a year. Why don’t all photographers post images online then? I think there are a couple of factors involved:

1. Photographers are artists not marketers – the same reason a lot of people can’t shoot great photos. (Like Me)

2. Some of today’s great photographers, who have become speakers, tell other photographers not to post images online – (now we are back to listening to artists not marketers). Face to face sales are important, but not all events present a face-to-face opportunity, you have got to do both online and direct sales.

3. Photographers think just posting images on Facebook will be good enough, but it only works well for a day or two until the photos get the buried. Facebook posting does not even come close to having the same impact as posting on a professional looking cart. My suggestion is to use Facebook to make a post with a link to the images in your cart. Facebook is great for a lot of things, but not for a company using it for its only online connection.

Post images online, photographers photo cart4. A lot of photographers base the reason for not posting images online because they do in house presentations (remember, I’m a marketer and I would do the same for most jobs). I think the thing photographers are not grasping is that to stay in business you need to keep marketing 24/7… So after we had done the presentation, when walking my customer to the door, I would say, “By the way I will post your images on my website so you can share them with your family and friends.” What did I just do? Basically it’s like handing my customer a stack of my studio brochures. Even a corporate head shot customer could bring 5 to 10 people to your site that did not know who you were. A wedding could bring in hundreds of visitors – and the advantage is that a friend or family has already hired you – What better referral can you get?

The golden rule in marketing: The more people who know about your service, the better you will do!

If you are one of those people that do not post online – I want to hear the reasons why not.

Or if you are one of those speakers who advises against it – we all need to hear why you recommend this to others!