If you give MorePhotos CEO Mike Connors a call and ask for ideas on how to sell photos online, you better be ready to sit back and enjoy the ride.  Mike has a bunch of ideas, and a bunch of inspiration to boot.  The cool thing is that the team here at MorePhotos has actually built the shopping cart (and tweaked it over the years) from actual photographer feedback.  Here’s a few tips that will help you out, as well as associated MorePhotos system features that make them easy to implement.  You should be aware of these and using them if you’re not already.

1) Post your event before you shoot it: How is this possible?  We created “coming soon” events.  This way you have the ability to set up an event that is planned, and interested parties can register their email to get an auto notification when the images are live and ready for purchase.  Sweet!  This is a great way to build excitement for the event and the images yet to come.  Here are instructions and a screen screen shot to show you how it’s done:

• In Online Manager go to Event Manager, Events, Add Event
• Choose Coming Soon Event, and fill in your event data

(click in for detail)

2) Discount your event & post for a SHORT time period: Testing this technique in the early days proved a couple different things.  For one, it increased sales 30-35% to have events listed for a 3-4 week time period rather than 2-3 months.  Secondly, when a discount was added to the equation, say for the first week, 2/3 of procrastinators (those folks who wait months to order your images), stepped up to the plate and ordered right away to get the savings.  To add a discount sheet, simply:

• Go to Online Manager, Pricing Manager, Discount Sheets
• Add a discount sheet, name it, then click add discount

(click in for detail)

3) Capture the “last 3rd”: What’s that?  Good question.  In Mike’s words, “it’s the last 3rd of procrastinators who waited too long to purchase.  They missed the discount, they missed the active event, and you don’t want to pay to leave your extra images up  just for them.  That’s why we have an archive feature.  When you create an event, simply set a date for it to auto archive.  It’s kind of like hibernating.  The images in archive do not count toward your monthly peak image count, and only cost 1 dollar per 1000 images!  The kicker is that you can set the tool up to charge the customer a certain amount to get the event out of “archive”, then automatically send them a gift certificate for that same amount off of their order, thus increasing the chance of them ordering to get their money back – plus of course they get your images:)

If you’re looking into MorePhotos for the first time, visit our client testimonials page and take a glance at our photography website templates!

I hope this was helpful.  Let us know if you have any questions or comments.  You can also give Mike Connors a call @ 231-932-0855 x 15 to grab a bit of that inspiration for yourself.