Selling your photo.net images online?

[mg]

Good summary of what was said, Brian. So, I'd be indeed interested in Model 1, variant a), about which you wrote the following: "In one variant of this model, photo.net collects the payment, deducts its fees, and forwards the balance to the photographer on some regular payment cycle." I agree that regular payment cycles are convenient, but judging from the disadvantages for photo.net under model 1, as you noted them, I would like to suggest this: "regular payment cycles", BUT... payments are made to the photographer only:

 

- AFTER THE PRINTS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED, and IF THE BUYER IS SATISFIED WITH A) DELIVERY ON TIME and B) THE QUALITY OF THE PRINT.

 

A) DELIVERY ON TIME: PRINT TO BE DELIVERED WITHIN 30 DAYS IF THE BUYER OPTS FOR COURRIER, WITH 60 DAYS IF HE DOESN'T.

 

B) QUALITY OF THE PRINT: WE COULD EASILY MAKE A LIST OF REQUIREMENTS FOR ALL THE POSSIBLE CASES OF TECHNICAL FAILURES. NO COMPLAINS SHALL BE ENTERTAINED FROM BUYERS WHO WILL COMPLAIN ABOUT THE POTOGRAPHER'S ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION UNLESS THE PRINT DIFFERS GREATLY FROM THE JPEG POSTED ON-LINE AT PNET.

 

Based on such a set of precise rules and regulations, complaints will still happen, but should imo be limited. Dammage during transport is covered by courrier companies, and the buyer can't complain if he choose a cheaper transportation with no attached insurance.

 

If a buyer still complains about the print for "technical failure", I see 2 possibles options:

 

1) Photo.net accepts the responsability of deciding who's right or wrong. Then, the dissatisfied buyer should send the print to PNet at his own expenses.

 

1.a) - If PN decides the print is technically "out", then payment won't go to the photographer but will be returned to the buyer - after deduction of the shipping fees, which will be refunded to the photographer. PNet will keep or destroy the "failed" print, and the buyer would only have lost the shipping fee - the same as for any canceled transaction on the net. As for the photographer he will only have lost his crappy print. Fair enough ?

 

1.b) If PN decides the print is technically correct, the photographer gets paid by PN, and too bad for the buyer...? Nah, that can't be. So let's just say that the buyer can still refuse the print, but needs to pay for shipping and return shipping of the print + 50% of PN's commission + 50% of what the photographer was supposed to get. Fair ?

 

b) Photo.net doesn't accept the responsability of deciding who's right or wrong. Then the unhappy buyer and the photographer will never find an agreement, which means that the buyer will keep the print and the photographer won't be paid. Now who's the photographer who'd want to face this kind of problems, especially given the fact thatany buyer can complain any time about anything, be itjust an excuse in order not to pay ?! Not me, for sure.

 

In other words, PNet can take a fairly high commission - 30 to 40% imo -, but if PN doesn't want to be responsible in this deal, there no way the deal can work with any guarantee. And if we are prepared to do a transaction without any guarantee, what's the point of doing it throughphoto.net anyway ? I mean, the buyer can send an email to the photographer and simply tell him "I want that wonderful sunset I saw in your folder ! How much ?"

 

Which means that photo.net, in model 1, must still face SOME responsabilities, and act as a real midleman, or it just wouldn't work - or at least wouldn't work with photographers, who can see that they may not get paid after sending the print. :-)

[mg]

In your idea, Brian, is there a decision to be made as for whether to chose model 1 or model 2, or are you not excluding to have both model 1 and 2 as 2 options...?

 

I think, if it's not too much work and complexity for photo.net, it would actually be a good thing to keep both models for photographers to choose from.

[melresnick]

Since PhotoNet subscribers and potential buyers are located in many countries around the world, I must ask whether we would be prepared as independent printers for the complications of international shipping. In any case, buyers would need to know in advance whether they will incur customs duties on their purchases. (At present, there is no way of knowing from the Community Member page where a person is located, and - off topic - I would love to see this information.)

 

There are many advantages to each model, but I wonder whether the international scope of PN and this wonderful idea is the deal breaker for the first model. In the second model, all prints would be shipped from the U.S. - unless Brian decides to outsource the printing (^0^) .

[mbb]

One of the easiest ways to present quality of the image is posting in for sale gallery two files. One the low-resolution version of the image to view and second, a small 100% crop of image section @300dpi. Potential buyer can even print that section to see a quality of the image.

 

I might be wrong but I have a filling that if somebody wants a photo printed by photographer (especially one with reputation of broadly accepted art work) it will contact (or already did so) him/her directly. That is exactly what I would do if I have interest to buy a print. I think PN can have a bigger operation when offer full service to less known photographers who cannot handle efficiently process of printing, shipping etc in professional way.

[mbb]

It also come to the mind that if PN will be a broker between seller (who print own images) and buyer many people will try shortcuts to save money and get discount price. Ebay has that problem all the time. One can be surprise what buyers and sellers can do to save or make a few extra bucks.

[mg]

Presenting "a small 100% crop of image section", as Mark suggests, is an idea that crossed my mind too - a good idea, I think, although another section of the print may show defects.

 

Mark is right as well that people may try to close deals behind PNet's back, but as I said earlier: the only way PNet can prevent it to some extent is to offer an additional guarantee, that buyer and dealers wouldn't get if they'd deal among themselves without PNet.

[root]

It's not clear what value PN is adding to the transaction between buyer and seller that justifies a commission. Most sales will be between photographers already on the site, and the sale will be based on some familiarity with both the work of the photographer and perhaps various posts that suggest that s/he knows what s/he's doing in the wet or digital darkroom. You can buy, sell, or exchange prints right now without any direct involvement from the site. Unless there's some significant marketing being planned which would increase the visibility of my images beyond what PN provides and what my personal website now generates, I don't see the benefit, especially since it may be difficult to tell where the referral came from. I've supported my family for 33 years on a business model that is based entirely on gratis referrals. I also have several years experience with sales which were all based on referrals where a commission was expected. It isn't as simple as it looks.

[mottershead]

Carl, I assume you are referring only to the first model I mentioned, which resembles an eBay, or our own photo.net Classifieds. In that model, essentially the photographers would be paying photo.net for advertising. A large proportion of the revenue that photo.net makes currently from advertising is based on being paid for clickthroughs or commissions on sales. In the variant of the first model where photo.net collects the payment, the photographers would also be paying for a shopping cart service, or if it was structured as Marc G has suggested, something resembling an escrow service.

 

All of these are business models which have worked on the Internet, although it is true that some of them would invite people to try to cheat. People try to cheat eBay out of its fees by doing the deals on the side. With the photo.net Classifieds, when we asked "volume" advertisers to pay a commission on successful sales, few of them ever did. Most of them always claimed that their items weren't selling or that they had sold the stuff somewhere else. Even though they listed scores of items over the course of months, somehow it turned out that they never sold anything. Only a couple of the people were honest. Eventually we gave up trying to collect from "volume" advertisers.

[root]

I'm sure you're aware that many of the more popular photographers are active on more than one photo site, and many, if not most, have their own web site. So to deny you a commission when your role in the sale is unclear is hardly cheating. How will you compel a buyer to contact you rather than the photographer, and if you can, then it seems like you are trying to benefit from the reputations we've established on the web and elsewhere without adding anything to the transaction. The party line used to be that nobody made any money off their visibility on this site, but I'm sure you've read the posts by several people who corrected that false assumption. If you feel you can add significantly to the sales volume and at prices consistent with what they've been getting, then this venture could succeed.

 

 

It is the nature of any promotional campaign to cast a wide net that repeats the message often enough in a variety of different places to finally get the buyer to respond. When someone Googles my name, it comes up on several different sites, including photo.net. By contrast, in the case of stockphoto sites, even though most do not require exclusivity, it is the site that is contacted, and buyers are looking for a particular kind of image, not a particular photographer. The delivery is handled by the site, as per your option #2. In the case of prints, I think that for them to be sold at a price normally associated with fine art by a particular individual, rather than at the price of an enlargement of a snapshot, I would expect that buyers would want and expect the photographer to have some control over the printing process (if not all of it.)

 

I think the enlargement vs fine art issue, and the broad price range associated with the two interpretations of what a photographic print is, will be a major problem. If you end up doing a lot of business producing $25 prints, which I suspect will be the case, don't be surprised if some of the more established fine art printers feel as if the value of their work is compromised by association.

[mottershead]

We have a several affiliates who pay us commissions. For example, Adorama and B&H. Now, those affiliates also advertise on many other web sites and in print, and of course they also have their web sites, which are in Google with Page Ranks as high or higher than photo.net.

 

When someone clicks through from photo.net and purchases something, they nevertheless pay us a small percentage of the total purchase price as a commission, per their agreement with us. Cheating would be that they promise us a commission when people click through from our site and then they didn't pay it. They could rationalize this as you do by saying: "its not cheating because photo.net just got lucky that the person clicked through from photo.net. Actually, it was our ad in Pop Photo, or on these 20 other web sites, or the fact that the person had purchased from us before that resulted in this sale." This is just like you saying, "Well I have my own web site and I participate in a lot of other photo community sites; so it's not cheating if put my photos in the photo.net sales Gallery and then when people query me via email, having seen a photo on photo.net, I send them to my web site to make the purchase in order to avoid paying photo.net anything." That is what I mean by cheating. This is what people do with eBay auctions to cheat eBay. I hope you are not arguing that this is not cheating.

 

Why do B&H and Adorama not cheat? Because they reckon, apparently, that they get marginal business from photo.net. Yes, some of the business they pay commissions to us for they would have gotten anyway, and those commissions are wasted, effectively. However, they calculate that the marginal business they are getting through photo.net is worth the commissions, including the "wasted" commissions. They also know that if they started cheating, we'd drop the relationship, plus they might get a reputation for cheating, which would affect their relationships with other web sites. They want the relationship with us, because it produces marginal business with a value exceeding the commissions they pay us, plus they want a reputation for not cheating. Plus, I think they are basically honest guys, many of them deeply religious. So they don't cheat. In fact, we trust both of them so much, that we rely totally on their reports as to what our commission is for any particular month, and we have no way to second-guess them.

 

I don't know whether photographers such as yourself are more or less honest than New York camera dealers, and whether cheating and dishonesty by photographers would wreck the first model. It doesn't for eBay, but I don't know how much trouble eBay has to go to in order to mitigate seller dishonesty. When I see the rationalizing in your previous post, combined with my experience with "volume" advertisers in the Classifieds, I have my concerns about this, I must admit.

[MichaelChang]

I've known a few people from PN and possibly other photography sites for a while and have established personal relationships. Now, should PN implement a service scheme at some point and I wanted to buy a print from these friends whose pictures are displayed here (and elsewhere where I might also be a member and might also offer a site service to sell prints), am I morally or legally obligated to go through PN's or the other site's service? If so, which site should get the business?

[mottershead]

That would be up to you. There are many people who are already B&H and Adorama customers. When they are buying an expensive camera or lens, they are going to buy it from Adorama, for example. They trust Adorama, and have good dealings with them in the past. It is a given that they will buy from Adorama.

 

Nevertheless, they are also loyal members of photo.net, and they want to support photo.net. When they make their purchase, they go out of their way to click through from photo.net to the Adorama site, so that photo.net will get the commission. In those cases, from B&H's or Adorama's point of view, the commission they pay to photo.net (or any other web site, for that matter) is wasted, because they were going to get that sale, no matter what. It was just a question of which web site captured the clickthrough. Nevertheless, they pay the commission anyway. If all the sales were like that, then they are wasting the money they pay to photo.net. But they figure they are getting enough additional sales through web advertising generally, and through advertising on photo.net specifically, that it is worth it to them to have these relationships and to pay these commissions.

 

I think it would be the same with photo sales. Some people would feel more of a tie to the photographer and want him to get the full amount. Even if they learned that an image was for sale on photo.net, they might go out of their way to find the image on the photographer's web site and buy it there. photo.net might deserve a commission in that case, but they wouldn't get it. That wouldn't be cheating by the photographer, either. It might work the other way round as well. You find an image on Carl Root's web site that you want to buy. But you think: hey, I've seen that image on photo.net. I'll buy it through photo.net, so they get the commission, since I want to support photo.net. photo.net doesn't really deserve that commission, since you were going to buy the photo anyway, and you didn't even find it on photo.net initially. But Carl, being honest, pays the commission. Finally there are the cases which the photographer is really hoping for by putting his photos into the photo.net Sales Gallery: the person is looking through the photo.net gallery for a photo to purchase for a birthday present or to decorate the waiting room in his office, sees a Carl Root photo that he thinks is perfect, and buys it through photo.net. photo.net deserves the commission, and Carl pays it, happy to have gotten a sale he wouldn't have otherwise made.

 

If too many of the sales always turn out to fall into the first case, then photo.net loses interest in featuring Carl Root photos in its sales gallery. If too many fall into the second case, then Carl stops being interested in having his photos on photo.net. He likes photo.net, but not enough to pay us a tax on numerous photo sales for which we don't deserve credit. As long as a reasonable number of sales are falling into the third case, Carl is getting sales, photo.net is getting commissions, the buyers' walls are sprouting great photos, and everybody is happy.

[root]

I have purchased items from B&H over the phone, sometimes because I had a question, I couldn't get the click-through process to work, or it was simply easier to call. Should I have mentioned that I was aware that they advertise on photo.net (as well as in numerous other periodicals?) Maybe so. Would they then have paid you a commission?

 

The point remains that there was no participation on your part in the sale. (I did business with B&H long before finding photo.net, but I'm not even sure that's relavent, given how much time I used to spend going through their green pages in ShutterBug and elsewhere.) It always boils down to the point of sale in my experience with piano sales, at least, mostly to eliminate claims by more than one party to a commission and also to be very clear that the referral played an active role in closing the deal. As a seller, there were times when several "consultants" came to me for a commission on the same sale, yet neither one was the actual referral who probably had a better case.

 

I agree that it would be silly to split hairs if there's an obvious correlation in increased print sales and your setting up a sales gallery, but if you're simply trading on the credibility we've established over the years and the value we've added to the gallery without adding anything new yourself, then it doesn't look very attractive.

[mottershead]

Nope. They only pay us on clickthroughs from photo.net to their web site. You don't have to buy right off the bat for us to get credit. They will cookie your browser and if you buy later (within some amount of time), we will get credit. But you do have to clickthrough and buy on their web site. Mentioning us on the phone doesn't work. Even if you start the transaction on-line and have to call them about some problem, and they complete the transaction on the phone, we don't get credit. You have to go through the whole shopping cart thing on their web site for us to be credited.

 

The fact that we don't get credit if someone says "photo.net" on the phone doesn't bother me too much. As I said, we get credit for clickthroughs even in cases where someone was going to buy from B&H no matter what, just because they clicked through from photo.net. In a lot of these cases we don't really deserve credit, or not much, but we get it anyway. It all comes out in the wash. The deal with B&H and Adorama is clear, if a person buys something on their website within n days of clicking through from photo.net, then they pay us a commission. There is no questioning or trying to determine whether we "deserve" it, whether we worked hard enough for it, whether the customer was a previous B&H customer, etc. The clickthrough is in their web log, the web purchase is in their database, so they pay us.

 

Turning to photo sales, if we use this model, and we set it up to be paid for referrals, then there would need to be some sort of objective measure as to whether we have made a referral or not. If there was a referral followed by a sale, we should be paid the commission. Otherwise, no. If this was how we set things up, then if somebody puts up his photos in our sales gallery, then they have to be prepared to pay when people click through, even if it is a person who might have seen the same photo somewhere else, and might have bought it anyway either directly or through some other other web sites where the photographer is advertising. That is the nature of commissions. Some of them are more earned than others. If someone doesn't want to play that game, then they aren't compelled to put their photos in our Gallery.

 

In fact, I doubt I would set it up like this. I trust Adorama and B&H. But I don't think I would trust most of the photographers on photo.net to accurately record and pay for referrals that resulted in sales. In that model, where it is the photographer collecting the payment, only the photographer knows which referrals resulted in sales, and photo.net would have to trust the photographer to pay the commissions. Based on my experience with the Classifieds, between outright dishonest cheats, and the people who would always be finding some rationalization for not paying us ("oh, but this buyer is really a friend of mine"), and the people who just wouldn't be organized enough to accurately record the referrals and promptly send us the commissions, I think it would not be worth the hassle.

[keith_laban]

"Cheating" is yet another reason to charge the participating contributor upfront for the inclusion of their image in a "prints for sale" gallery. Why have the hassles of selling prints at all when you don't need to? $5 (or whatever) a month for each image posted to the sales gallery would soon add up to a whole pot of money and so easy to collect.

 

People tend to view images on photo.net, but a dedicated sales gallery might just jolt them into realising that they could actually buy and own them. It works on some of our own websites so why not on photo.net? This and the potentially huge buying audience would be the added value to the participating photographers.

[root]

If you receive payments directly, then that is your participation and it is clear that your interface played some role in initiating the transaction. Absent that direct involvement, I don't see either of us being able to track what involvement the site had, if any. We wouldn't know about clickthroughs; you wouldn't know about sales.

 

I can't help but be curious about what variables will determine visibility in the sales gallery, especially given the lack of keywords. Will we be inundated with birds, nudes, and faux sunsets? Will the selection system reward those who give away decent images for next to nothing? Ask the RM stock shooters what they think about RF and micro sites.

 

We used to insist that the TRP was not a competition. That could look like small potatoes in comparison.

[mottershead]

Keith, I agree, if we did the first model, where the photographer was responsible for fulfillment, we would just charge a listing fee, either a flat fee, or per photo. The only other way it could work would be where we collected the payment through our shopping cart, deducted our commission and sent the photographer the order to be fulfilled, with the payment following. All this, assuming that we don't take the responsibility for doing the fulfillment.

[root]

Good idea, Keith, but there's still the issue of relative number of views.

 

Continuous rotation?

[mottershead]

One way it might work is that there could be two levels: for $XX.00 you get the ability to enter sales particulars on all your portfolio photos (sizes available, price, etc) and there would just be a "buy this photo" icon or a link on the regular photo page, next to the photo in the TRP, etc.

 

For $YY more, or perhaps so much per photo, you get to have your photo in the Featured Prints Gallery. This might be organized by keywords, or by category. Within any particular grouping photos would be displayed in random order, which of course would change over time. There could be a variety of ways of presenting for-sale photos, but only the ones that had paid extra to be featured would be included. This would be a bit like Google and other search engines, where pages are displayed by relevance regardless of whether site owners have paid anything for placement, but next to that listing are any paid links deemed relevant.

[sammm]

As someone far more likely to buy (occasionally) than sell, let me contribute a thought or two along the way. I can't say I've read everything above, but I have read much of it.

 

I like option 1. Why? Because I'm really not interested in a print to the satisfaction of anyone but the photographer. The people I am likely to buy a print from are likely to care, deeply, about the print quality and presentation. If there is a central production location putting out photographs that range from mediocre to truly stunning, the people printing will get sloppy. And they will approach the printing from one angle, which the photographer may not. And I assume there are still plenty of photographers still dodging and burning rather than printing pure digital files.

 

Also, I would expect most art prints to be signed. How does the photographer sign if photo.net prints and mails?

 

I also, however, don't think the two approaches are exclusive, and it may be that a lower-cost type 2 service would attract a different clientele (including the nudes) than a higher-cost type 1 service.

 

On Carl's point about why the commission, I would say photo.net serves the role of the gallery, and that can be worth a lot. If I wanted to get prints from 10 different photographers because my business had just rented a new floor and I wanted a selection to decorate, coming to photo.net and choosing five photographers so I could order two each would be a big service for the photographer and the buyer, and worth a fair bit. For a sampling of different photographers and the ability to make an impulse purchae, a gallery is very helpful. Also, to do this right, photo.net should make some marketing investment, since those who come here now are not necessarily buyers. That marketing will entail costs.

 

Undoubtedly, many, and particularly the collector who wants to consistently pick up individual pieces, would rather go straight to the source, but I don't see anything stopping them, and if photo.net gets a commission on some but not all the sales generated, what's the big deal for the photographer?

[ajoy prabhu]

I think Sam M-M is on the right track!

 

I for one have a 2-tier system for my clients. Once they view the images in thier "album" they get 2 choices-- either have the image linked directly to printing services such as Shutterfly (Shutterfly has incidentaly stopped support for this web-based printing but some of us are still linked to it) and for others who want the highest quality, I let them specify the printing service and I profile my image and then send it off for printing or print it myself.

 

Just my ?2

 

Ajoy

[root]

If I recall correctly, this was the only extensive discussion on selling prints through this site, so I'm resurrecting this thread hoping that Phil will have the opportunity to read it.

 

One issue that got very little discussion was price points. I sense that a number of people who are attracted to this idea have very different ideas regarding what their prints should sell for (and by logical extension, to whom.) If you're accustomed to selling your work for several hundred dollars (before gallery commission) how will that market mesh with the site participants who expect to sell work for much less?

 

The issue of print visibility on this site, especially given the current subway station model, also needs a lot more discussion.

 

Comments, Phil?

[yann_r.]

Wow, you've been active!<br>

I don't feel revelant at all to participate in such a thread but I keep a look, it's an interesting idea.<p>

But ... Brian, FWIW, I've been member of deviantart.com and their prints store looks quite efficient (I've never used it but I've rarely read about complains). Do you know how it works?

[yann_r.]

Looks obvious I need to sleep... you've all been active in last october. good night.

[elsen]

I would support model 2, and i think Brain had thought about the scheme quite deeply. Pricing can be decided buy the author, suggested by photo.net or left open. Payment can be done by Paypal, films can be scanned and converted to multi-megapixel after an order is submitted and before photo.net can go to the printing and shipping process. Any business decision has its risk, and it is entirely the photographer's call if he/she wants to choose photo.net as the authorized broker or just another online gallery. Maybe the time has come for photo.net to set up a beta site for the service. Things will be much clear when the business model is really tested.