Suggestion

pecheney

Ok....so far I am VERY happy with smugmug. My sales are WAY down from otehr sites, and i am quite positive it is simply becasue folks do NOT relaize that the photos are for sale. THta stinks, but the functionality and ease-of-use of SmugMug is surprsingly keeping me quite loyal. I am going to have to redesign my website, www.CharlestonPictureCompany.com in order to increase sales by "educating" my clients that they CAN actuallu BUY BEFORE they even get to SMugMug's site. I am patiently awaiting an upgrade/fix, but so far SM has been VERY receptive!

Hope I do not sound negative, but please consider making the ability to BUY these photos more obvious.

With that said, I have one more suggestion that may or may not interest SM and teh SM community... and I am sure this has mots likely been addressed before... When the "Share with Friends" button is clicked, some truly nice functionality is displayed. I like teh way SM gives us flexability. The one thing I see missing is the send this photo to a friend functionailty. I don't like the way I have to reenter all teh info for multiple recipients. dotPhoto allows you to create a list of individuals and their email addresses for EAST sharing now and in teh future. I think customer relationship management is HUGE! I woudl love to harvets my customer's emails through smugmug, and be able to share photos, email them, etc. Hope that makes sense. Lastly, what about sending postcards... seeing as how a lower res version of teh photo is already made, what is wrong with postcard functionality instead of just a link to an email address.

GOod grief, I hate sounding negative, but these are the few caveats keeping me from being in love with SmugMug. Coupons would be nice, but that is advanced CRM functionality.... :-)

I am shooting the www.CharlestonMaritimeFestival.com this weekend. Anybody in range of Charleston come on down, should bne an amaizing weekend. Mr Ted Turner will be here. I'll share some photos with y'all after the weekend.

On an ancillary note, if anybody is doing what we are (event and location photograpohy), please email me. I would love to chat with somebody else to see how yoru sales are, what you are doing, and if you sell ANY gift items at all. I don't think ANY of my clients realize they canhave their photos imprinted on such cool objects!

PEC

Paul
www.CharlestonPictureCompany.com

mercphoto

Making sales obvious

pecheney wrote:

Ok....so far I am VERY happy with smugmug. My sales are WAY down from otehr sites, and i am quite positive it is simply becasue folks do NOT relaize that the photos are for sale.

I agree. The "order prints and gifts" button needs to be near the top of the page, not below it. It is way too easy for that button to be off the screen, forcing users to scroll down to find the button.

Can smugmug move the "order prints" button to be above the image?

{JT}

I plan on changing this ...
In the "fairly" massive print ordering overhaul we are preparing I had planned on moving the Order Print button to a more prominent location above the image. This will of course provide some negative feedback for people who will not like the scrolling it may cause, but when we start opening up more of the style sheet classes, pros can fix it if they want to.

mercphoto wrote:

I agree. The "order prints and gifts" button needs to be near the top of the page, not below it. It is way too easy for that button to be off the screen, forcing users to scroll down to find the button.

Can smugmug move the "order prints" button to be above the image?

mercphoto

order buttons

{JT} wrote:

In the "fairly" massive print ordering overhaul we are preparing I had planned on moving the Order Print button to a more prominent location above the image.

Very cool. You guys have been very good on the customer support front. Thanks.

pecheney

mercphoto wrote:

Very cool. You guys have been very good on the customer support front. Thanks.

I second that emotion! Very odd feeling having a company actually listen to its customers... :-) Refreshing change!



Another "issue" is the fact that all the cool gift items are located WAY down a scroll... Maybe a separate link that is used JUST for Gift items would answer this issue. It would be SUPER cool if there was a highly visible button that said "Order Prints" and next to it, another button, that said something to the effect of Print this photo on 70+ Gift Items!" Upon clicking that button, a page with the selected photo thumb nailed for reference and one page of all the gift items available with a check box next to each. I think this will help folks realize they can take a cool image/graphic on SMugMug and create a truly unique gift for somebody. Hope that makes sense. I know SM’s main focus isn’t selling photo gift items, but it is such a cool possibility that I want to market them more aggressively to my customers and don’t want to have to use a third party like Club Photo. And I hope this isn’t too annoying of a feature request! I am sure SM has a mile high list of feature requests!

Baldy

pecheney wrote:

I am sure SM has a mile high list of feature requests!

Indeed. But we love hearing them anyway.

The prototypes I've seen from JT seem to show a somewhat easier way to access gifts than we have now. It turns out they're fun and we like offering them, but sales by comparison to prints are very small. Postcards do well and probably when we get the time to do Christmas cards and calendars, they will too. But the rest are just fun sidelines.

ClubPhoto, by the way, sells cooler magnets than we do, but EZ Prints sent us prototypes of new magnets that look really great, in two sizes.

scrooks

Baldy wrote:

sales by comparison to prints are very small.

I like pecheney's idea about a separate button that emphasizes the cool items, and would bet that if something like this were implemented you'd see that type of sales jump at least a bit.

I would like to think that some of my customers will be all over those items once I start offering them. I don't offer them now because of my fear of misunderstanding of cropping on the customer's part, which I hope will go away soon with the new ordering system and visual cropping indications.

pecheney

On another note, and this may not be a suggestion at all: I am a web developer by trade with an event/location photography business as well. I am shooting events on behalf of companies and then passing out a little card to direct folks to my smugmug gallery with their photo for purchase. Not rocket science really. What I am coming across lately is folks wanting me to use my “pass cards” to direct them not to MY website, but theirs to increase their hits. I have tow ways to handle this. I can consult with them and install SM on their site, but then the commission check and everything will go to them as their credit card info will be involved, and this will open the obvious door to letting them do the photography themselves and simply upload it their own SM galley. Make sense? I want to know if I can install MY smug across MULTIPLE sites and restrict them to viewing JUST the galleries I want them to see? That way I get the commissions, the mark up, and control the photography, yet THEY receive the added functionality and exposure by having 1000’s of people going to their site to view the photos. Make sense?



Can I install my SM gallery on my client’s sites, and if so, can I restrict them to just viewing what I want them to view? I don’t want their clients getting confused by going too far back in a gallery and looking at other photos that are not pertinent… I have 5 clients wanting this functionality NOW and I am freaking cause I am afraid if I make them buy their own SM then they will not use me as their photographer in the future… I guess I want to cobrand on behalf of my clients… maybe I thinking too hard about this??? Any help is GREATLY appreciated as I have a need for this starting TOMORROW with a 40k shoot!! Ahhh!!! J



Yep..





Paul E. Cheney, Jr.
Web Development
www.superiorinternet.com | www.charlestonpicturecompany.com

Baldy

Hey Pecheney,

Wow, this sounds very intersting. Unfortunately, I don't see clearly how to do this with existing functionality, but I sent the link to JT for him to noodle on. Hopefully he'll weigh in soon.

Thanks,
Baldy

flyingpylon

Two words: Web Services.

{JT}

ok, let me get this straight ...
I need to clarify what you mean, I read through twice and got two different meanings. What I think you want is this:

Let's say "Company A" hires you to shoot an event for them - they invite all sorts of other companies, guests, friends. Instead of sending those guests to your site on smugmug, they would like to send them to their own website: http://www.companya.com/photos/event.html - but that page serves up images from your gallery - and they can not move out of that gallery to other galleries you have?

If that is the case, then there may be some tricks we can do in the future. No promises, but there are solutions.

GREAPER

If I am reading this right, it is a bit more complicated. What I understand that he wants is:


The ability to link to photos in the html of his customers site incorporating the photos into the customers site. (this part he can do now)

The ability to generate print sales through smugmug FROM that customers site without any noticablesite change so that a Company A can sell prints from Company A's site through smugmug, but with the credit for the sales going to the photographer in question on their smugmug account.

The ability to make this all look seemless as if the customer never left Company A's site.

pecheney

GREAPER wrote:

If I am reading this right, it is a bit more complicated. What I understand that he wants is:


The ability to link to photos in the html of his customers site incorporating the photos into the customers site. (this part he can do now)

The ability to generate print sales through smugmug FROM that customers site without any noticablesite change so that a Company A can sell prints from Company A's site through smugmug, but with the credit for the sales going to the photographer in question on their smugmug account.

The ability to make this all look seemless as if the customer never left Company A's site.

Yeah, actually, y'all are confusing ME a tad! :-) I shoot festivals. RIGHT now my business partner is shooting at this festival: www.CharlestonMaritimeFestival.com . Simply put, I want to be able to create a gallery called Charleston Maritime Festival, and drop 1000's of photos into the gallery within many subcategories. I want to change my pass card to say "To view your photos, go to www.CharlestonMaritimeFestival.com !" NOT to my website, which is www.CharlestonPictureCompany.com ... I want to be able to tout that I can seriously beef up my client's websites hits and exposure by making each photographed "guest" go to my clienst website. I don't want them to get confused and click back and see other festivals/events that we also shot, though... I think both of yoru repsonses were almost opn track, but I gota lil confused, so I reiterated. My fear, as I mentioned, is taht they will just buy SmugMug, and use it themselves, and my commissions will be shot. I JUST spoke with the festival director about this and he is excited if it can happen now or in the future. I have 4 other clients JUST like this. One of them beinga weekly music series backed by the very largest event promotion company. Their head guy is VERY excited about it as well, and if it works he wants it done on his corporate site for cities all up and down the east coast. I have a fest with 200k wanting it, another with 82,000 annual attendees in NC, etc. It is a very practical way to increase a website's exposure... MAke each individual go back to teh festival's website, and look at the event's photos via a transparent SmugMug back end...

Heck, I am so busy I have not even cobranded my own site. Can I just go ahead and cobrand my account across my customers RIGHT now? I need to look into teh cobranding functionality more... Hope I am clarifying and not making it more confusing!

{JT}

I get it ...
It seems like this would be an easy thing to do, and depending on the level of integration it could be. What will not be possible is associating a gallery with a domain - it would just lead to more confusion and confliction with how we handle domains and accounts currently. (You "could" frame the page to get around this - but that leads to the IE cookies and security problem, and is not a good solution.)

What I do see as possible is being able to us CSS on a per gallery basis. What this would do is let you change what header or footer is on the page, and let you turn off page elements - like the breadcrumb trail back to your other galleries.

This is part of the next big feature we are adding, which is full customization of your site's look and feel.

flyingpylon

I'm thinking about something sort of similar, the difference being that I would own the different sites. My thought was to create a database that would contain the smugmug photo id and other information about each photo. I would use my own logic to categorize, search, and display the images. However the src attribute for each image would include a link to the image on smugmug using the id. Then, on your smugmug account you could create a plain custom header and footer with no branding. Customers would see the image displayed on the specific site for their event, and then if they wanted to order a print a non-branded order window would pop up. This was just one idea. The hard part would be the manual insertion of smugmug photo ids into your database. Not too bad for a few hundred images but more difficult for a few thousand or more.

I've suggested web services to smugmug a few times, which would make all of this trivial (at least from our point of view!). I don't think it would be too hard for them to implement either, though it would mean allocating development time from what I'm sure is already a very full plate of features and functionality. As an example, just look at all of the people that sell products using Amazon Web Services. Product images, descriptions, reviews, etc. all show up within the site owner's design automatically but everything is sold through Amazon.

Baldy

I'm pretty sure that my take is we'd love to have what I think of as an API to smugmug. I envy what Amazon has created with theirs.

It's simply a resource issue and we're so focused on getting this new shopping cart out the door and then following on with the customization features that make ordering prints more obvious, that it's hard for us to think through anything else at the moment.

Sorry I don't have a better answer for you.

All the best,
Baldy

flyingpylon

I think we all understand that there are lots of requests ahead of an API, so no problem there. It's just that when you throw out ideas and a company actually responds, they really start to flow!

Something that would really help me in the short term would be a way to automatically generate a list of original filenames and their corresponding smugmug photo ids.

Baldy

flyingpylon wrote:

I think we all understand that there are lots of requests ahead of an API, so no problem there. It's just that when you throw out ideas and a company actually responds, they really start to flow!

Indeed! I only wish we weren't so tied down to this difficult shopping cart problem at the moment so we could knock off a lot of little things in a hurry.