Pre-order or Sitting Fee?

GetTagged

Is there a way for customers to go to our smugmugs and pre-order/prepay sitting fees?

I really wish this could be an option in Events actually.

My partner and I are beauty pageant photographers. We are new to smugmug and still learning the features. We would like to be able to have our customers pay their sitting fees before the pageant event or photo shoot.

One person suggested opening up a gallery, posting one picture and on the download pricing set it to our sitting fee price. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

mrcoons

Check out my gallery HERE, I use Google Checkout so that the customer can pay their deposit. There are a number of services you can use to do this, Google Checkout, Paypal and a new service from Chase that I cannot recall the name of.

As I got this idea from Dgrin I would imagine there are a number of folks that use this.

Hope this helps.

GetTagged

That's really cool. Now what do you do for the purchase of the rest of their photos? Do they just add them to the shopping cart and purchase them that way? Do you do a markup to cover the rest of your fees? Also did you design that page yourself? I really like it! Can I snag the code?

What we are trying to do is charge what we would normally charge for the disc of pictures. But instead of having to sit down burn discs and mail them out. We have them pay the fee, then their downloads are free but they have to purchase prints.

I love smugmug but trying to get used to somebody else doing all the work for us is a bit of a challenge. We're loving it though because it is giving us so much more time to market, do graphic design, and spend more time with our families.