Defining characteristics for Smugmug pro for hobbyists
arjunrc
Registered Users Posts: 159 Major grins
Hi, given the doubling of price, I thought I'd start a thread specifically for folks who want 'Pro' features but are hobbyists. The 'Price increase' thread has gone through many pages of different opinions, and I thought I saw the CEO of SM being open to considering what is a right feature/price point for hobbyists:
The big question is 'Does SM find it business wise relevant to support hobbyists?' - that I can't answer, but assuming it is, its worth knowing what hobbyists want (or at least, my opinion of it):
I am a hobbyist who would like an option to sell, along with the convenience of automated print and delivery to customers. I'd like to pen down what my thoughts of features are and where a compromise could be reached by SM. Personally, I can afford $300 for a year, but given the return I get from this hobby, it is not worth that money - which is why 'only $XX per day' or 'a pack of cigarettes less' per day analogies don't apply.
I only recently joined SM and frankly I get my pro acct free, because I developed PB2SMUG (Very nice of them to do this), but even so this price is as a matter of principle, off its base for hobbyists.
Given all of this, I think SM is a company that cares for its users and listens to feedback. Here is what I can suggest as a package:
1. Keep the price to $99. That's still 4x the price of a PBase, for example (yes, I know its not an apple-apple comparison)
2. Don't offer unlimited space. Instead, while uploading offer a 'checkbox' that says 'discard originals' which basically means it will only retain, say, 800x600 or 1024xxxx
3. Don't assume that those who want to sell conveniently will want to pay $300 a year. Many hobbyists don't make that much of money a year, but are willing to pay a premium to SM for its better features, hanging on to the hope that maybe they will sell a few in a year. This by itself is the biggest reason I moved to SM - I thought hey, here is a site that makes selling easier, and I may get lucky. IF that is taken away, or made very expensive (Relative to the value a hobbyist sees), then SM is not worth it.
In other words, "PLEASE KEEP SELLING WITH PROFITS IN" --> this feature by itself will justify a hobbyist paying $99. Please give them ability to monitor sales. EASY SELLING IS AN INCENTIVE - it makes _no sense_ to take it away just because they are paying less.
4. Don't give any sales related support - be clear that all you will do is manage the automation of ordering through software. If there is a problem in the sale, we will have to contact the lab
5. Don't give options of many labs. EZprints is enough.
6. If you don't want to give this audience stats, fine. Just let us enter a statcounter code that can be globally applied
7. Allow us to keep the CSS customization. Remember hobbyists have a hope to sell and act like pros, even if they are not
- we are perfectly fine if you give us the basics and make us work harder to customize it compared to the pros.
8. Take away any premium support - make them go to forums for help, and only interact with your support for critical stuff (you define what it us)
Any other features other hobbyists want, or agree/disagree with the list above?
The big question is 'Does SM find it business wise relevant to support hobbyists?' - that I can't answer, but assuming it is, its worth knowing what hobbyists want (or at least, my opinion of it):
I am a hobbyist who would like an option to sell, along with the convenience of automated print and delivery to customers. I'd like to pen down what my thoughts of features are and where a compromise could be reached by SM. Personally, I can afford $300 for a year, but given the return I get from this hobby, it is not worth that money - which is why 'only $XX per day' or 'a pack of cigarettes less' per day analogies don't apply.
I only recently joined SM and frankly I get my pro acct free, because I developed PB2SMUG (Very nice of them to do this), but even so this price is as a matter of principle, off its base for hobbyists.
Given all of this, I think SM is a company that cares for its users and listens to feedback. Here is what I can suggest as a package:
1. Keep the price to $99. That's still 4x the price of a PBase, for example (yes, I know its not an apple-apple comparison)
2. Don't offer unlimited space. Instead, while uploading offer a 'checkbox' that says 'discard originals' which basically means it will only retain, say, 800x600 or 1024xxxx
3. Don't assume that those who want to sell conveniently will want to pay $300 a year. Many hobbyists don't make that much of money a year, but are willing to pay a premium to SM for its better features, hanging on to the hope that maybe they will sell a few in a year. This by itself is the biggest reason I moved to SM - I thought hey, here is a site that makes selling easier, and I may get lucky. IF that is taken away, or made very expensive (Relative to the value a hobbyist sees), then SM is not worth it.
In other words, "PLEASE KEEP SELLING WITH PROFITS IN" --> this feature by itself will justify a hobbyist paying $99. Please give them ability to monitor sales. EASY SELLING IS AN INCENTIVE - it makes _no sense_ to take it away just because they are paying less.
4. Don't give any sales related support - be clear that all you will do is manage the automation of ordering through software. If there is a problem in the sale, we will have to contact the lab
5. Don't give options of many labs. EZprints is enough.
6. If you don't want to give this audience stats, fine. Just let us enter a statcounter code that can be globally applied
7. Allow us to keep the CSS customization. Remember hobbyists have a hope to sell and act like pros, even if they are not
- we are perfectly fine if you give us the basics and make us work harder to customize it compared to the pros.8. Take away any premium support - make them go to forums for help, and only interact with your support for critical stuff (you define what it us)
Any other features other hobbyists want, or agree/disagree with the list above?
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Comments
I am a hobbyist, and I disagree with many of the tradeoffs you are proposing here. So let's get it on!
1. Sure, lower is good, but $150 is acceptable and obviously people have been able to justify it.
2. Never. Limits on file size means I can't print or offer posters. Ridiculous. Unlimited space is the norm, and, as SM says, they don't want people to have to choose which of their pictures are more important.
3. Agree. There needs to be a way for hobbyists to keep selling. I personally favor a cap on sales, after which you go to the next highest pricing tier.
4. Ridiculous. The lab doesn't want to do business with a bunch of individuals, and the customer deserves to be dealing with a professional support team like SmugMug.
5. Disagree. I choose Bay for images I really care about. In fact, if SM doesn't change and I have to downgrade to Power, I will just buy directly from Bay. I sell some art prints locally, and I want them to be printed perfectly.
6. No, no, a thousand times no. If you can't see which galleries and even images are getting traffic, you can't learn a thing.
7. Agree, but the CSS customization is available in Power, too.
8. Why? Is that a huge part of the cost? My guess is SM heroes save them money in the long run with retention.
My plan is simple: Set Pros at two levels, by sales volume. If you exceed the lower sales volume, bravo! You are a success. But you also have to pay SM for the higher level of service. Obviously, this sales/profit level has to be reasonable, and higher than the cost of the higher plan. Something like $500 sounds right to me, but you can do the segmentation to see at what sales level the upload volume starts to soar, and that will tell you where to set it.
Exceed that threshhold for, say, 2 months, and agree to pay a prorated overage until your next renewal, or be capped on further sales.
Thanks! More feedback and more participation will give SM a collective view of the hobbyist crowd. My thoughts inlined.
I think sub 100 sans key features is more appropriate for hobbyists, but if you are demanding unlimited space, then yes, $150 is ok.
Why do you say unlimited space is the norm? I can't think of a single service I pay for that has unlimited space as the norm (with the exception of gmail, which is more textual data than binary). Given stats + limited space, you can always look to see which photos are popular and make sure you have originals of them there for print ordering - maybe a check every few months. Again, its a trade off.
What?!? All labs like talking to individuals. I have accounts on ezprints pro, whcc and others. Any photographer with their own website also talks individually to labs. I have no idea how you assumed labs don't like talking to individuals.
Okay
Again, please re-read, slowly. I didn't say discard stats. I said let us use external stats like statcounter. It will also do what you want and SM does not need to take care of it for us
True. I'm just saying its also important for hobbyists who want to (hope to) sell
Support is always a spiked cost for companies. And companies can put any price to it, because it ties more directly into employee salaries, employee interaction, etc
I quite like that too.
- limit upload per YEAR. Maybe 10-20gig?
- current storage amount not effected. Eight years w/Smug has built up to 31052 photos. 86% are family history photos.
- exclude packages, coupons, events, printmarks, stats
- print only at EzPrints
- allow watermarking (limits license to steal posting anywhere)
- allow backprinting, cards
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1. $150 is a reasonable price, I think making it $100 across the board is actually to cheap for everything we get in return. How much we make of course depends a lot on the size and type of print, but my one sale was enough profit to cover a years cost if it was $150.
2. On the fence here. I don't want my file size to be limited, nor my storage, but at the same time, I personally would be okay with a fairly high cap, like say 100g or maybe even 50g(I'm currently only using 11g). As for file size, it kind of ties into my thoughts on the pro labs. I'll get into that part with that number. I would be okay with a storage limit, but it needs to be well above what the average would use.
3. I absolutely want to keep and be able to set my own prices and profit margins. Sure, I've only sold one print, but my main style of shooting is landscapes, and people who want to buy one, are likely to just be browsing around and not actually hiring a photographer to shoot a scene. Having the option to make an impulse buy is a very key thing, and not having to make contact with someone to do it. Having a cap on sales would be perfectly reasonable where if you break a certain point, you're bumped up to the next tier. Obviously Smugmug can't just automatically bill you for more without permission, so something needs to be done here if that were implemented, but I agree this is a viable option. Getting rid of coupons, packages and that stuff I would be okay with as well.
4. I love this part about Smugmug. Their support in all aspects of their product. I don't have a solid opinion on this one as I haven't had an opportunity have a problem with a print. Maybe a tiered support system where this would be included in the higher tier? If you have a lower tier, you still keep the fast email and all around support, but for prints, contact the lab as you mentioned in the OP.
5. This perhaps could be an a la carte style option. Where maybe for an extra 10 bucks we can get access to one lab of our choosing. I use BayPhoto like the second poster and want to continue using them. Their metal prints are awesome, and were the only ones with them for a while (I know that's not the case now.) Especially with the type of photography I do, I want to feel comfortable selling a large sized metal or canvas and knowing it will look fantastic, assuming the picture did originally. For large sizes, we need a pro lab. For smaller sizes like say 8x10 and lower, I would be okay with using a cheaper lab, as long as they don't force any color correction or anything on us. File size caps and pro labs with larger prints are tied together in my opinion.
6. I enjoy looking at my insanely high 20 visitors a day and where they are coming from. As of right now, stats are not important to me, but the more and more I get into this as a hobby and maybe eventually as a source of income, stats will be more and more important to have. I think these are important, but do not know enough about various options to make a suggestion.
7. This has to stay the same. I love tinkering and messing with my site and do it quite frequently. Losing that ability will be a HUGE downside for me. I don't think there's any consideration of dropping that ability since it's available on the power tier as well right now. That is the main reason I started with Smugmug over someone else a couple years ago.
8. I truly feel that the support Smugmug provides is their bread and butter. Of course their service as a whole is, but the support really stands above pretty much every company I've ever had to deal with regardless of their products. This one could maybe be split into a couple different tiers that allow certain things. What those will be and cost I have no idea, and maybe it's a bad idea all together not to keep it as it is. Maybe for all but the business accounts, have no guaranteed weekend support? So the business gets the prompt replies even on weekends and high priority, but the rest of us can just wait till the next business day. I don't know lol, random thoughts. I know support is generally a big cost, and that's essentially the business model of HP and Dell and all the budget pc buyers. You buy the physical product cheap, and you pay for support whether it be per phone call, or more up front for better guaranteed support.
The biggest thing that I think people want, is the commerce options. I think some of us would be willing to make some sacrifices and abilities if we could maintain the ability to set our prices and make some profit. I don't know what all the deals with the labs entails, but having access to one pro lab would be great. Maybe you could strike a deal with one lab and make that be THE one for all Pro accounts, and the business accounts can have their choosing at will as to which lab.
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I use my SmugMug accounts as my photo display and sharing site. I don't have any interest in culling old photos, I want them there for my grandchildren to look at from their space station ;-)
I hate to be one of those people who talk about other sites on SM's forum, but....
You really may want to try uploading some of your best work to sites like Zazzle (and I'm sure there are more). I normally do action work, but I have gotten some pretty good nature shots over the years. They don't get discovered on SM, but they do get found on Zazzle with the right keywords, and people buy them! Not a ton, but a few hundred$ a year. If I were to actively promote my nature prints to my network, I'd probably want to send them here instead of Zazzle (which is a pretty tacky place). But for reaching strangers, it's not bad!
All of the artificial cutting of features seems pointless to me, however, if it is believed that those features are the magical lure that will entice the big time professionals, then I could personally do without the following:
1)Packages.
2)Events.
3)Different print labs (in fact I could do without any of them. I'd like to be able to self-fulfill orders) this would have the side benefit of decreasing cost associated with customer service as there would be no prints to replace or have people complain about.
4)Back Printing.
5)Stats - this is a completely useless feature when compared to google analytics anyway.
6)Unlimited uploads - a tiered structure would be fine - more space = higher costs
I'm sure that there is more and I'll add them as I think of them.
Things that I still want:
1)Customizations.
2)Watermarking - I agree with Allen it helps prevent stealing of your photos by the public. Though it apparantly doesn't help with the stealing of your photos by SmugMug if you have a power account or lower and haven't opted out. (sounds a little bit like facebook's privacy policies to me).
3)Ability to set prices.
No doubt more to come as I think of them.
Now as to whether SmugMug could automatically bill you for overages in your data, assuming a tiered pricing structure, every pro account has a credit card on file to cover coupons an other things that might cause you to sell below cost. So it would seem they could just bill you. No fuss no muss. Just install a clear warning that you would have to click that you are about to step up to the next data tier, and presto everyone is happy. The low volume guy gets a small affordable price and the power user gets all the storage he could possibly want. This also would make it a viable option to accept more than just jpegs. If you want to upload 100 TB of raw files, no problem, check the box, enter your password, and upload away.
I could so get behind a limit on uploads per year, depending on the level.
We are neither hobbyists or professionals or we are both professionals and hobbyists depending on the criteria. All the below are my personal observations against our businesses criteria.
Online sells to date = zip
Direct sales generated from our SmugMug web sites = average
Business branding reputation by using SmugMug = above average
Money earned directly from our photography business = non-profitable
Money earned directly from our overall photography related business model = profitable
Money earned directly from the overall photography industry = lifetime career income
Our businesses use SmugMug to fill in the gaps of the parts we don't do. So to lose any of the features we use would be very difficult to overcome. We don't make on-line money like the virtual world professionals -- yet we aren't hobbyists either by our real life definition.
SmugMug splitting the levels at e-commerce is what is causing us problems. Hobbyists need e-commerce and hardcopy fulfillment as much as the professional but doesn't usually make enough to justify the difference in cost of such a service. Yet to say that a person must be making money THROUGH their online business to define them as a SmugMug professional, doesn't work either.
In a nutshell, the features we use are:
Photography (not videography) Portfolio display for only our best works
Site branding and extensive customization
Watermarking and right click protection
Gallery passwords and unlisted galleries
Shopping cart for standard prints as a contract incentive to our clients
Guest uploads
Customized domain names
Statistics
SmugVault (can’t live without the ability to transfer secure documents)
Smart Galleries (so useful if people would go back and maintain their sites now that these are an option)
Pricelists (others scream but I love them as compared to the previous option)
Features that we NEED and haven't been met yet:
Customizable e-commerce (or call it self-fulfillment if necessary) so we can have pre-paid fees thru our websites
Stuff we don't use and can go at any time:
All the fluff - events, boutique packaging, specialized nick-knacks, etc. IMO, most long time users had already worked around not having those features and instead are looking for new ones long requested (i.e. folder-like nesting).
Unlimited storage of videos or photos -- That's one benefit to paying extra for SmugVault – more file types and large enough sizes.
Unlimited is great in theory and wonderful in marketing. Other than that, unlimited can kill -- unlimited calories, unlimited water, unlimited cell phone use, and now unlimited SmugMug storage.
While only my opinion, I believe TPTB should take all their features, analyze who is using what features and at what price point, and then reorganize the features AND future engineering work around the corresponding price points. My wild guess is that might be what they were trying to do. However, it needs to be done across all levels of offerings, not just the pro account. If it has to be, make the crisis a true reorganization of resources. Rhetorically, one wouldn't staff a closed store so why engineer new features for everyone if the feature is only used by a specific customer level whether hobby or pro? If it is a feature that will benefit across the board, then across the board small price increase for everyone is called for.
In summary, I'd have no problem paying $300/year for the features I NEED. I won't pay $150/year for the features someone else is abusing (photo dumping). Tiered pricing by features or storage or both....
Besides my obvious lack of info, I would suggest that there are at least two ways of improving your bottom line. One, raise prices. Two cut costs. So if say this price raise is about storage and not labor intensive actions, then all this stuff about changing the way things are structured is moot and not really hitting the point.
Anyone mind giving me a smallish summary of what was said in the vid?
Also, Roy, congrats on the program/app!
Prices haven't been raised for 7 years.
Prices are being raised for Pros.
Unlimited uploads are pushing up costs because cameras are more robust
4 developers in 2005 to 40 today and the future holds great engineering
Want to stay an independent business instead of selling
New account level by splitting Pro into Portfolio and Business levels
So -- according to the video it is both labor and storage costs.
Thanks you for the synopsis! Greatly appreciated!
Just put your own statcounter code in your gallery descriptions with a font size of zero.
I've got the most basic account there is, and this way I can see who is looking at my galleries.
So, to summarize, I'd love to see upload/storage limits if it would keep pricing down. I also have no need for events or packages. And I appreciate that SmugMug is making an effort to consider alternatives to what was already announced.
After posting a long, boring rant in the big thread and then reading the posts in this thread, I think I have a bit better understanding of the issue at hand and what I want. I am not a pro (I don't make all or most of my income from photography), and I do not use (yet) SmugMug for selling my work (I sell CDs of images, not individual prints with the exception of landscapes). I'm a hobbyist who makes money from photography and so, in a nutshell, here's what I need:
1. Be able to sell my prints regardless of which tier I'm in, and at the profit margin I want. I'm willing to pay SM more of a cut from my prints at my level of sales. So, pros get charged a certain percentage per print, and I get charged a higher percentage. This way, everyone can still sell prints for a profit.
2. Storage in tiers. This is a huge benefit for me. I'm willing to pay market price for 50GB of storage, and if I need more, I pay for the next level of storage, say 75GB or 100GB. I know of SmugVault but I haven't looked into it to see if this is my answer. Whatever the case, I want it transparent. One place to upload and let SM deal with the storage in the background.
3. I want one comprehensive dashboard where I can get all of the information about my business and photos in one spot.
4. I want customization to be a LOT easier than it is now. It's like making freakin' sausage around here. I don't want to read through tens of pages in multiple places in Dgrin to figure out all of the customization options. My goal is to sell pictures, not learn CSS/HTML/whatever, and I don't want to pay someone to do it. I can use a tool at the UI level that handles all of the technical sausage behind the scenes.
5. I want relevant statistics that will help me better market and sell my prints.
6. I really like the current support system and I would be willing to pay for tiered support.
7. Self-fulfillment of orders.
I don't have the answers to what SmugMug has to do to fix this situation, but I'd be willing to do some paid consulting to help them out.
Florindo
www.bellacosaphotography.com
florindo.smugmug.com