SmugMug Rant!

Sam

Not sure where to post this, but I'm sure someone will move it to the right place.So, my friend at work brings me this 4X6 snapshot of her and friends at a Christmas party. (Yes I know, not a pc holiday party) Any how she wanted me to copy and print out 4 copies for her. I noticed that the photo was in a cardboard frame with a name, phone number, and e-mail address on the back, so I tried to explain copyright, and suggested she contact the photographer to purchase them from him.After 2 days she finally gets a web address for his business, and she was instructed to use the Smugmug link to locate and buy the photo. Sam thinks, good, Smugmug, this will be easy. His web page was horrible, childish, and no link to Smugmug. No problem I can find Smugmug and his photos. I find his site...................yuck, it took me 10 minutes to locate her photo, took me more minutes to figure out how to start the buying process. I could not get a price with shipping, and/or tax without filling out a form with all my address, CC # etc.I tried to walk her through buying these photos, but she gave up and said she was going to take it to Walmart, scan it and have copies made. At this point I would even scan them and make copies myself.Ok, maybe one bad experience. Off to Andy's smugmug site. I know this one will be set up right! Went to his photo gallery's and poked around, (Great work!) Ok lets experiment, how easy or hard would it be to buy this one? Oh, wait, I need to go to a different window / area, ok, I am in the buy section, now I just need to find that same photo..oops. nowhere to be found. Couldn't buy it if I wanted to.Now I will admit I ain't the brightest bear in the woods, but I can usually find the berries. So please don't try to explain how I need to go down a special hidden path, dig in a secret place to unearth a hermetically sealed box of berries. I am too busy eating the nice tasty berries here in the open meadow.Sam

Mike Lane

Sam wrote:

Not sure where to post this, but I'm sure someone will move it to the right place.So, my friend at work brings me this 4X6 snapshot of her and friends at a Christmas party. (Yes I know, not a pc holiday party) Any how she wanted me to copy and print out 4 copies for her. I noticed that the photo was in a cardboard frame with a name, phone number, and e-mail address on the back, so I tried to explain copyright, and suggested she contact the photographer to purchase them from him.After 2 days she finally gets a web address for his business, and she was instructed to use the Smugmug link to locate and buy the photo. Sam thinks, good, Smugmug, this will be easy. His web page was horrible, childish, and no link to Smugmug. No problem I can find Smugmug and his photos. I find his site...................yuck, it took me 10 minutes to locate her photo, took me more minutes to figure out how to start the buying process. I could not get a price with shipping, and/or tax without filling out a form with all my address, CC # etc.I tried to walk her through buying these photos, but she gave up and said she was going to take it to Walmart, scan it and have copies made. At this point I would even scan them and make copies myself.Ok, maybe one bad experience. Off to Andy's smugmug site. I know this one will be set up right! Went to his photo gallery's and poked around, (Great work!) Ok lets experiment, how easy or hard would it be to buy this one? Oh, wait, I need to go to a different window / area, ok, I am in the buy section, now I just need to find that same photo..oops. nowhere to be found. Couldn't buy it if I wanted to.Now I will admit I ain't the brightest bear in the woods, but I can usually find the berries. So please don't try to explain how I need to go down a special hidden path, dig in a secret place to unearth a hermetically sealed box of berries. I am too busy eating the nice tasty berries here in the open meadow.Sam

Bear in mind that Andy makes it so his images are not regularly for sale. He offers up a certain number of photos to sell from time to time. The photo you were interested in may not have been for sale. Try another site that always has their photos for sale.

I can think of one...

Andy

Sam wrote:

I am too busy eating the nice tasty berries here in the open meadow.Sam

Wow - excellent rant!

Sam, I don't make all of my photos available for sale via my website. Sorry I added to your upset!

All the best,

Baldy

We'd love to identify people who have trouble with the cart and watch them before they figure it out to do it. For example, not seeing the shipping on the first page is something we've heard a few times so maybe the shipping link needs to be an icon or have its name changed from shipping or something.

The darkside of not being able to buy prints tho, that is hard, is when someone turns that option off so it can't be found, which is the way they intend it but does frustrate people.

Nikolai

Sam,
As Mike said, there are plenty of SM accounts with enabled print orders.
You can check out my Misc gallery for instance. I'm not saying the the SM shopping cart is the easiest in the Whole Wide Web to use, but given the number of parameters it has to deal with (a way more than your regular apparel shopping cart with size and color only:-) I'd say it's OK.
Peace!