Block, or redirect lookers?

jbee

I do event photography a bit. I get lots of hits, but few buys. The views seem satisfied with being able to look at their watermarked images when ever they want.

I'd sure like to block, change the water mark, send an email or something to them.

I've tried a notice that prices go up after 2 weeks. Warning that the gallery will go away.

All to no avail.

Anyone have any code or solutions?

I thought of dropping a cookie then checking its date and doing something, but I don't have the skill level to write the code.

All help is appreciated.

cmason

So you think by doing this, people will buy? Folks doing this are not buyers anyway... seems to me you will only make it harder for those looking to buy....

jbee

Sales is about turning lookers into customers. Yes, I think they can be converted, but the question is how?

A cute note that they only get 3 more looks and the picture comes down, might do it.

luke_church

jbee wrote:

A cute note that they only get 3 more looks and the picture comes down, might do it.

Forcing choice point decisions is a fairly common economic strategy, whose name I have forgotten.... So I guess there might be some validity in the commercial aspects, personally it wouldn't suit my business model, but hey... each to their own.

My point here is just to note that technically, you're not on a winning approach here. Some things you might consider before investing time or money in a technological solution along these lines, to address what sounds to me like a business problem:

-> The images will be cached in the browser. A tech-savie customer can just look in their browser cache and it'll be there... (Or in an extreme case run a web-crawler on your site)

-> More technically inexperienced customers may still know how to clear their cookies. It's really not hard in IE7 or Firefox. You may find that your customers learn how to do this... They may disable cookies for your site. There are unplesant tricks you can play with coding information in their browser cache, but this is hard, and if people catch you doing it, they'll be very unhappy... It would also be difficult to do in the way Smugmug currently support customisations.

-> You may find that your customers just become good friends with the Print-Screen key...

-> They may look at your page from a different browser, a different user account, or a different computer (e.g. at work).

There are n other ways of getting around this kind of technique unless it's deployed with agressive 'sign-in' security and mechanisms to prevent people creating multiple accounts.

Now consider the impression you'll make when your customers discover that, in fact, no, the images haven't gone away, you've just used a weak technical mechanism to stop them seeing them.

IMHO, this doesn't align with peoples' views as to how the internet works. Personally I would just be annoyed with a website that did this.

Your milage may vary, my only real point is that ASAIK the current technology won't give you a nice, simple solution to this.

Luke

dogwood

jbee wrote:

I do event photography a bit. I get lots of hits, but few buys.

Yeah, events are baffling. I shoot a lot of local fashion shows-- shot three big ones (for my area anyway) in a row and handed out business cards like crazy at two of them. The third show, I didn't hand out a single card. Not one.

The first two shows? I sold one photo total. The show I didn't hand out cards? I sold over $300 in prints! I have no idea how the people found my website, but obviously someone passed the url around.

And yeah, I can easily get over a thousand unique hits a day on a gallery of one of these shows. Sometimes people don't care about the watermarking and just print-scrn the shot anyway (I see them on myspace like this-- my latest watermark is my name and url, so at least I get some advertising out of it).

So I'm baffled too... I've tried posting EVERYTHING I shoot at a show, I've tried only posting the very best shots, I've tried the ol' "photos only available for 30-days" (actually still do this, but that's more of a time thing for me), I've tried handing out business cards, etc, etc. Selling event photos is a lot like photography itself-- there's a lot of sheer luck involved, it seems to me.

EDIT: just occured to me that I left this out-- I didn't hand out any cards at that one show because it was big event and photogs were all clustered in a pit so there wasn't any chance to network-- but that also means ten other photographers all had the same photos as me (we were all in basically the same spot) which makes it even stranger to me that I sold so many photos when there were plenty of other options.

Mort3770

You might find this link helpful
I too struggle with the same issue you do about photo sales of events. This link provides some food for thought.

http://wizwow.blogspot.com/2007/05/selling-pics-online-perspective.html

Karenl39

I was asked to do an event at the highschool. I did and handed out order forms for the parents to order from. Lots of the parents were very excited and told me they would order every picture I had taken of their child. I ended up with 0 orders. I'm not doing events anymore. Not worth it in my opinion.

jbee

That's exactly what I get.

Maybe there is no magic formula, but....

Dna

A couple of thoughts.
One of my websites, www.lsvphotos.com, is for local lifesaving. I get hits and sales in the middle of winter as word of mouth gets around and when mum finally gets a couple of minutes to log on and order some.

A fellow photog shoots the local baseball and has a couple of computers available for the players to browse his photos. He has order form next to the keyboard and almost never fails to get the sale.

It might be that they are all excited on the night and would promise the world but in the reality (and hangover) of the next day couldn't care less.

This all suggests that going for the impusive buy works better than the later internet sale.

Andrew