Steal their ideas...
dwterry
Registered Users Posts: 209 Major grins
I currently use PhotoReflect for sports images and Smugmug for everything else (weddings, portraits, etc). Today I saw a comparison of ExposureManager to PhotoReflect and Smugmug. It makes me drool. But before I jump ship ... please ... just steal their ideas! :-)
http://www.exposuremanager.com/scripts/website.pl?rm=compare
Some of the things I'd really like to see:
1) Self fulfillment (as an option, of course)
2) Package pricing
3) Discount coupons
4) Volume discounts
5) Reprint discounts
I'd also love to see LOWER PRICES on 5x7s. I often sell 300-600 of them at a time (as invitations) and simply can't do it through smugmug. Smugmug's base price is nearly $1 more per print than the company I use for invitations.
http://www.exposuremanager.com/scripts/website.pl?rm=compare
Some of the things I'd really like to see:
1) Self fulfillment (as an option, of course)
2) Package pricing
3) Discount coupons
4) Volume discounts
5) Reprint discounts
I'd also love to see LOWER PRICES on 5x7s. I often sell 300-600 of them at a time (as invitations) and simply can't do it through smugmug. Smugmug's base price is nearly $1 more per print than the company I use for invitations.
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I would love to see these things added also. Any chance these might get done this year?????
It would make a wonderful Xmas present to all of us loyal Smugmug Pro's. We've been good this year (and last year and the year before that)! Not saying we didn't get something good the last few years, but we REALLY REALLY want these!
Please Santa, work the elves overtime and get them developing these enhancements to the system.
Thanks as always,
Fred
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
We're about to get a second SM account in lieu of EM or anyone else because of the SM service.
http://midnightblue.smugmug.com
Canon
While some of the functionality is not on the leading edge of technology. It is obvious SM is working hard to get to that point and stay there when they get there. They just have over a half million members on this site pokin and asking "are we there yet" like a bunch of kids (no offence, just an analogy).
In regards to customer service. I'm hard pressed to find ANYTHING that is a customer service oriented as smugmug. To the best of my knowledge. This entire site is funded by them and the full time staffers have answers (from a REAL person) in threads before you get an automated reply email from other companies help desks.
So jump ship if you must. You do know what creatures jump ship though...
Are you talking about commission? 15% here and 10% there. Also, their yearly fee is $50 less.
Smugmug is all about customer service. They have a good product (not the best) at a good price (also not the best). What you're paying for here is customer service which is very, very good (likely the best, I just don't know).
Still, there need to be some strides taken no narrow the features and/or the price gap. Price is an easy change - get rid of the 3 tierd model and go to two account levels: casual and pro. ~$35 year and ~$100 year. Suddenly price isn't an issue any more.
Some features would take a long time to roll out, some features may not be possible with the current system, but some could be done immediately. For example, I see that EM has "promotional flyer insert." I've never understood why smugmug doesn't. It's simple to add one 4x6 or 5x7 promotional picture to every pro order. EZ prints doesn't even have to know the difference between the promotional picture and any others. Pros can upload the image to be used as their flier and change it as often as they wish. This would be paid for out of the 15% SM takes as commission.
I can understand how packages might be complicated, but coupons shouldn't be that hard. Each pro should be able to create one coupon code that removes a certain percentage from the total order price. (This amount is taken from the pro's profits. The only trick is making sure the pro has the profits to cover the coupon).
Smugmug is great at what it does but companies like Zenfolio and EM are closing the gap. Rather than waiting for "giant" feature upgrades and rewrites, I think it would help SM to impliment some of these easier changes sooner rather than later.
I know I made casual reference to jumping ship in my original post. But I'm really not in a hurry to do so.
What it ultimately comes down to is this: Can I make the sale? Can I be profitable doing what I'm doing?
Right now the answer is yes. But right now, I most often make the sale OUTSIDE of Smugmug!
For me, Smugmug functions as a proofing site with the possibility of occasional 'extra' sales. The real sales and printing work happens outside of Smugmug where I have the flexibility to give the customer what they want. That's more work for me, and less profit for Smugmug.
I'd like to change that. I'd like Smugmug to offer the flexibility to handle more of the sales. And I'm even willing to part with a portion of the profits to let that happen. It's good for me. And it's good for Smugmug.
Seriously, I still like Smugmug a lot. I just drool over the sales possibilities that exist elsewhere and wish I could turn part of that task over to Smugmug is all.
SM's on the way with that, I trust!
http://midnightblue.smugmug.com
Canon
Come with on the Raddest Photo Trip Ever!!!
www.michellesphotographyonline.com
Michelle Martin
Control your destiny, or someone else will.
!. Customer addresses.
2. Detailed, printable sales reports.
3. **metallic prints (these are great!)
4. Books
5. Pre-sale certificates
6. Discounts (and accumalative discounts)
7. Packages (one or multi prints)
I don't ask for much, do I?
www.michellesphotographyonline.com
Michelle Martin
Control your destiny, or someone else will.
That's exactly where I am. Lost sales for SM because I do these sales outside of SM. But it's extra work for me. It would be nice to let SM do the work, and even share the profits. :-)
I can see where you're coming from with wanting the customer address, but after my experience with Lulu, I'm just glad Smugmug gives us anything at all!
P.S. -- I know it's not quite the same, but you could send your customers e-mail greeting cards and/or flyers...
CWC Photography: “Painting pictures with cameras.” • Nature & Animals • Around the World • New York City • Miscellaneous • Sunsets • Central Park
I am SOOOO with you on the 5x7 pricing. I make many photo announcements, cards etc.....I tend to lead my customer to 4x6 so that making them is worth my while....the profit difference is just unreal! I would LOVE to have the pricing dropped on the 5x7.....another fab thing would to have it so that I didn't have to send my customers their envelopes seperately. This I can deal with, if I could start to push the 5x7 greeting which I would much prefer (I don't even order the 5x7 for my own personal cards because I think it is too expensive).
lower 5x7, lower 5x7, lower 5x7 please, pretty please!
One thing I only just recently discovered about SM's delayed proofing.... You can only sell an image as big as the one you've uploaded!
In other words, let's say I'm covering "sporting events' (I do, and I use photoreflect for that). When shooting a sporting event, I am going to literally have THOUSANDS of images to upload (I once shot 7200 pictures in one day ... that was 12 soccer games, averaging 600 pictures each).
At cable upload speeds, I can upload approximagely 100M every 30 minutes. That means, when I'm uploading full size images, I can get about 20 images uploaded every 30 minutes. These are wedding images. Sports images are smaller. I'd probably get about 40 sporting images per half hour.
That means ... if I wanted to upload 7200 images, it would take me 180 hours ... or 7.5 DAYS to upload one day's worth of soccer pictures.
There's just NO way to do it.
At photoreflect, we're uploading smaller versions of the images (only what the customer sees). The customer purchases an image, and we then fulfill the order ourselves by editing and uploading a full size image to another service for printing and shipping.
I had _THOUGHT_ that with SM's "Delayed Proofing" that I could do the same thing. But because SM limits the size of the print that you can purchase based on the size of the file that is uploaded ... if I upload a small version of the file, you can't purchase anything more than maybe a 4x6 at most.
Which totally disqualifies SM as a possible host for sporting event pictures!
So I have a new request:
For Delayed Proofing galleries ... TURN OFF the size limitations on purchases. If the gallery (or photo) has a price for it., let the customer purchase it. We'll upload a full size image later!
(seems like a pretty easy fix ... wonder how long it'll take)
I'd also really like to have delayed proofing on digital downloads.
I upload non-edited images to my site and only edit the ones that are purchased. The trouble with digital downloads, is that the images are downloaded without editing. So I tell the customer to contact me first before ordering a digital download.
I'm not sure how to do it... email the file? Email them a link for downloading later? Ship it on CD? Give the customer the option of waiting or downloading now and explain the difference? Pick something...
I agree 100% on this one!
Canon Gear
Being a programmer myself, I have some idea of the difficulties involved. The added challenge of making it all work in deliberately-incompatible apps (grr :bluduh) makes things all the harder.
http://www.chrislaudermilkphoto.com/
I do think the "turn off the size limitation" change would be fairly simple though. Right now SM doesn't let you order a picture that isn't big enough to be printed. If it simply checked to see if there is a Proof Delay available, it could go ahead and let the customer order the image while waiting for the photographer to upload a full size image.
I also agree. My 500px wide web images probably wouldn't print very big...My for-print images are much bigger...3504px wide. This is probably the most important feature I need right now.
Have you tried uploading very low quality, but still high resolution images? You know, bump it back to 50% if you're exporting from LR? (I dont' export from PS so I dont' know the equivalent.)
Then you upload the highest quality image ONLY for the photos purchased. You'll save a ton of time because files are so much smaller, the quality isn't that obviously different when you keep your viewable image smaller (L or M in SM) and you can still fullfill the larger prints.
I haven't done this, but just thought it might be worth a try.
As for EM, I've looked at it - heck, I have an account I'm going to close soon. They are good, but their interface isn't that great. Some things look GREAT when you're setting them up, but when it comes to an actual customer ordering them, it's a bit confusing and an ugly interface. I've changed my business model a littel so that I can stay with SM because it's a better company.
With that said, though, there are a LOT of really amazing features that EM has that I'd LOVE to have on SM. Hopefully one day soon. It would make my life infinitely easier.
www.tippiepics.com
I set up a trial account and it wasn't half of what they said in regards to ease of use and overall functionality on the customer facing side. It didn't seem intuative to me.
The premier sites that they used as their flagship sites wearn't all that hot either.
I don't agree...
The problem I see is that smugmug has no way of knowing what the full size of the image really is. How would they know if you have a higher quality version on your computer? How do they know that you won't be on vacation with no computer access during the proof delay period?
Images too small for the size ordered would surely end up getting printed, and customers wouldn't be happy.
I don't think it's impossible to make it work, but I think it wouldn't be such a simple change to make it work well.
Dave
The idea is ... the photographer KNOWS what size he has available. He sets the gallery up. If the gallery HAS a price for it ... then it's available for sale.
Simple. Really.
As for the photographer being on vacation during the proof delay ... you have that problem right now, today. That's why the photographer should set his proof delay accordingly.
But it would ignore portfolio pricing?
Maybe I'm different from the average smugmug pro user, but I almost never set gallery or photo pricing. I just rely on portfolio pricing. So I always have a price set for all print sizes (that i ever want to use).
So for this to work, it would have to ignore portfolio pricing and users would have to set pricing for each photo that has a larger size available.
Again, I'm not saying this is impossible. I'm just saying it's not so simple and it would take a lot of thought and programming to make it work without leaving the possibility of printing low-res pictures by accident.
Dave
Why can't the photographer scale back the image to say 2400px or 3000px on the long edge (I use IrfanView to do mine in a batch). That way the pixels would be large enough to make the big prints and still be small enough (reasonably) to upload and not take a week. Then when someone orders a print, replace the print with a full-size 21mpixel editted image if you wish.
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I hadn't tried to compress a file much more than the 8 quality, and did a experiment with a file at 2, 4, 6, 8 & 10 and uploaded them. I can't tell the difference diplayed at large.
Here are 3 of the exact same photos, with different compressions I did as a test. Can you tell which is compressed more?
I was looking through the feature comparison the other day myself because a FlickR group that I'm part of is setting up an EM account. I tried my best to offer SM as a viable alternative.
What caught my eye were perhaps more technical features:
- FTP based uploading - this would enable me to use a multi-threaded upload tool, provided SM servers would support the load. One of the responses in this thread mentions the time it takes to upload full-resolution photos. If a multi-threaded FTP tool is used the time is reduced dramatically.
- Uploading to multiple galleries at once - past recommendations have been made on how to hang galleries using multiple heirarchies. Then I can have location based and repeating event based organizations at the same time. But most critical is that one image is hosted under multiple references. Current rationale offers multiple copies that loose reference integrity and are new unique images.
- Online color correction looks like a nice feature too... I'd be curious to see how that works though.
One thing that bothers me is the compression which occurs on original photos when cropping, or other manipulation through online. As mentioned above on the FTP remarks, when the original size is compressed creates a less than desirable 'original' photo.FTP access for downloads as an administrator would make it so much more viable as an archival site. Sorry but the prospect of spending hundreds or more to order CDs/DVDs of my photos on the site seems rather expensive. I have had storage media go bad and had to rely on SM as my archival source.
Capturing and creating fashion, film, festivals around Detroit
Wordpress-ed Fuzzytek
Check out Smugbrowser. It's what I use for all of my uploads now. And resolves several of the issues you described. Here are the reasons I use it:
1) Multi-threaded: it uploads several images at once, maximizing bandwidth.
2) I can add to the queue while it's running (I don't have to wait for one upload to finish and then start a new one).
3) I can upload to multiple galleries at once (I'll have galleries like "First Dance", "Cake Cutting", etc, all going at the same time).
4) Even when it is done, if I leave smugbrowser open, I can *immediately* start another upload without having to first navigate through smugmug and wait for their uploader to start. I just drop a new file on smugbrowser and away it goes.
Basically, smugbrowser saves me a LOT of time.