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Thinking about changing pricing model
careanne
Registered Users Posts: 7 Beginner grinner
Hello! I'm new to the forum (longtime lurker, though).
I'm very new to 'professionally' photographing (not sure if you can even call it that, though). Anyways, I've been charging $50 for a session fee, and then letting my clients order what ever prints/digital files they want. However, I've been noticing more and more that clients want digital images, but don't want to pay the $15 per image fee for them. So I was thinking of offering a few different 'tiers' instead of just having a session fee, and slightly raising my session fee price. This is a very rough draft of what I was thinking. Does anyone have a similar pricing model? If so, does it work well for you?
Option One- $75
This is a basic a la carte tier; you will get up to an hour session with all of your fully edited images in an online gallery. You will have 14 days to place your print or digital files order before your gallery is taken down. If you need more than 14 days, there will be a $25 fee to put your gallery back up.
Option Two- $150
In this option, you will receive everything as in the first tier, but you will also receive $100 towards your print or digital file purchase of the images that you love.
Option Three- $300
This is an all-encompassing option. You will receive everything included in the first two tiers, but you’ll also receive your favorite 25 images on a CD with full print rights.
I'm very new to 'professionally' photographing (not sure if you can even call it that, though). Anyways, I've been charging $50 for a session fee, and then letting my clients order what ever prints/digital files they want. However, I've been noticing more and more that clients want digital images, but don't want to pay the $15 per image fee for them. So I was thinking of offering a few different 'tiers' instead of just having a session fee, and slightly raising my session fee price. This is a very rough draft of what I was thinking. Does anyone have a similar pricing model? If so, does it work well for you?
Option One- $75
This is a basic a la carte tier; you will get up to an hour session with all of your fully edited images in an online gallery. You will have 14 days to place your print or digital files order before your gallery is taken down. If you need more than 14 days, there will be a $25 fee to put your gallery back up.
Option Two- $150
In this option, you will receive everything as in the first tier, but you will also receive $100 towards your print or digital file purchase of the images that you love.
Option Three- $300
This is an all-encompassing option. You will receive everything included in the first two tiers, but you’ll also receive your favorite 25 images on a CD with full print rights.
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Comments
I was selling digital files on CD for $35 ea or $60 for 2 at the events I'm doing.
I was getting a lot of opposition to the price with people complaining the images were just digital and infering we should be almost giving them away. One woman got loud and smart and asked " How do you justify $35 for a an image on CD when the disk shouldn't even cost $1?"
I said "because the camera it was taken with cost $2500 and the computer I edit and burn the images to disk on cost about the same!"
That shut her up to the point you could actually see the " Beaten" expression on her face. Wasn't really a win for me though even when she did begruglingly buy the CD.
So this week with people still basically annoying me for " soft copys" ( I hate that term!) I saw some 4G quality brand USB drives at the office joint for a bit over $4 ea so I thought what the heck, and bought 15 of the buggers.
I told my sales girls that the images are now $40 for the first pic and $15 thereafter which although lower over all on the CD for 2, is still above our average sale value.
The upshot has been that after this mornings sales session, ( 1st half day 3) the girls rang me saying they have sold out of USB's. The surprise has been that the majority of people have only bought 1 image so the cost hasn't actually been the issue. The girls are saying that the people seem quite excited about the fact they can take the image on a USB where as they wined about it on a cd.
They also seem surprised/ excited when the girls take the USB stick out of the rather tough packaging and see it's new and a quality brand. Dunno if they thought they were going to get a used stick??
Seems the price and the product was not the issue, it's basically the packaging.
I never stop learning in this game.
If you are remotely serious about having any sort of business, forget about putting the pics on the web. It's a laughable waste of time and effort. Putting edited images online is stupid and there is no other way to put it less offensively I'm afraid.
Organise a Viewing session when you make the booking to shoot. The projector idea is the best but if you can't afford to go that road yet, at least get a large monitor or a Plasma to show the pics on.
I can't stress enough how putting shots on the net is just making anything and everything you do completely pointless.
Yeah, I know, they will say they don't have time to come in and they can only see them on the net and all the other crap I have heard 100 times over. They will say this right up to the point you say no, you don't do that. Then they will say they will have to get back to you in bit of a huff which they will do up to 2 days later when they realise they have no choice. Get the appointment First though.
Putting pics on the web is amateur hour and I don't care who that offends because it's true. If you want to have any chance of making a worthwhile return on your investment and getting the best sale value as well as best serving your clients, You need to do the sales presentation face to face and there is no other way.
As for your packages, Well basically they are obviously rubbish in my conceited opinion with the web component. Even so, I'd be going $99 for the session fee. That will eliminate the clients you don't want which are cheap, make you look more professional and establish the power base that YOU are in charge and not groveling for every $$. I think people are like animals, I'm sure we give off a scent or something that the others in the pack detect and recognise without even knowing it.
When you are desperate for sales they are the hardest thing in the world to get over the line because you give off the scent that the others know your are weak and easy prey. When you are confident and doing things on YOUR terms, it's like the scent of success goes out and everyone wants to come to you.
Start your session fee higher and be confident and in control as a pro.
From there, price your work accordingly. Yeah, I know, you don't want to loose clients by being too expensive. Let me tell you, the last thing you want is clients who think you are cheap!!!
They will want everything, be complete and utter pains in the arse's and you'll not make a zac and hate what you are doing in a month. You have no clients now so nothing to loose. You don't know about business so take it from someone who does, go for the higher middle market, price your services and products at the upper middle and you will be laughing instead of crying over the tight wads who are attracted by cheap and low end.
As for your CD, You'll no doubt get the forum mentality of " I wouldn't let my images go out on disk where people could get crap prints made" baloney by people that have spent more time reading forums than doing business in the real world. I have made a LOT of money and still am selling portrait and glam sessions EXCLUSIVELY on disk and my real world 10+ year experience with it has been all successful.
My reputation hasn't been destroyed because someone went to wart mart and got a bad print, that's a laughable load of guff. I have got a lot of business because people went to other shooters whom wouldn't give the client what they were prepared to pay for and I would.
My suggestion with your disks is to price them at at least $500. I was shooting glam sessions for years at $1000 a day with all the images ( unedited gasp horror!) on disk and I worked my way up to $1200 and now $1500.
It's not about the money or the way which the images are delivered, in the case of my glam work, it's about the experience and what the pics mean to the person in terms of self worth, appreciation by partners etc.
Trust me, People will pay a LOT for what gives them the warm and fuzzies they want.
Thank you for your reply, you make a lot of good points. I think I will try the in-person ordering session out, but what do I use my Smugmug for now? I paid a bit of money for it, lol.
And although it's scary to raise my pricing so much, you're absolutely right about clients thinking I'm cheap. I just need to take the plunge.
Very interesting Glort!
Most of my work is at open events (car shows and show & shines). I agree that a face to face presentation is most effective, and printing onsite is the best way to achieve sales for each event, however for me, I have been getting orders over the past month from my online galleries in which spouses of car owners have been purchasing prints as Christmas gifts for their significant others (Now if I can figure out how to effectively market to the car owner's spouses for next Christmas
And it is not just from the car shows in which I worked at getting business. I still shoot for enjoyment. I have several galleries of landscapes on my website with images I shot for fun. Recently, I had an order from a woman in California. She ordered nearly $700 in landscape prints from me. I even had an order for several prints from someone in Alaska. This would not have happened without the website. While I don't rely on the website sales as my primary direct income source, the sales I achieve from it are certainly welcome and more than pay for the hosting and the time I put into uploading the images.
Deep South Focus Photography
Mobile, AL
http://DeepSouthFocus.com
For what I thought the question was about which I took to be more along the line of portrait work, I stand by my opinion that it's throwing money out the window to sell online. If you got a $100 sale off the web, you probably would have got $500 had you sat down with the clients and presented your work in a more professional and personal manner.
My opinion is not a lot different after having done events for 3 years with onsite showing and printing and having tried everything I could think and read of to make online work. My position is that online is simply going to give you 10% of what you would earn, if you were lucky, with onsite ordering ( Printing is NOT essential IMHO) where you have a chance to give the client some service, info and a bit of sales encouragement.
I know people make online work but to what degree no one knows in comparison to if they did onsite.
I also think the " Success" of any sales depends on your goals and the standards you set yourself. Some people might think selling $500 worth of picsw from an event is great, others may have differing expectations or aspirations.
Personally I'd have to pull another events worth of sales out of the online christmas orders before I considered it successful given the number of people I shoot.
My experience with online was it hurt onsite sales badly and we never got a single order with over 20K pics uploaded over 5-6 events and 4 months.
If I hadn't been doing OK before and noticed the dropoff in onsite sales, I would have put it down to my pics being crap. The thing was as soon as I did away with the online and stood my ground on it, the onsite sales from the events went straight back up.
We had loads of people whinge that they didn't have time to look at the pics then but all of my crew noticed that many of the people that whinged the loudest were also the ones that consequently stayed looking the longest and had above average orders.
I think in some markets online could be effective to some degree in adding to onsite sales but I sure as hell would never rely on online to make my living from like I do with onsite.
Again, this pertains to event work. To me doing portraits or anything other than event work and trying to sell purely online is just plain business suicide.
In the work I'm doing now, we get asked 20 times a day every day, if the pics are on the web. There is no way in hell I'll ever do that. As I tell my girls, for the most part I believe that is a way to get out of buying today and inevitably NEVER buying either intentionaly, kidding themselves they will or forgetting all about it as soon as they are 30Ft away from our sales table.
I do believe I loose sales through not having the pics on the web but I'm also 1000% convinced that I loose a lot less sales not having them on the web than if I did and that's really what it comes down to.
Something that reinforces that is we get asked " For a card" another 20 times a day because the people don't have any money with them/ want to check with the husband/ wife/ girlfriend/ school Mum/ lady in the corner shop/ Haven't been paid yet/ the phase of the moon is wrong etc and so far I have got about 3 people actually ring and follow up on ordering a pic in the last 3 months.
I tell my sales girls now to tell the people that unfortunately we don't have provision for ordering afterwards due to the amount of people we photograph and the cost of someone having to find the images, email confirmations, print, pack, send etc and that and the shots will be available till the end of the week Be that in 6 days time or today if they would like to come back and leave it at that. We offer to take the order along with credit card details and a date we can charge the card and then send the order when it goes through.
We have had quite a few people take us up on this but it's a very small percentage to the amount of people that have taken a card with the pic number and were going to get back to me.
Over the last couple of weeks we have been playing hardball, we have noticed about half the people will buy there and then. They will often get a friend to buy for them with the intent of paying them back later, they find money they " forgot " they had, go to the car and get their wallet ( who the hell in their right mind leaves a wallet in their car??) and somehow manage to buy what they told us 2 minutes or less before hand that they couldn't do.
I do photography for a full time living to put the bread on the table. In business I have learned that a lot of the time when peoples lips move, it's because they are lying.
I have also learned that wile it is essential to please your customers and go the extra mile, it's also doubly important to know where to draw the line and say no. It's also been more profitable than not for me to say no in a great many instances.
As for your landscape stuff, that is different again. Your $700 sales is impressive because that is one hell of a tough market. There isn't many other ways to make a go of this market which is different to the events and certainly portraits.
The thing I look at though is not the one offs, it's the averages. To get a good average with online sales either with onsite or without is way tougher for events than with onsite and all but impossible with portrait and the like work.
Ok, so let's throw the online viewing out the window, and put 'in person viewing and ordering session,' does any one have a similar pricing model, and does it work for you? Or have you tried it and it worked out better just to have a session fee, and then order what ever, without having a print credit/digital files included?
I have included a wall print in many offers and it worked well. I include a disk of all the unedited images in my wedding packages and I also sell my glam work exclusively this way.
For portrait work which is what I assume you are talking about, I'd be careful.
IF you are going to charge $500+ for say an hours shoot and all the images, fine. The thing is you need to be getting the same money or better when you include the digital files as you would get with a worthwhile print order.
The other aspect which I think you need to take into account is the "promoteability" of any given pricing model.
Myself, I rather go in with a low session fee for portraits then upsell. I know I can give them shots they won't be able to resist, I know I can sell snow to Eskimos and I rather be trying to sell a product I have in my hot hands than sell something they have to imagine the value in.
That may be what I do in other markets but eah market is different and it depends on the way you are promoting the offer or generating leads.
I don't have any one given model for anything I do, I like to have an arsenal of ideas that I can switch and change between as I need and have each initiative sorted and planned in my head so I just roll them out as needed.
Now that said, I also know that something like a disk with all the images on it, yours to keep and make as many copies as you want for family and friends etc is a lot more appealing to the clients I want than the $20 session fee and buy prints after that model that's been done to death.
I still think I can make it work though, the question is, which one do you think you can get the most clients through the door with in the first place?
Either model SHOULD result in the same profit to you if done right and you have the ability to upsell and pre-sell where needed as each model requires.
The thing I believe is the significant factor is YOU in your ability to firstly promote that model and secondly have the skills to make the most of it.
you say that you provide a disk - are those images 'straight from the camera'? or are they edited?
I wonder what the Super Heroes at SM can tell us about this. Do they have any insight. Because, after several years, I am about to give up home for on line sales.
A) advertisement
If you're shooting portrait sessions you need to explain why your time/experience is worth a certain price. People will either pay it or not. If they don't value you're work you're not wasting your time on the shoot and processing.
Allowing clients to make follow-up purchases from your web site is fine - but that shouldn't be the driver.
Straight from the camera normally.
If things are slow and my trailer jockey has some spare time they might get a crop but that's it.
I know how to take a photo, I don't subscribe to all this " Pictures must be edited before you show a client or your reputation will be ruined " Crap and garbage.
Never had a complaint about images on disk yet. Wish I could say the same for prints!
I expect they would tell you that online sales are the greatest thing in the history of mankind and the known universe! Like anyone else with a vested interest in a product they are going to do their best to make it sound as appealing as possible.
I will guarantee if you have been presenting your work in person ( I'm assuming we are talking portrait sales here) once you go online only your sales Average will fall through the floor.
I agree with Johng that if the online is a follow up that may get some extra sales. I don't think it will be much but may be OK.
What I would really watch is making it known they will be on the web at the sales session if you are doing one because I would fully expect what you will get will be " WE can order them online if we want more/ change our mind/ get more money in the future etc.
I never give my Clients a reason to put off the purchase, especially with event work. It certainly would not be applicable for all markets and situations but I rather loose a sale by having them walk off than give the whole clientele an out. I have been burned before where I have said people can email me at a later date to see the pics etc and then had that go round a group of people who all use that as an excuse not to order now.
OTOH, when I have said basically it's now or never, I get complaints and then the people spend more time looking and tend to have larger orders than average. The amount that do walk are VERY few and many of them have got back to me and said is there any way you can possibly do this? so I have lost Noting at all on what I would have going the other way.
It's all well and good to bend over for clients, right up till the time it starts costing you money.
Is there a reason you are giving away the face to face presentations for online?