| Joined: | Wed Apr 11th, 2012 |
| Location: | Melbourne, Australia |
| Posts: | 525 |
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As part of this I was asked if I could do prints or make the photos available for download, and that it was expected that I would sell these photos - either by organising prints or making digital download available.
I am for the time being without my own photo printer, so I would either have to outsource the printing or purchase a printer. For now I decided to forego the idea of charging for prints.
I have had my own site up and running for some time now and knew in theory how to set up a shopping cart, but adding in digital download was something beyond my limited knowhow so I started looking around to work out how to do this. Being confident that I would come up with a solution I had accepted the gig, so the pressure was on!
I had previously downloaded a couple of Lightroom plugins from http://shop.theturninggate.net. In the early days I had got a Lightroom plugin that generated a flash gallery from them and used it to create a gallery for my sisters wedding. As time moved on and the iPad came out I purchased a further gallery from them that made a gallery that worked on both computer and mobile devices and allowed viewers to swipe through images on an iPad or iPhone.
Looking at what they had available now it seemed that they could solve my problem. They now have a number of plugins including updated galleries, and e-commerce cart that facilitates digital downloads, a product called Autoindex which can drive a menu page for different galleries and a plugin that can drive Lightroom's publisher feature - which would be a real boon for getting the photos up and online quickly after the event.
I purchased the CE3 blog and galleries bundle ($100) and the cart ($50). If I was going to do it again I think I would have got the Web publishing Bundle instead ($85) and might yet buy the Pages plugin from that bundle as a standalone as I think it might be better for me later.
I followed the instructions on the TTG wiki page for installation. The gallery is very straight forward, and so is the Autoindex (my main problem with this was I was sure there must be more to it than this!) Publisher and Cart take a little more effort but not much if you have basic computer literacy (I am no expert, but I'm also not tech phobic). Outside of the Lightroom Plugin installations you will also need to be able to install downloaded folders into the right place on your web host server. I used an FTP utility (Cyberduck) to do this. You also have to go into certain files and make a very simple text edit to the PHP code there, this is very simple in reality and described quite well in the instructional wiki on the TTG site: http://wiki.theturninggate.net
I mentioned in a previous post that I use 1Password. You have to generate a lot of different password in this process for different areas of your site, ideally you want them all to be strong and different, this is where 1Password really helps.
The Cart and publisher plugins are probably the most interesting.
The Cart allows for a number of different 'Products' which are then applied across all of your images. One of these can be digital download - but that only really has one format. However you can different size prints at different prices, different print media at different prices etc. There are also discount structures that can be applied set to different price thresholds and a discount code. You can configure all of this in a web front end once it is set up. One limitation I cam across with the discount codes was that they applied to the whole order. There may be a way to adjust this but I didn't find it. I wanted to set up a structure where for $35 you could download any photo in the gallery, so I set a 100% discount up when the purchase came to more than $35. What happened in testing was that the entire cart then became $0, so I scratched that idea! In the end I left a code in for 50% discount past $30. In practice the photos were $4 each so when the cart reached $32, the whole thing dropped to $16. I wrote this up in the header, but may not have been clear enough because people still purchased 6 for $24. Add two more photos and they would have saved $8.
The purchases all go through PayPal, either from the users account or payment by credit card. I set up a 95% discount with the code friends&family if anybody wants to see how this works.
Publisher was an absolute time saver. Without this I would have had to save each galley separately and export download copies of the photo into the purchase folder for the cart to access. Publisher does this for you and couldn't be any easier to use once set up. This is shown in the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgvIvj79N4g
I had a couple of learning moments along the way. I used nearly all of my host hard drive allocation but got the site fitted in with about 100Mb to spare - however when folk started to purchase photos it seems some fairly large temporary files were created and this crashed the site. I also had two buyers that were unable to download their images, but I believe this was because of the previous issue. There are logs you can look at for transactions and from these I was able to extract the download link for one buyer and e-mail it to her (all was good subsequently) but for the second buyer this trick didn't work. He had purchased 39 images and the download page only showed one (I think it was his purchase that crashed the site). I had the image file names from the purchase log and in the end I had to find them in Lightroom, export them into a dropbox folder and send him the link - which was a little laborious but worked well. I also did a photoshop version of one off the better shots of him (below) and sent him a full res version for free as apology and he was delighted with this so left a happy customer.
The other small point I had was that prior to final payment the customer has to check a small box agreeing to the terms and conditions. A number of people didn't seem to notice this and couldn't progress. I need to think about how to call it out more as to me it seems pretty standard and obvious, but clearly if more than one person has an issue it needs work.
In the end I never needed to ask for support. TTG is owned by an American chap who is based in South Korea and a lot of the coding seems to be done by a mate of his who is based in Australia. The two of them appear to be the only resources and the run a forum where they provide support. Having browsed that it looks like the support is really good but I didn't need to use it myself. Given the time zones, I'd probably find it more immediate than most of you if I did need to use though!
Overall I'm very happy with how this all worked out. Using these products saved me a massive amount of time I think compared with trying to do this any other way, an allowed me to provide a professional service and professional looking front end, whilst turn the photos around really quickly. Overall my customers seemed to be very happy which was the main thing.
If you'd like to check all this out http://richwhetton.com/EFC6photography/ If you want to check the purchasing out select more than 8 photos and use the discount code above, it'll take the cost down to zero as it stacks the discounts.
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