Selling Photographic Prints Online

I mentioned in an earlier post – Creating an online photography website – that I have created a web site using Lightroom Galleries – a very clever use of the web gallery templates provided in Lightroom. This looks pretty smart, but two things are making me consider a change – one is that even if I enable the shopping cart, accepting credit cards is going to be complicated, and then I still have to organize all the printing and sizing of the prints assuming someone finds the site. It is pretty hard to make a personal web site appear near the top of a Google search!

Having looked at the alternatives – mainly Zenfolio, Photoshelter and Smugmug, I decided to go with Smugmug. A couple of things seemed to be important in that decision – I read some posts about people having been discovered through searches on their site and have sold prints that way, and then I found a 50% off coupon that I could use against a Pro package. The Pro package allows you to configure and customize the site to make it unique, and also allows you to sell prints at a profit.

I had printed a 20×30 inch photograph of Yosemite Valley seen over the Merced River and displayed it on the wall at work – a colleague on a visit to the office saw it and was interested in prints of this and other Yosemite photographs and that was enough to make me want to solve the problem! The new web site isn’t finished by any means, but it is on-line with Smugmug under the Backyard Image Fine-Art Photography label!