There has been a lot of anti-Paypal discussion elsewhere due to problems. Personally, I do use Paypal and have only experienced problems with customers refusing to use their CC on their site or any internet site. They think it's safer to phone me. I used to try to explain that it was actually safer using a secure service such as Paypal compared to phone lines, now just take the card info and keep quiet. We know for sure from customer conversations that getting rid of Paypal is on our list of priorities. There's no doubt that many people refuse to post their info on the Paypal site. Paypal may be a familiar name to all of us, it's definitely not to everyone.
Apparently Google Checkouts service is better than Paypal. I tried to use it and they do not offer the service in Canada yet, just UK & US.
There are a few freebie and/or very cheap ways to get photos on-line if you have a web provider. I use Breeze Browser, since I owned it already and it's so cheap. It integrates well with Paypal and offers a dozen or so premade templates. I think the biggest misconception that photographers have on internet sales is that they will just take pictures and be rolling in money. It takes a lot of time & effort to get the site right and to adjust it continually when you get feedback. for most of our galleries, we married Breeze with Show It Web. Show it is $99 or $199 for a great flash inbedded template system. I would not ever use anything that forced customers to have special software on their computer. Show It Web is flashed based, but does not require players to be installed (at least that's how I understand it). Flash based also provides one more step in copy protection
Everything we post is time sensitive. Most galleries we post for our preschool photos are taken down after 7 days. We put a countdown clock right on the gallery. We get lots of calls to re-post and we charge $10. In some cases you can tell that they have stolen images because they still don't place an order after paying the $10. Why 7 days? For crying out loud, if you can't make a decision within 7 days, you are just playing games with me.
Music adds a huge sales appeal to your internet galleries for portraits. I haven't tried this with sports action yet, but still working on what music/sounds to use. We get a lot of positive feedback on the music that we put with portrait galleries and we know it helps sell.
Show big images. I would never order from thumnails that I can't see all the detail on. We make sure our images have good detail to full screen size. Since this also means that they can make great 8x10's, every image is watermarked across the front. With our preschool system, we use a template that has our name diagonally just below the face, even covering the neck. It does take a few minutes more time to go through each image, making sure the mark is tweaked up or down a bit for each photo but it's worth it in my opinion.
All of our galleries are hidden. Nothing can be accessed from our main site. I don't know of any other photographer that does this and that's just fine with me. I see it as a special access priviledge that I allow certain customers to use. I send them a secret link to their own gallery and then they can either forward this link or click on the email button on the gallery to send it to their family and friends. It creates a greater sense of security. when we started showing preschool portraits on-line, I was super concerned about security. After hundreds of galleries in use, I have never recieved any negative comments and when we did a survey of 100 users, the response was that they felt safe that their child's photos were kept secret. People do not want their photos being viewed by pervs on the internet. Do not take that thought lightly.
The biggest message I want to leave is this: most customers love the internet because photographers post lots of great pictures that they & their friends can watch & copy FOR FREE. If you want to make money, always keep that in mind - FOR FREE. You've got to convert that into money.
Nothing here is about what photos sell on the internet but I'm trying to avoid that question. It's like telling a photographer how to shoot. They don't listen.
DougA
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