I am new to the Pro Board, but have spent a lot of time on the Wedding/People forum. Here is my question.
Recently I purchased a Smugmug Pro account. I was wondering what people do to get the most out of it. Do you sell any other prints on Smugmug, like fine art or what have you? What did you do to customize yours out? Have you implemented using coupons? Anything else that you use Smugmug for?
I really haven't taken full advantage of the features available so unfortunately I cant be of much help. I don't try to sell anything using smugmug. I bought mine when I was working for another photographer and just wanted a personal site to play around with. Customizing it I found to be a real pain but you couldn't beat the price. Now that im opening my own studio I will probably continue to use it for some proof galleries from time to time but that's about it. There isn't much on mine right now but feel free to check it out at AdamStewartPortraits.com
I use mine to sell sports action shots. It was much simpler to go that route than fulfill so many small orders from players' parents. I also use Smugmug as a proofing site for senior portraits, although I fulfill those orders at the studio after meeting with my clients.
I use smugmug for selling sports photos mostly. I also create galleries to sell sports posters, usually 16x20". I just implemented coupons, which I am happy about. Not sure if it's really worth the $50 bucks a year more than something like Zenfolio. You can do a lot of site customization if you want, not sure if you can do that with the other sites. I keep mine fairly basic.
I use mine predominantly for client proofing of commercial work. Its very good for this. I also upload final processed images for the clint to download (good if there arent too many)
I also display weddings for clients and sell prints this way, although there really are only token sales here as we mainly reprint through our own lab.
I was using mine for selling sporting event prints, but lately I've been using it for client proofing of commerical work as well. The clients really like it (I use the "Black Arts" theme), and they can easily email the password-protected gallery link to others. Makes me look organized without much effort (uploading is a lot easier than emailing lots of images) and makes the clients look really on the ball to their boss/team members, who can watch the portfolio develop real-time and feel involved in the process.
I use it primarily for sporting events. I kept getting asked for prints and after trying a different site for a year, I moved to a slightly customized smugmug site and haven't looked back. I think I'm getting close to 1,000 images out the door and haven't had a single issue of any magnitude.
Haven't tried coupons yet, but will probably give it a shot as ski season starts to crank up.
I use my Smugmug Pro account basically as a catalog of images. I do get spontaneous sales from time to time but most of my customers view the website then contact me with thier specific requests.
It makes a great sales tool.
Good Luck and take advantage of all the smugmug features.
I started with SmugMug and now only use that site for my event photography sells...works flawless for me...worth every penny in the time it saves me. For everything else I've moved on to a photobiz site...much better for proofing.
I use my smugmug site for 99% of my sales, super simple, I just upload all the photos to a gallery and hand out business cards at the event. With motorsports(which is what I primarily shoot) I have found that I have to hand out less and less cards at each event as slowly people are saying oh, we check out your site every monday anyway.
I recently purchased a large format printer and started doing my own printing, and when combined with the fact that I had received some scepticism about the US currency I decided maybe the paypal cart was a better fit for me, so I implemented that into all my galleries and now do my own printing rather than paying a lab to do it, then paying 15% of my profit to smugmug(now I only pay 3% to paypal) as a trade off I now have to fulfill my own digital download orders, but I think it was worth it in the long run.
The customization is definitely not easy, but if you ask for help on their boards there's always people on there willing to help out.
Feel free to check out my site if you want some customization ideas, PM me if you have any questions http://www.stevenszabophoto.com
T Bangerter wrote:
I am new to the Pro Board, but have spent a lot of time on the Wedding/People forum. Here is my question.
Recently I purchased a Smugmug Pro account. I was wondering what people do to get the most out of it. Do you sell any other prints on Smugmug, like fine art or what have you? What did you do to customize yours out? Have you implemented using coupons? Anything else that you use Smugmug for?
I really wanted my storefront to match my main website (links in my WWW button), and SM was the only full-stack service I could find at the time that allowed that. I have been pretty happy with the service as a whole, though, but it certainly took a while to get some pretty basic functionality like coupons. Sometimes I feel like they add flashy, oh-that-is-neat features when I'd rather have features that actually help me sell more photos, but I'm sure they're just tackling things in the order most people are requesting them. For now, though, I tend to do a fair amount of external setup to make things work the way I want. For instance, I often want to provide people with a very short web address at an event (like: stopmophoto.com/boston10 or whatever, rather than store.stopmophoto.com/events/Boston-2010/jhg1324hg_12h3r) and SM doesn't offer (or I haven't found) a way to do that, so I need to take care of it on my own. Not a huge deal because I can manage a webserver, but it's a pretty basic function that's missing.
