luketrot
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 Re: Event Sales Quick Setup Help needed | |
For Hammy and those who happen to have missed Episode 1, 2, and 3 of “Printing onsite”.
First, I can\'t believe I\'m letting myself get sucked into this debate again... But here it goes.
Do I print onsite just to save on postage?
It’s a world of mail order and I have no problem waiting for Newegg to ship me my computer parts to save a buck. But our market is 15 year old cheerleaders high on adrenalin and Dip’n’Dots. They are buying t-shirts, jewelry, flowers, cheer bears, candy grams, spirit megaphones and oh, I can’t get my photo today? Do you really believe you’re not losing sales by making them wait weeks for their prints? Parents, Grandparents, Boyfriends want something to give their cheerleaders after they perform to say AWSOME JOB. If it’s not a paper photo then it’s going to be a t-shirt or Cheer Bear.
Now, there used to be a time when we got over 1000 orders at an event. And if we still did that, then it would be worth while to take printing supplies and personnel. But since we\'ve evolved our images on CD - and especially for teams, we rarely see over 250 orders per show as up to half our orders are for the team CD Interesting, we are doing extremely well with our CD sales; same group buy model you use. Has it affected our paper sales? NO! Because parents ordering the CD still want the paper prints to show their friends and family onsite. They want to give their children, grand children, girlfriend, etc a gift because they did such an AWSOME JOB. We even include a custom borders with the date and event name for additional incentive to order onsite. Your inability to move paper product onsite is not because of increased CD sales, it’s because by not offering your paper product in a timely manner so there is no incentive to order it.
But wait! 6 years ago Hammy didn’t see a drop in sales?
6 years ago you may not have see a drop in sales by eliminating printing onsite. However with today’s economy would you see an increase in sales if you did print onsite? When Hammy started, cheerleaders did not have an opportunity to receive amazing action photos. Today the market is saturated, every competition has multiple shooters offering excellent quality photos. Cheer parents see the same pictures week after week at every show they attend. By not offering your product instantly there is no incentive to buy onsite. So they wait until they get home, check out your site and your competition’s sites offering similar images and selectively place their order.
Printing onsite, it’s sooo complicated.
As I have mention before, I do not believe Hammy\'s experience 8 years ago of printing onsite with inkjet printers is relevant to today’s event photography business. Hammy\'s dad told me all about the headaches they had to deal with trying to manage multiple inkjets onsite. To be fair, if I had to deal with inkjets onsite I would be on Hammy\'s side on this issue. However today’s event photographer’s use modern high speed dye-sub printers that are extremely reliable and require almost no maintenance.
But the cost… Hammy wrote: A large 2 day venue would cost me up to $800 to print onsite!
So? I large 2 day venue should make that back 10 fold in increased paper sales. Maybe more considering how poor your paper sales are doing lately. 
But printers cost soo much money..
A quality roll based Dye-sub printer will run approx $2000-$3000, we carry 2-3 printers per trailer. A month ago I just purchased two new printers for our trailers because the current printers have 20,000+ prints each and I wanted to make sure we had fresh printers to start this season. The old printers become backups and the backups end up in our office. (same idea as camera bodies) But what is expensive? When you multiply each printer’s 20,000+ prints by $10 per print I’m not sure the initial printer costs is much of a factor. What becomes a factor is the cost per print and for us it’s 99c for an 8x10 and 54c for 5x7. Plus of course the added sales of selling onsite.
Scalability?
Between viewing stations, servers, camera gear, etc, two pelican cases housing printers is the least of my concern. The setup time takes one person 10 minutes to setup a laptop and 2 printers. As mentioned previously we do not dedicate staff to simply import images every four minutes so our staffing needs are primarily the same for the same size events. Last month we covered a cheer competition with 248 squads using 3 photographers and 3 staff taking orders and printing without a hiccup.
Who should print onsite?
If your just starting out you may not have the funds to justify printing onsite. However as you increase the size of your business and the size of your events you’re going to find printing onsite does increase your ability to make a profit. The price of a few printers will seem insignificant based on the revenue you can produce with them. You will also find when pitching to new contracts you will have an advantage over your competition by offering your products instantly onsite. Hammy has an extremely successful model/business without printing onsite, that does not make him the rule but the exception. There are many national photography companies who have found a way to print onsite not just covering 3 shows but up to 10 shows at once.
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