Selling your photos

LaurenElizabeth · Jun 17, 2013

Does anyone know a website where you can sell your photos to the public? I took photos at a dance recital and I would like to sell them to the dancers and their parents but I'm not sure a good way to do it... Any advice?

KmH · Jun 17, 2013

To be able to set your own prices, figure a web site like that will cost you $100 or so and up in advance for a year of use, plus the web site owners will get a cut of your selling price.

Zenfolio.com, SmugMug.com, Flickr.com, etc.

Your state may require you collect and forward state sales taxes to them.

Zenfolio $120 Premium account:
Premium

Complete professional website with everything you need for selling online.
Includes all the features of the Unlimited plan, plus:

64 MB maximum file size

Integrated shopping cart with your prices

Sell products from partner labs (12% fee*)

Self-fulfill your own orders (4% fee)

Sell digital products (8% fee)

Watermarks

Client access page

Client proofing and Favorites

Marketing tools, coupons, gift certificates

Zenfolio branding is removed

Can be used with external website

tirediron · Jun 17, 2013

The website isn't really the issue; it's getting people to go there. For my money one of the best resources for this sort of work if you don't already have an established web presence as a photographer is facebook. Upload a gallery to facebook with a 'contact me' comment and you're off to the races. If you're going to do this regularily, then set up your own website. Tools such as WordPress templates make this quick and easy to do, and you won't have to share your profits with a hosting service.

Buckster · Jun 17, 2013

Zazzle | Custom T-Shirts, Personalized Gifts, Posters, Art, and more is free, other than they'll take a fee on every item you sell, but that cost is known by you up front per type and size of the item, and you can set your prices there accordingly to cover that cost. They'll then take care of the printing, shipping, billing, returns, etc., and paypal you with your profits.

You can put your images on prints or posters up to 6 feet wide or tall, plus a wide variety of accessories like mugs, t-shirts, hats, calendars, magnets, key chains, skateboards, iphone cases, and lots of other stuff. Customers can choose sizes, paper quality including canvas, frames, matting, etc. However, you don't make any profit on matting or framing, so that's kind of a bummer - but then, you don't put anything into that aspect of it either, so...

You can choose from many different storefront layouts, or cobble one together on your own if you know a bit of HTML or CSS, and you can set up a different store front for each project if you like, but they're still all managed by you from one user name and account. Then you can send a link to the store(s) or particular images to whomever you like, or post them to the world on FB or make business cards with it on them, etc., to fire up your advertising and networking.

jwbryson1 · Jun 17, 2013

Last year, I took photos at a neighborhood HOA event (a meet and greet with Santa Claus). I set up a FREE website on Online Photo Proofing | ShootProof | Sell Photography Online :: ShootProof.com and uploaded my photos to the website. It's simple and it cost me NADA for 30 days to run the website. You can then send a link to the participants and they can choose which photos they like. You can email them the photos or if they want prints, you can actually set up the website where they can choose prints themselves.

To simplify it for myself, I only provided an email copy of the image in JPEG format that they can upload to Facebook or to another website and get a print for themselves.

Just a thought....

imagemaker46 · Jun 17, 2013

If the dancers and parents weren't give advance notice that the photos would be made available on a web site along with the address on a piece of paper, the chances of getting anyone to visit a site that does not yet exist is the biggest challenge. Chances are that it will end up costing more to put everything together than you will end up making. This is the cart before horse approach to selling online.

ShooterJ · Jun 17, 2013

I second ShootProof. They have some nice galleries, friendly interface and reasonable rates if you continue to use after 30 days.

If you decide to do this often, you can (as suggested) set up a website and ShootProof will integrate with your site, with none of their branding visible to the client. To the end user the gallery would operate as just another part of your site.