So how is the Alpha testing going? We’re furiously working away getting the product ready for the beta launch in mid-late August 2009. This means you will be able to use PhotoMerchant to host your own professional photograph website and sell your photos online, instead of just playing pretend. If you’re new to PhotoMerchant, visit our website and register to receive an invitation to join our beta program.

Customise your website design

You may not know it, but there are plenty of options for you to customise the look and feel of your site in the “Website” navigation tab. For starters, in the “Theme” section there are 5 great colour themes (each with 10 complimentary link colours), there are 8 font options and a selection of 4 layout options for your home page and portfolio section.

You can also add your business logo to your site. If you’ve got Photoshop, create a 300×50 pixel (72dpi) document, design or import your logo and then “Save for Web and Devices” as a transparent PNG, JPG or Gif. You can even upload a Favicon, which is the little graphic that appears in your web browsers’ address bar. For inspiration you can download one here or create your own.

You can also rename every page in your site navigation. Under the “Theme” tab scroll down to “Navigation” and you will have the option to change the name of each page. You can turn individual pages on/off, select which page will be your home page, plus, you can alternate the left/right positioning of text, images and navigation until you get the look you’re looking for. We’ve created a demo website called Million2One which shows how you can customise your site using the basic options that are currently available.

Coming soon, we’ll be offering many, many more layout options, more colours, fonts and customisation options. We’re just scratching the surface with what we plan to offer including, animated galleries, flash galleries, blogs and more…

Preparing your photos for sale

With luck, one of the main reasons you are using PhotoMerchant is because you want to be able to sell photographic prints directly to your customers. With PhotoMerchant you can offer a variety of pricing and printing options to suit your business needs.

To get started, you will need to define the wholesale costs of your “Paper Sizes” and “Paper Types”. Click on “Business” in the navigation and then click through to each section. Add the sizes and wholesale costs from your existing print house, completely make them up (this is just for testing purposes after all) or you can download the price lists from our US partners Burrell Color Imaging or Nulab Professional Imaging in Australia.

Next, go into “Shipping Options” and add some default prices, otherwise you might end up incurring the costs of shipping to your customers. For costs on shipping you should consult your preferred courier company or visit the USPS and Australia Post websites for pricing options.

Once these have been setup, you can then create different “Pricing Models” for different types of photographic service. For example, you might set premium prices for your Wedding photography or more conservative prices for Corporate photography. You can then assign your pricing models per “Gallery” using the edit function.

You can also setup different “Feature Sets” which allow you to determine which “Paper Sizes” and “Paper Types” are available per Gallery. For example, you may only want to offer medium to large print sizes for your wedding clientele and limit their paper stock to Gloss and Metallic. “Feature Sets” are a powerful way for you to control the print options you wish to sell.

PhotoMerchant will be launching with Self-Fulfilment capabilities using PayPal as the merchant gateway. This means that you will be able to manage the printing process with your existing print house, or you by using our print partners Burrell Colour Imaging in the US or Nulab Professional Imaging in Australia.

In the near future we plan on offering Full-Fulfilment printing, meaning PhotoMerchant will automatically send print orders directly to our partner print houses and then drop-ship the finished products to your customers, and will use our own built in merchant facility. But that’s another bigger email for another day…

Embed Twitter, YouTube and Widgets into your Website

There are a wide range of Video, Flash and Social Media widgets that can easily be embedded into your website. As an example, on my LomoVision website I have a video page that contains three Vimeo Videos, my home page has a Twitter Widget (available from Twitstamp) and my blog page uses Widgetbox. You don’t need to have a basic understanding of HTML, but it helps.

To embed these widgets into your website, you will need to use the HTML option in the WYSIWYG editor. Click on “Website” in the main navigation and then choose the page you wish to edit (it may be called something like “Custom Page 1” or whatever you have changed it to). Click on the “HTML button” located in the “Body Text” section. Clicking on the HTML box will open a pop-up window which contains the formatting code for the copy on that page. You can simply copy and paste the code before the top <p> to insert the widget at the top of the page or after the </p> to insert it at the bottom. You can add as many as you like.

You can get widgets from a range of sources including Google widgets, Widgetbox , YouTube, Vimeo and more…

Secure individual Galleries with password protection

PhotoMerchant has the ability to create private galleries so that only specific “Customers”, “Customer Groups” or people who have been given a “Password” can have access. This is particularly useful for wedding, children and corporate photography when the subject matter needs to be protected from the general public.

There are two ways you can make your Gallery’s private: 1) assign a unique password or 2) give access to specific “Customers” or “Customer Groups”.

To create a “Password” for a Gallery, click on the “Edit” button or create a “New Gallery”. Near the bottom of the pop-up window select the “Protected” option. A password box will then enable you to enter a unique password for you to manually forward on to your customer.

To assign the Gallery to a unique “Customer” or “Customer Group” you will need to create a New Customer or “Customer Group” or assign the it to an existing customer. Click “Edit” and then select “Visible only to selected customers and/or groups” in the “Visibility” option. The “Save” button will change to “Set Permissions” which will present you with the ability to choose who can have access. Using this option, the only way your customers will see the gallery is if they “Log In” to your website where it will appear in the “Portfolio” section.

It’s easy to create a “New Customer” (just click “Customers” in the navigation and click the “New Customer” button and then fill out the forms with name, email and password details (they will be then sent an email with their login details).

Note: If you leave the “Visible to all users” but have a selected “Protected”, the gallery “Cover Image” will be visible with a “Padlock Icon” in your portfolio section, meaning the gallery is password protected.

It’s much easier than it sounds. Why not log in to PhotoMerchant and give it a whirl right now?

In the next issue we will highlight the new features available in the beta release.

Our blog’s been quiet for a while, but over at the PhotoMerchant offices, it’s anything but quiet.

We’re still powering away on PhotoMerchant and looking forward to release. Our alpha-testers have given us some truly valuable feedback, and we’ve also been busy meeting and talking to people about PhotoMerchant. We’re looking forward to releasing PhotoMerchant in the near future, slowly at first… we’ll get some more feedback from our Alpha group and see what you think.

Here are a few hints about the features we’re currently working on:

• Print-shop integration in Australia and US (with more to come…) – this means that when your customers order prints, PhotoMerchant can automatically send the order to your local print house and the prints will be delivered direct to your customers!
• International currency support: you – and your customers – can carry out your transactions in your local currency.
• Usability testing our member interface: exciting stuff! Our latest interface designs are being tested for usability and we’re looking forward to offering you a sleek, simple interface.
• Bigger selection of web-store design templates: we’re creating a selection of templates so you can customise the look of your web store.

We’ll keep updating you with the latest developments at PhotoMerchant – each day, we’re a step closer to sharing the product with you, and we’re looking forward to it!

The blog’s been quiet, but things have been non-stop action over at PhotoMerchant since I last posted! So, time for an update…

Thanks to all the readers who agreed to be Alpha testers for PhotoMerchant. Over the last few weeks, our testing team has been working their way through PhotoMerchant’s features and giving us feedback. We’ve been responding quickly, and we’ve released 2 ‘alpha test’ upgrades, each with new and extended features.

Some of the exciting features we’re looking forward to releasing:

• Templates that give you display options for your photo-selling website;
• An ‘at-a-glance’ dashboard that lets you see what action’s been happening on your site;
• Integration with PayPal and print houses – your customers order prints, and that order is sent directly to the printers.

As well as Alpha-testing, we’ve been working with some of Australia’s top photographers, ensuring that PhotoMerchant will meet the needs of high-end photographers and those starting up their business. So far, we’re delighted with the feedback we’ve had from both ends of the market – overwhelmingly, we’re being told we’re on the right track.

We’re into final stages of development now, so we’ll be keeping up the pace over the next few weeks. We’re on track for release very soon, so we’ll attempt to keep you posted more frequently and whet your appetite for some of the neat features you can look forward to when we release.

We’d welcome your comments – especially our Alpha-testers – and feel free to ask questions about PhotoMerchant’s features!

For the last few weeks, I’ve been giving you some tips on how to get your photography business running in the online world. We’ve covered things like workflow, sales and online websites. But now I want to go one step further than just tips, and give you a sneak peek at the application we’ve been working on. PhotoMerchant is not just a blog – we’ve also been working on developing an application that will enable photographers to upload their photographs to the web, show them to customers, and sell online – all in one application. We think our product will revolutionize the way photographers do business online.

I am pleased to announce that in a few days, PhotoMerchant will be entering the alpha 1 phase of its development. This is a very exciting time for us as we have been working on PhotoMerchant for quite some time now and the alpha stage is where we will put its functionality, stability and usability to the test.

PhotoMerchant is primarily aimed at photographers who want to sell their photos online. It allows photographers to upload and manage their photos with the end goal of selling them online to either their existing customers, new customers or the world at large.

If you’re interested in using the “pre release” version of PhotoMerchant and helping us to put it through it’s paces… email us at alpha@photomerchant.net. If you help us test out our new web application you’ll get a PhotoMerchant subscription of your choice at HALF PRICE.  That’s right, when PhotoMerchant goes live, you can choose the subscription level you want and get it for 50% the marked price! Interested yet? Email us at alpha@photomerchant.net.

Want more detail? Read on…

What is PhotoMerchant?

PhotoMerchant is an online sales, workflow and presentation tool that allows photographers to sell their photos online. Imagine being able to setup all your print sizes, paper types, options and products you wish to offer, as well as various discounts like volume, earlybird and coupon discounts. Then, adding shopping cart functionality along with credit card processing facilities to your own website, or if you don’t have a website, using the one that PhotoMerchant automatically creates for you. This is what PhotoMerchant does. It actually does more, and you can read below for more detail.

PhotoMerchant can integrate with your own website to turn it into a fully fledged e-commerce photography site where you can sell your photos and manage customers as well as handle orders, payments, printing and shipping. In the not too distant future PhotoMerchant will also be integrating with a number of Professional Printing Houses around the globe as well as providing post processing services and a host of other value-add features.

If you are interested in having a “first look” at PhotoMerchant and also helping us test the alpha version, leave a comment on this post or send us an email at alpha@photomerchant.net.

Alpha 1 Testing Phase

The alpha 1 testing phase will commence on 2 April 2008 and we are now looking for a cross section of photographers from the following genres: portrait, wedding, event, sports, landscape, school, seniors, animal, divorce, glamor, product, real estate, corporate, baby, travel and food photographers. If you fit any of these categories and you take photos with the objective of selling them then we want to hear from you.

Okay, so what can you expect?

The application will contain almost all of the functionality we will go to market with, however, it will neither have the final interface nor will it be bug free. What we need you to do is to put the application through its paces and record any bugs, suggestions for new features and usability issues in the process.

So you think you’ve got what it takes to become a PhotoMerchant test pilot? Then read on.

If you are interested in participating in the alpha testing phase please send an email to alpha@photomerchant.net or just leave a comment on this post with your email address and we’ll contact you!

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