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.