More Pricing Enhancement Requests

[scrooks]

I've already requested some pricing enhancements, such as sliding scale prices, coupons, and pricing at the category level, so what's the difference if I request a few more. :-) These could very well be things already being considered, but it doesn't hurt to ask and express interest.

1) I'd like to see more specific information about the size ratio for the various products that are available. Many of them (but not all!) have it hinted at in the description with things like "a minimum size of 1024x768 is recommended", but I would like to see a specific ratio, such as 1.5 that the picture will be printed at on the product.

2) As a followup to #1, I'm hoping that the new ordering tool that's coming will allow some control over cropping. Right now I don't offer very many sizes to my customers because I fear a customer will end up with a picture of their kid with half the head cut off from cropping -- you cannot count on the customer understanding what's going to happen with cropping just from a few words. I really think showing the picture to the customer as it will be printed after the crop would be a fantastic addition. If the customer was allowed to slide the crop to whatever spot they wanted, that would be even better. Do that and I'll probably offer all the products to my customers.

3) As a followup to #2, if I could offer all products it would be nice if I could price everything at once as Smugmug price + my markup. Just a box where I could enter something like $5.00, hit a button, and all the prices would be filled in with the Smugmug price + $5.00. Then I could go change any individual items if I cared to. There are a lot of products out there for me to offer, and if I have to set pricing on each gallery (that's another topic :D ) this feature will save a lot of time!

Thanks for listening!

[Baldy]

Hi Scrooks,

Many thanks for more great suggestions.

Cropping is our #1 problem and we're very focused on it. Unfortunately, it's a problem made nearly out of control by issues like consumer cameras having a 4:3 ratio, fitting your TV perfectly — where no one views images — but fits no existing print sizes that customers are familiar with.

If you sell them print sizes that fit 4:3, which we do (4xD, 5xD & 8xD), the resulting prints fit no frames or albums.

Pro cameras, on the other hand, fit 4x6 prints perfectly but endure severe cropping for 8x10, etc. In the digital world cropping in Photoshop is easy and common, but then the consumer is at sea when it comes to picking a print size to fit.

We've been testing variations in alerting the customer to the size discrepancy, offering print preview, and the ability to specify cropping for any given print size.

You might wonder what's taking us so long and one answer is web browsers don't make this easy without using a plugin like Flash, which we're very reluctant to require. We programmed a pretty good bulk move tool without it and we're quite determined to do this without Flash as well, but it's exceptionally tedious to get it working with every browser configuration.

And the other is that most consumers have no concept of cropping. What do you mean, it doesn't fit? Make it fit and please don't cut off the top of my daughter's head. You can imagine in the environment of a shopping cart as they're rushing to complete their order and get on with life that the #1 thing on their list isn't pausing to learn about ratios and specifying one crop for a 5x7 and a different one for an 8x10. And yet that's what the shopping cart has to guide them through.

Film at 11.

All the best,
Chris

[scrooks]

I have felt and feel your pain. I've worked many times and for many hours trying to get things to work across browsers. Good luck!

And I know what you mean about consumers and cropping. If it were possible to use DHTML to give them something like a thumbnail with a red outline around the area of the picture they're going to get, letting them use the mouse to drag the red outline wherever they want -- some people still wouldn't get it. I trust you'll do the best you can to make something easy to use, and we'll go from there. No matter what you do someone will have problems; just make the defaults decent and hope they keep clicking away. :-)