Pro Accounts

KhaosKhaos Registered Users Posts: 2,435 Major grins
edited October 3, 2005 in SmugMug Support
First off let me say smug mug is fantastic as a photo sharing site that offers the abilty to share and print photos. I still believe it's the best there is.

My issue is more with the "Professional" account for smug mug.

The issues is that smug mug uses the same design for both with certain features turned off for the regular and pro-user accounts.

I understand the design is easier to control, program, and cheaper to maintain one template design rather than two, but it also truly limits the professional account.

If it remains like this, I think labeling the accounts like silver, gold, and platinum would be better. Professional is misleading because of the limitations.

Professionals want control. That control is somewhat limited at smug mug because of the common design for all accounts.

1. Watermarking. We should have control of the type, opacity, and what size gets watermarked. I want the user to see it large size and have that watermarked but not the medium size.

2. Bulk pricing. I understand coupons and codes would be a nightmare to program for and I'm OK with not having them. However, a different template for the shopping cart should be used for the professional accounts. We need the ability to set multiple prices for prints based on numbers ordered. Say at least 3 for each. So next to 5x7 I have the option of choosing the different number of prints and the price.

Most professionals make money from commissioned work and that often gets bought in multiple prints, or is at least encouraged for higher sales.

3. Cobranding should continue to the shopping cart. The user is at galleries.creativekhaos.com, but the minute they go to the shopping cart, it's smugmug.com.

4. More control over the price list view. The seperation hurts when users don't know to click the other drop down menu or are just too impatient to do so.

These are a few items that have been brough up a lot. I can only see them be addressed with a seperate template for pro accounts. Is this in the future? I think a decsion should be made to continue as a photosharing site only and continue to be the best at it, or have that and a great professional offering also. Currently running both in the same box hurts the pro side too much.

Comments

  • onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited July 7, 2005
    Hey, this is great feedback. Thanks! We'll definitely internalize it and see what we can do. Some comments:
    Khaos wrote:
    1. Watermarking. We should have control of the type, opacity, and what size gets watermarked. I want the user to see it large size and have that watermarked but not the medium size.

    As we've said over and over, this is on our to-do list. It's difficult, and a much lower priority than some other things we're working on, such as vastly improved customization.
    Khaos wrote:
    2. Bulk pricing. I understand coupons and codes would be a nightmare to program for and I'm OK with not having them. However, a different template for the shopping cart should be used for the professional accounts. We need the ability to set multiple prices for prints based on numbers ordered. Say at least 3 for each. So next to 5x7 I have the option of choosing the different number of prints and the price.

    Most professionals make money from commissioned work and that often gets bought in multiple prints, or is at least encouraged for higher sales.

    This isn't likely to happen anytime soon, I'm sorry. Coupons are much easier, in higher demand, and will likely happen much sooner.
    Khaos wrote:
    3. Cobranding should continue to the shopping cart. The user is at galleries.creativekhaos.com, but the minute they go to the shopping cart, it's smugmug.com.

    Carts often have photos from more than one site. Which cobranding should smugmug display?

    Our SSL certificate only applies to smugmug.com hostnames, so your customers wouldn't be able to use secure processing, their credit card details would be sent in the clear. I think it'd take a huge bite out of your sales.

    smugmug's name is on the customer's credit card statement. They contact us for shipping problems, reprints for the rare printing problem, etc. We need to be up front with them that they're interfacing with us, or they're lost.

    Khaos wrote:
    4. More control over the price list view. The seperation hurts when users don't know to click the other drop down menu or are just too impatient to do so.

    We continue to evaluate this one, and don't have a good answer yet. When we do, you'll hear about it here. What is clear is that customers are much less confused now that things aren't on one single list, and Pro sales have gone up as a result. Separation helped sales - not hurt them.

    Khaos wrote:
    These are a few items that have been brough up a lot. I can only see them be addressed with a seperate template for pro accounts. Is this in the future? I think a decsion should be made to continue as a photosharing site only and continue to be the best at it, or have that and a great professional offering also. Currently running both in the same box hurts the pro side too much.

    We don't consider the two to be distinct. Great photosharing makes for great sales for our Pros. If we did consider them to be distinct, we wouldn't do one or the other - we're not going to stray from our course of being the ultimate in photo sharing.

    The interesting thing is that dgrin readers only see a small portion of our user base. Most smugmug customers, and almost all of our Pros who generate lots (thousands of dollars / month) of sales, never bother to post here. So, while we derive lots of feature requests and ideas for the site from dgrin, there's a ton of other customers who voice their opinions via email and other communication as well.

    The vast majority of our Pros can't stop telling us how great the service is (better than anything else out there, according to them). They'd love custom watermarking, and to some extent, coupons, but other than that, we rarely hear of any other areas where we're not doing a great job. I don't think most Pros would argue that we're hurting the Pro side of things.

    Thanks again!

    Don
  • Matthew SavilleMatthew Saville Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,352 Major grins
    edited July 7, 2005
    This is sort of off topic Don but I think another issue is not only do we want to be able to give a discount to peope who buy 10-20 prints etc. but I at least (I guess you already know) am still interested in the ability to offer my work matted / framed. That would not be something that EZ prints does, but something I do.

    But on the topic of what EZ prints does, I hope you're still pestering them about getting their panoramic prints onto the light jet printer!!!

    Also, EZ prints doesn't seem to be keeping their prices up with "the times". I have been forced to exclusively use Adorama for all prints 12x18" and smaller, just because the price difference is so drastic and the difference in quality is, to 100% of people who see my prints, nonexistent.

    Please respond about this. I think all the aforementioned thousands of dollars worth of Pro business should be at least PART of a bargaining chip when smugmug writes to EZ prints with a suggestion / question / request...

    -Matt-
    My first thought is always of light.” – Galen Rowell
    My SmugMug PortfolioMy Astro-Landscape Photo BlogDgrin Weddings Forum
  • mercphotomercphoto Registered Users Posts: 4,550 Major grins
    edited July 7, 2005
    onethumb wrote:
    This isn't likely to happen anytime soon, I'm sorry. Coupons are much easier, in higher demand, and will likely happen much sooner.
    Cool! I actually have a use for coupons. And digital downloads.
    We continue to evaluate this one, and don't have a good answer yet. When we do, you'll hear about it here. What is clear is that customers are much less confused now that things aren't on one single list, and Pro sales have gone up as a result. Separation helped sales - not hurt them.
    As a general rules, fewer choices to a consumer makes life easier on the consumer (strange but true, I've seen it myself). So I can see the shorter lists (by separating them) makes life easier. The only other way I know of to shorten the lists is one I can't even figure out how to make work. Right now, for each size prints my customers see three options and prices (matte, glossy, luster). If this was reduced to one, and then a separate choice for paper type, this would make things less cluttered still in the price list. The problem is, of course, that luster paper costs more. While all my prices are identical for the different papers, I can see some wanting to charge more for luster.
    Bill Jurasz - Mercury Photography - Cedar Park, TX
    A former sports shooter
    Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
    My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
  • KhaosKhaos Registered Users Posts: 2,435 Major grins
    edited July 7, 2005
    Thanks for the response.

    I have a way around the water marking, it just lands up using more of your disk space.

    I can see being able to use coupons and adjust them to bulk orders also. Thanks.

    I didn't think of the orders from multiple smug mug users in the shopping cart. Ooops.

    The only thing I can ask for then on the multiple lists is the ability to choose the order they are listed. With Normal as the default and my pics are offered only in the 2x3 format, the user only sees a 20x30 when on the other specialty prints drop down they would see a wide variety of sizes. I would like the wider variety to be default by my choosing.

    This is really for selling non-commissioned work. You can always tell the customer whos hired you how to navigate in the shopping cart. I'm more concerned about a potential customer that links in from somewhere else or from a business card posted in a local establishment that is unaware how to navigate the cart.

    Thanks again.
  • Techman1Techman1 Registered Users Posts: 155 Major grins
    edited October 2, 2005
    onethumb wrote:
    Coupons are much easier, in higher demand, and will likely happen much sooner.

    The vast majority of our Pros can't stop telling us how great the service is (better than anything else out there, according to them). They'd love custom watermarking, and to some extent, coupons, but other than that, we rarely hear of any other areas where we're not doing a great job. I don't think most Pros would argue that we're hurting the Pro side of things.

    Thanks again!

    Don
    The above quote was a subset of what Don had indicated in an earlier message.


    Don,

    I was wondering where the "coupons" might be falling in the priority list these days. You had indicated back in July that this was something that Smugmug was likely to be able to implement sooner. I know that watermarking is on your list, but wanted to see where this one might be these days.

    Thanks to you and all of the Smugmug team for all the recent changes. Also, thanks in advance for the update to this issue.

    Regards,

    Fred
  • pat.kanepat.kane Registered Users Posts: 332 Major grins
    edited October 3, 2005
    mercphoto wrote:
    ... As a general rules, fewer choices to a consumer makes life easier on the consumer (strange but true, I've seen it myself). So I can see the shorter lists (by separating them) makes life easier. The only other way I know of to shorten the lists is one I can't even figure out how to make work. Right now, for each size prints my customers see three options and prices (matte, glossy, luster). If this was reduced to one, and then a separate choice for paper type, this would make things less cluttered still in the price list. The problem is, of course, that luster paper costs more. While all my prices are identical for the different papers, I can see some wanting to charge more for luster.
    Funny this thread just popped to the top as I was heading to the suggestions thread to type this in. I would think that given the volume of prints passing through smugmug that they could negotiate a single price regardless of finish. This would cut the list tremendously and allow all print types to show up in one pickbox with gifts in another.
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