I know, I know, story of everyones life. What are my reasons:

1. Order totals hidden. Im not the photographer who doesnt have to worry about "how much it is."
2. SPAM!! My god man! SPAM!
3. The $99 fee wouldnt come out of the $600 order placed. Noo...it has to be charged to my credit card...but why...when you have $600 of my dollars! Just use that!

Another reason I am leaving is because of cust service. Most companies, no matter how big or small, always call you to see how things are going. I've gotten 0 calls in 9 months.

Just for craps-n-giggles - heres the 9 months stats:

Released Events - 27
Consumer Orders - $1707.74
Expenses - $968
Net Profit - $739.25

Total Paid to keep Pictage running - $810

For me, it just makes sense to do it myself. Maybe I'll go back to Pictage when we're a little busier, but for now, its in the best interest that I depart that ship!

Now I'm lonely.

..and it will be nice to no longer get emails from customers who are complaining about too many emails!

I've never done the real math to see how Collages.net compares to Pictage, but I have been happy with Collages. There are a few things I wish were different, but they're not that critical.

Just thought I'd give you an option.... since you're lonely!

Instaproofs. $1707.74 x 15% = $1451.58 in your pocket.

Only if you're not actually delivering the print orders.
You have to deduct what you pay for the prints, packaging, shipping, taxes and overhead too.


But I get what you meant.

Matt, I looked into collages, and it seems like its the same deal....except its $70 a month and not $99. Can you extend the events beyond 60 days? I reckon they dont have an email spam problem eh? I appreciate you taking the time to chime in...especially when I have 4 other weddings for next year scheduled on Pictage. Tyring to figure out a way to transition over!

Well I don't have enough volume to sign up for the annual plan. I have a few events a month... mostly portrait events at $9.00 each.

You can relaunch events past 60 days for $9.99 per month. Customers receive three e-mails during the event and I think that's it. The e-mails are really poorly worded though, and sometimes aren't grammatically correct when they automatically insert the name of your event into their generic text. I have e-mailed them about that, but nothing has been done about it. I think there is a way to create custom text for the notification e-mails, but I think you lose some other functionality. Not sure... I haven't played with it yet.

You can fulfill through their in-house lab but the per-print prices are higher than WHCC's PF option.

There are some limitations but I like the end-user's interface, which in some ways is the most important thing. Customers need to be able to work the thing!

If things really pick up, I'll probably move to PickPic.

We were with Collages for several years after we left Pictage. I really like them. They have extremely responsive customer service, which was really important to us. Our customers really liked the look of the site, as well. Emails were minimal. One thing I did like, and I really miss right now, was that you could send emails yourself if you decided to do a special or promo or something. It was really easy. You wrote the email, selected which events or visitors you wanted to send it to, and it was sent as if it was from you. We used this to occasionally run a free shipping special or a discount or whatever. We used it once to offer a free family session to the first 5 respondents by a certain date. Collages also relaunches all your sites in October so that people have a chance to buy more for the holidays. They allow you to opt out on an event by event basis if you want.

We made it clear to our customers that the site would be online for two months. If they wanted it relauched after two months, they could pay $9.95 a month to Collages to relaunch it. Collages occasionally offered specials on this, also, the longer they chose to relaunch it, the less it cost. We never had anyone complain about having to pay to have it up longer.

We started using PickPic last spring. I really like it, but I do miss some things about Collages. I highly recommend it to anyone.

I'm tempted to comment here...

Go ahead Dan, all comments are welcome. Hopefully people that leave Pictage will say so on this thread.

By the way Dan, love your stuff!

I left Pictage for many of the same reasons, one of which was I didn't have the volume to make it worth it for me.

I know that people who shoot 40-50 weddings a year, its probably more worth it. But, I couldn't justify the cost.

Ksenia

_{(I like Printroom.com)}

[COUGH] PICKPIC!! [/COUGH]

Okay, so it's self fulfill but SOOOOOO nice and it's also super nice that I am in control of it all. It is the most beautiful system and I have received SO many compliments on it. Troy & Rebecca are amazing too. I'm not "big time" by any means, but when I started comparing costs, features and general options, PickPic made sense for me. It's about the same as a year's worth of Pictage membership fees but when you think about the commission, high print costs, SLOW turn around times, spam, sucky prints (that I was getting anyway) and extremely poor CS and accounting from Pictage, it makes the price a lot easier to swallow. And you own it... no membership fees. It's yours. I *heart* PickPic!

I signed up with Printroom at last year's PPE and once I started (trying) to set it up I just found that I really didn't like the appearance and functionality of it, BUT, I have heard good things from others.

I do love Pickpic, but my site is not compatible. The folks who built my new website (portfoliositez.com - highly recommended), says they are putting in shopping carts beginning of the year. This means I'll be able to do it myself.

In the meantime, I think I will go with Collages. So Matt, an order is received, then you send it to WHCC? Curious on that part.

Much appreciated

Nick,

I use a program called studiocart. I think it's a little under-rated! They have excellent ( I mean excellent) customer service, and you fulfill your own orders. I use WHCC to order prints.

Check it out
http://www.studiocart.com

It costs a bit up front, but is only $30/month

I had an issue with a client order, and I submitted a help request to the company. Within 5 minutes, the owner (Brian) was calling me on the phone to solve the problem (even though it was 12am his time). Pretty darn worth it to me!!

You get an order on Collages.net, receive an email telling you you have an order, Adam did any retouching or work on the photos, then we uploaded to WHCC or Millers. We have always had the orders shipped to us, then we repackage and mail them out ourselves. I know a lot of people use print fulfillment and just have WHCC send them out for them. Collages direct deposits your money into your bank account about a week or week and a half after you receive the order.

You could always get another web hosting account and domain and run a cart there. A GoDaddy site would be about $50, WestHost about $150.

Keeping the sites separate may work out better in the long run anyway.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

I made the decision this week to go with PickPic as well. Can't wait to get it set up!

(I'm an impatient guy so it's gonna be tough to wait...)

Yeah. I knew you knew. Get the order, send it to WHCC, and done. Still a lot more money in your pocket, I'd wager.

I don't have any experience with DigiProofs... but considered them recently.

Their pricing is based on a per-event fee (I think it's $45 per 1,000 image event).

I tried Collages.net and love the look, but thought they were a little expensive...charge to upload and then take 15% of the order. I LOVE Instaproofs! They only charge 15% of the order, send me an e-mail when I have a new order and just added direct depost. They send payments twice per month.

I want to expand on what Lynn meant by "uploaded." You do have to manually order each picture, size, quantity, finish, whatever through ROES. That is my least favorite part. It is TOTALLY manual. So if you get a big print order, your head is literally spinning afterward. I always feel like I left one image out or ordered the wrong quantity. It's total monkey work!

I wish I could hit one "Fulfill" button on Collages and have it zapped to WHCC. At PPE, one of the women at the WHCC booth hinted that they might be adding their own online hosting one day. I have no idea if it is correct or true, but if it looks anything like Collages' interface AND I can click the magic "Fulfill" button... I"m there!

Yes, the 15% does sting a little, considering you still have to pay a lab for the actual prints, but for me it's the best interface for the customer (and doesn't look like some guy in his basement designed it, as many other proofing options do).

I used to be with digiproofs and hated their interface and navigation so much!!! Maybe they've changed in the last year...

Actually, there's a nice workaround to this... just register and host a new domain that you'll use for the shopping cart (and/or perhaps a custom blog as well).

Continue using yourdomain.com for the main website, and then use yourdomain.net for the shopping cart and/or other functions. Since most of the better website templates allow you to link to an "external site" for select functions, you simply define your ".net" domain as that link and voilla... your clients are routed to the PickPic shopping cart.

Works like a charm.

Best of luck!!!

David

I am actually changing a few things on my end too. I will continue to use Pictage, but will be ordering my images from my clients myself from another lab. This serves multiple purposes. First of all, I want to give my clients better packaging. The black boxes are cool, but always come dented. Friends and family will still be ordering from Pictage. I simply don't have time to fulfill those orders myself.

If you are a busy lab, Pictage is easily worth the 99 a month. I use the free credit card processing, and the forever storage that they offer. We are shooting over 100 events this year, and were just gonna get busier than that in the future. I really haven't had the billing issues that others have.

As I've stated before though, you really need to build a relationship with your personal customer rep. That is the best way to get issues resolved. At that point you have an individual you're holding accountable. My rep Adam is awesome!

instaproofs is amazing...

so says the posterboy

holy wow! all this talk about instaproofs...and I just now checked them out! frikking double wow! Any cons with instaproof that I should know about before signing up?

Thanks a lot you guys!

InstaProofs:

Their interface isn't as slick as Pictage's ... but it gets the job done. PayPal or direct deposit to your account every two weeks (after you mark the order as "shipped").

Remember that they are NOT a fulfillment house... you have to do the printing and shipping yourself.

You'll be uploading low res files... I've found that running the high res jpg files back through Lightroom as a new import allows me to re-export them at 1280 pixels (or whatever the recommended size for upload is) with minimal embed data. The uploads go a whole lot faster than Pictage... but remember -- they are not an offsite backup like Pictage is. You're only uploading low res, so make sure you've got a great back up system for your files.

Just like Pictage, et al, sort your images into category folders BEFORE upload!

Other than that, I'll probably be using them next year, since my print orders have fallen way off this year due to including the disk and printing release with my wedding packages.

Another possibility is photoreflect, they work with the Express Digital software that I find very helpful. You can manually fulfill or use one of their labs and drop ship. I've never had a problem with them yet.