This is a repost SORRY!


For those that don’t use Pictage (or another all online lab), how does your order fulfillment process work?

Do you use a paper form? Another piece of software?

If you are using another piece of software, say a shopping cart on your website....

How do you receive the orders?
What’s your process to get those orders to the lab?


I am looking for the best way to streamline my order workflow. It really seems the bottle neck comes when getting the images to the lab. Finding and uploading the images is a huge hassle.

We receive the order (either from Collages.net or directly from the customer), find the images (they are organized by either the groom's last name or the session name and date. We keep them on several hard drives until we archive to DVD. If they are archived, we have a list that tells us which disc the event is on.), do any retouching or anything like that that is necessary, put them into a folder in a folder that we keep called "orders," upload them to Millers Lab (if it is a small order we combine it with one or more other order). We primarily use Miller's online ordering software. We used to use Labprints and that is the program we prefer, but Labprints has not updated all the options Millers offers in two years, so it is pretty out of date. All of it is very quick and easy. We tend to send orders to Millers a few times a week, depending on how busy we are. Right now is a little slower for us, so we are only sending about two orders a week. We get the orders back from Millers in about a day or two. If they are local customers that ordered through us we call them when the order is ready and they set up a time to pick it up. If it was ordered through Collages.net or they requested us to mail it, I package them. I go to the post office about once a week to mail them. I do have a postage scale, so smaller orders we just weigh and stamp and mail from here. Adam tends to wait until he has several orders then gather them all at once, retouch them, then put them in the orders folder on my computer. Doing several orders at once makes it go very fast because you are doing the same thing several times. We tell people it will take 2 to 3 weeks to receive their order, but they usually receive them faster. During the holiday rush we actually were getting most orders out in about a week or sometimes less.