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May 27, 2010

Introducing Featured Products, smarter coupons with shipping discounts, export to Animoto, five new Themes, and more…

One of the benefits of being a Zenfolio member is that our service keeps improving all the time. We carefully listen to your feedback and about every 2-3 months update the service with new and improved functionality.

We know many of you have been waiting patiently for the Packages functionality to arrive, so before you ask, the packages functionality is there, but you can't see it yet. It is buried deep in the code as we are not quite finished with the user interface for this big feature. We had to make a hard decision to postpone the final release of the packages so we can bring you several other new features that were ready to be released.

Featured Products

It is now possible for photographers to select a list of featured products that will appear directly on gallery or photo pages in the Visitor View. This feature vastly increases the exposure of products and pricing and encourages your visitors to purchase. The list of featured products can be configured for each price list (Premium feature). For Basic and Unlimited accounts, the Featured Products list displays a selection of popular products from our partner labs.

Increase sales with Coupons

The popular Coupons feature now has even more flexibility:

You can create coupons that can be applied to specific galleries, collections, or groups.

You can now provide your customers with shipping discounts in addition to the product discounts.

Coupons can be restricted to specified product types: Prints and Products fulfilled by our partner labs, Digital Downloads, Products that you fulfill yourself, or Packages (in the near future).

More pages for your web site

We added new types of built-in in pages for building your unique web site: the Guestbook Page, the Featured Galleries Page, and the Recently Added page. You can link to these pages from your site menu to streamline the navigation through your site and to make your home page clean and professional.

Add to Cart is renamed to Buy

By popular request, the 'Add to Cart' button is now called 'Buy' and is moved to be the first button in the top right corner of visitor pages, making it more prominent and actionable. Our studies confirmed that the new name generates better response from clients, leading to increased sales.

Price List Editing - Simplified

The redesigned price list editing interface makes it easier and faster to customize price lists by breaking tasks into separate logical pages. We added the option to turn off the Best Fit subcategory in the Add to Cart popup. This useful, but less known feature recommends products with a aspect ratio matching the selected image. However, when photographers carefully pre-configure products for specific image sizes, this option is not needed and now can be turned off.

Export to Animoto

You can now export your images to Animoto, a popular service that automatically creates beautiful and unique slideshows from your images.

Edit View Enhancements

We've made useful enhancements to the Edit View:

Added an indicator showing the number of selected images
It is now possible to assign a cover photo to a gallery/collection from any other gallery

New Themes

Five new Zenfolio themes and corresponding templates are added. These themes were created entirely using the Zenfolio Theme designer. You can use them as is, or use them as a starting point for creating your own unique themes.

New Gallery Layout

We added the new "Right to Left" Gallery Layout for Thumbnail pages of the Visitor view. The new layout is symmetrical to the current "Left to Right" layout and works great for displaying the list of Featured Products.

Custom Products – note to photographer

Customers can now add a note with instructions for the photographer when ordering custom products. Photographers refer to the note when reviewing orders, which allows addressing specific client's needs.