Turn your passion into a business
The Zenfolio Premium plan offers photographers a flexible e-commerce platform that allows selling of prints and other products while maintaining the clean and easy to use presentation.
Selling Overview
The Zenfolio e-commerce platform is designed for photographers providing them with flexibility and features to get from shooting to selling in as little time as possible. The platform allows to:
- Sell products from Zenfolio fulfillment partners
- Define and sell digital products available for download
- Sell your own custom products and fulfill them directly
- Create multiple price lists and assign them selectively to galleries or individual photos
- Review and approve orders before they are sent for fulfillment, including replacing photos with high resolution edited files
- Use coupons to promote your business
- View detailed reports of your selling activities
Detailed information about the selling process is explained in the following sections.
Selling products fulfilled by Zenfolio partners
Zenfolio fulfillment partners offer a variety of prints, photo products, and services including a variety of print sizes, frames, mounting and finishing options, apparel, and gifts. You can select products you would like to offer for sale, set the price, and Zenfolio will take care of the entire ordering process including:
- Taking the order
- Collecting payment for the order
- Fulfilling the order and shipping it directly to the client
- Providing customer services and handling all other post-ordering requests from your clients
- Paying out your profits upon request
- Providing detailed reports for any time period
When an order is ready for fulfillment, Zenfolio will send your original file for printing. Sending originals ensures that the lab always has the highest quality files to achieve the best print results. Your files are sent exactly as uploaded, with no watermarks you might have assigned. We also supply the lab with cropping information, and any additional services selected including color correction. Our fulfillment partners will print the order and ship directly to the client. No invoice or pricing information is ever included in the package.
Selling Digital Products
The ability to define, price, and offer for sale almost any digital
product based on your photographs is part of the selling capabilities
offered by Zenfolio.
You specify which digital products you offer for sale, select standard
or custom license terms to go with them, and set prices. Customers can
add these products to a Shopping Cart, and download them immediately
after completing the checkout. For digital products Zenfolio will:
- Take the order and collect payment
- Store downloadable files for 30 days
- Enable customers to download purchased images individually or in a batch
- Send e-mail notifications to all parties
- Provide detailed reports
Learn more about selling digital products by downloading the PDF document below:
Guide to Digital Products on Zenfolio »
Fulfilling your own custom products
Zenfolio supports selling your own custom products. These are products you fulfill yourself by doing your own printing or using a local lab.
For custom products, Zenfolio provides an integrated Shopping Cart which allows you to use your own PayPal account so payment is sent directly to you. You can then fulfill the order and provide customer support.
Setting up custom products involves a few extra steps. First, you need to specify your selling preferences such as tax collection and messaging to your customers. You will also need to setup shipping methods and shipping charges. You will also specify the e-mail address of your PayPal account to be used for collecting payments.
Then, you will setup your custom products by writing product descriptions, uploading product images, defining shipping preferences, and specifying resolution and aspect ratio.
The last step is adding your custom products to a price list. During the checkout process, customers will be informed that products are fulfilled by you directly. When an order is placed for a custom product, you will be notified by e-mail, and the order will be listed under “Pending Orders”. You are responsible for fulfilling the order and communicating with your customers.
You may also choose to combine both types of products in your price list: products from Zenfolio partners and your own custom products. The Shopping Cart will correctly separate the products into separate orders during the checkout.
Selling Globally
You can sell products fulfilled by Zenfolio partners in 4 currencies: United States Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Pound Sterling, and Euros. Mpix lab, our fulfillment partner in the United States offers a variety of prints and mounting services, and ships them to US and Canada. Photobox lab, located in the United Kingdom, ships prints and photo products worldwide. Imagine Your Photos (IYP) and fotoflōt, offering photo gifts and a unique way to display photos, are located in the US and ship worldwide.
You can sell your custom products in the following currencies: Australian Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Euros, Pounds Sterling, Yen, U.S. Dollars, New Zealand Dollar, Swiss Franc, Hong Kong Dollar, Singapore Dollar, Swedish Krona, Danish Krone, Polish Zloty, Norwegian Krone, Hungarian Forint, Czech Koruna, Israeli Shekel, Mexican Peso.
Fees
In addition to the yearly subscription fee, there is a per-order service fee as shown in the table below:
Note that for orders fulfilled by Zenfolio partners, the service fee is taken only from the profit earned, not from the total order amount which is what most other service providers do.
Price Lists
Price lists define products offered for sale and their prices.
You can create any number of price lists and assign them selectively to galleries or individual photos. With multiple price lists you can charge different amounts for different type of work. For example, you can have a special “at cost” price list and assign it to your family photos, while setting higher prices to your “for profit” work.
The creation of a price list starts with selecting products that will be offered for sale. You can easily add all products from the list offered by our fulfillment partners, or pick and choose desired products. Some products include additional services, such as frames, mounting, or coating. After the desired products are added to the price list you can select which services will be offered to your customers and at what prices.
You will then set a markup or profit for each product. Zenfolio gives you the ultimate flexibility in pricing the products that you will be offering for sale. You can set prices as a batch operation, using a formula, or individually for each product.
Using a formula you can quickly price all products offered for sale using a combination of a fixed and percentage markup. The formula used for setting the selling price looks like this:
The base price is the cost of a product charged by fulfillment partner and cannot be changed. The final selling price is set by specifying the fixed markup and/or the percentage markup. The formula is used to quickly set the selling price for all items in your price list. You can also specify an option to round the prices to make them look more appealing.
The example below illustrates how the pricing with formula works.
| 4 x 6 Print | 8 x 10 Print | |
|---|---|---|
| Base Price | $0.19 | $2.00 |
| Fixed Markup | $4.00 | $10.00 |
| % over Base Price | 100% | 400% |
| Selling Price | $4.38 | $20.00 |
| Gross Profit | $4.19 | $18.00 |
| Zenfolio fee (12%) | $0.50 | $2.16 |
| Photographer Net Profit | $3.69 | $15.84 |
If you prefer to set prices directly, you can override the formula. In that case you will specify the final selling price, and the calculated profit will be shown, or specify the desired net profit, and the final selling price will be calculated.
In addition to specifying prices for prints, you will need to specify prices for additional services, such as framing, mounting, coating, etc.
Price lists also allow you to configure which additional options are available to your customers during the checkout. You can choose whether your customers can change cropping, color conversion, or select color correction. For example, if you always crop your photos perfectly for print sizes offered for sale, you would not allow your customers to change cropping.
After creating price lists you will need to assign them to galleries or photos. Price lists can be “inherited” by nested items from their parent groups or galleries for extra convenience, and you can also override price list assignment. For example, you can assign one master price list to the “root” level, which will apply to all of your galleries, but override the prices for special selection of your most successful photos.
When visitors to your galleries click the Add to Cart button, they will see products offered for sale as specified in the price list assigned to the selected gallery or photograph.
Order Approval
For each price list you can specify whether orders are sent to fulfillment partner automatically, or whether they will be reviewed and approved by you first. Approving orders gives you ability to fine-tune the images before the order gets submitted to the lab. You can replace customer-selected photos with high-resolution or properly cropped ones. You can also adjust cropping to make sure the final product is perfectly aligned with your artistic intentions.
During the order process, your customers will be notified that the order will be approved prior to printing. You will then get an e-mail notification prompting you to review and approve the order.
It is important to approve submitted orders quickly so clients do not need to wait long for orders to be fulfilled.
Getting Paid
When you earn profits from selling, the proceeds are deposited into your Zenfolio account.
At any time you can click the Request Payment button located on the Account Statement page, and request payment via bank check or Paypal. Checks will be sent within 5 business days. There is a $3 fee charged for each check.
There are no fees for payments sent through Paypal from Zenfolio nor from PayPal.
The US law requires us to provide the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with information on anyone with earnings in excess of $600. That is the reason we request US Tax Applicability information and, if applicable, your Tax Identification number prior to submitting a payout request.
All remaining earnings may be mailed to you at the end of each year to zero-out your account.
Zenfolio will also send you a 1099-MISC form at the end of the year if your total payouts were over $600.
Sales Tax
Sales tax is collected on orders fulfilled by our partners and shipped to the state of California in the USA. International customers are responsible for all duty taxes and V.A.T. that may be added to the cost of the order upon receipt.
Reports
Zenfolio provides a variety of detailed reports for tracking sales. In addition to a summary page, you can break down the information by date range, orders, products, customers, coupons, and even top selling photos. You can also easily find past orders in case you have to provide support for your customers. All transactions are also recorded and can be viewed in your Account Statement.
Using Coupons
The Zenfolio Premium plan includes the ability to create coupons and use them as a promotional tool to distribute among your potential customers. Amount-based coupons subtract the discount amount from the order total. Percentage-based coupons subtract discounts as a percentage of order total (shipping and taxes excluded). Finally, base-cost coupons allow customers to order products at their base cost, bypassing any markup you may have added.
You can also specify the coupon expiration policy, such as after a certain number of uses, or a certain date. Customers with coupons will be able to redeem them during the checkout process.