Thanks for the feedback. I agree that many, if not most, people who sell sports action photos online don't delete the stinkers. I also agree that many prospective customers won't wade through the dreck to reach the few decent shots. I keep 40-90 photos from each game or match; averaging 55 or so. And the Exposure Manager site is easy to understand. So I don't think I'm losing customers that way.
I appreciate your suggestions for making more money, but I like to shoot what I feel like shooting. And I don't want the extra (non-photography) work of getting contracts and attending post-season banquets. For me this is more of a hobby that pays for itself.
It would be great to somehow get results of a survey of my customers and near customers, particularly the latter. All I can do is guess as to why they don't buy. My best guess is that they procrastinate. They say, "These are great pictures, and I'm going to buy some... But not today." And, of course, they eventually forget about it. Others have their own cameras and provide their own pictures. The worst of those (from my point of view) shoot the whole team and gift the pictures to parents and players.
Although this is getting a little better lately, as parent-shooters are staring to just put their photos online, not bothering to make prints. A few years ago they were making CDs for everyone.
Exposure Manager has an advanced account that costs more money, and I tried it for two years. You can capture email addresses when people visit your galleries and send targeted emails to them. EM's software can tell how many of these "email blast" messages are actually opened. I never got past 10 percent opened. So potential customers are deleting the messages unopened, or a spam filter is capturing them.
And every year someone had problems getting the site to recognize their email address. I gave up and went back to the standard account.
JeffreyG wrote in post #13308411
Try changing your business model. Shooting on speculation is a tough approach in a lot of markets. You have to somehow get the parents / athletes to know about your site, they have to maintain interest all the way home to the point they will bother logging in, and then they have to be willing to wade through all your shots to find their kid.
From what I've seen, most speculation shooters are not willing to cull bad shots hard enough or order the picture by player, which makes the customers work too hard.
I contact teams and only shoot once I have a contract to provide the team with a set package of materials that they can use for their banquet. I also sell online, but since these sales are above and beyond the contract I've already been paid and this is a nice extra. It's easier to direct parents to the website as well once they have seen what is available at the banquet.
Like you, I find that setting the individual photo prices high results in no sales, and that's from customers who even know what the material looks like. But still - You shoot over a month and gross only a couple hundred bucks - time to change the approach.
