Website vs. Storefront Site

I'm finding myself doing more and more sporting/competition events each year and currently I have a website that showcases my work, and then a Zenfolio site for customers to download/purchase photos.

At the moment my Zenfolio site is a Premium account with costs $140/yr. My website costs me $11.99/mo + $19.99 for Site Backup Pro. So in total, $163.87/yr. So between the two sites, over $300/yr.

For those of you who sell a decent amount of images via a website, what are you doing/using?

I am not a huge fan of the Zenfolio premium package interface that clients use at the photos. It's bulky, boring, and takes a little more effort from the client to view photos than I would like.

$10/month for ShootProof and run the site under VPS Hybrid (WiredTree) for $40/month. I run five sites under the package so speed is a must (two is e-commerce aside from my photography sites).

just started using nextgen gallery word press plug-in. haven't' worked all the kinks out, but it is 80 bucks for the right to use the software for a year and it has ecommerce built in. You can choose to renew every year and always have the latest software, or after 11.9 months just keep using the latest version until it dies.

I use both Smugmug and Shootproof. I'm sure there a less expensive options but I have so many photos on my Smugmug site I'm afraid to move.

Has anyone looked at mylio.com. It seemed pretty interesting when I looked at it over the weekend. There is a free trial for 1000 picture storage with std plan of $100 annually for 100K pix and there is an advanced level and I don't remember the price of that.


Al

Hybrid AWD wrote in post #17281075
I'm finding myself doing more and more sporting/competition events each year and currently I have a website that showcases my work, and then a Zenfolio site for customers to download/purchase photos.

At the moment my Zenfolio site is a Premium account with costs $140/yr. My website costs me $11.99/mo + $19.99 for Site Backup Pro. So in total, $163.87/yr. So between the two sites, over $300/yr.

For those of you who sell a decent amount of images via a website, what are you doing/using?

I am not a huge fan of the Zenfolio premium package interface that clients use at the photos. It's bulky, boring, and takes a little more effort from the client to view photos than I would like.

You can simplify the customer experience a lot by creating your own custom bundled products - i.e. print + frame + mounting as one item.