Start Selling Images With WordPress in Under 10 Minutes (WordCamp Philly, 2015)
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Slides from my session at the 2015 WordCamp Philly on June 13, 2015. https://philly.wordcamp.org/2015/ What’s the most efficient way to sell images with WordPress? How do we reduce the use of external ecommerce systems for selling photos? See the differences between popular ecommerce plugins, their strengths and weaknesses. See what it takes to convert multi-system users into a purely WordPress system.
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Start Selling Images With WordPress in Under 10 Minutes (WordCamp Philly, 2015)
- 1. Start Selling Images With WordPress in under 10 minutes
- 11. “Everybody has their own specific wants and needs, and there are a lot of great systems out there for everything that you can imagine, but not one of them is perfect for every use case.” - Pippin Williamson, Apply Filters Ep. 38
- 14. Platform/Extension vs Single Plugin
- 15. Platform/Extension • Less core functions • Easier for developers • Pick and choose
- 16. Single Plugin • All functions the end user wants • No need to find extensions for added functions • Still easy to customize
- 17. Target Market
- 18. Community
- 31. Talk about Create products that answer the questions your target market asks. Offer
- 32. Community & Blog Wrangler at Photocrati scott@photocrati.com photocrati.com nextgen-gallery.com Photographer scottwyden.com Start Selling Images With WordPress In Under 10 Minutes … starting now
Editor's Notes
- Colby Brown is a landscape and humanitarian photographer who travels the world, documenting it, and helping people in need.
- Colby has traveled to Iceland to teach workshops I think more than 9 times already. Every place he travels he walks away with stunning photographs to sell to clients, and to aid in selling his future workshops.
- Like many other photographers, Colby uses SmugMug for his photographs. But also like many other photographers, he combines his use of SmugMug with WordPress. Meaning, his main website runs 100% on WordPress, and then in the menu he links to his galleries on SmugMug.
- Colby is using the X Theme, which is growing in popularity among end users. The website is bright, clear and big and bold. It responds nicely on mobile devices, and his homepage has a gorgeous slideshow showcasing his best photographs.
- Colby is using NextGEN Pro to display his sample photographs from workshops and to help sell workshops in the future. NextGEN Pro has become part of his social proof.
- He is also using NextGEN Pro within his blog posts of gear reviews.
- But he is still using SmugMug for his portfolio and to sell his photographs. So the question becomes why?
- What makes SmugMug so attractive is the feature set and ease of use for its end users and target market. Namely photographers. For $300 a year photographers get an entire website designed for them with the ability to upload unlimited high resolution photographs and sell them with print labs fully integrated. SmugMug makes displaying and selling photographs a no brainer. So why are photographers also using WordPress at the same time?
- To really understand why so many photographers and visual artists use SmugMug or similar type platforms over a WordPress plugin, it is important to understand fundamental differences between the various plugin options.
- “Everybody has their own specific wants and needs, and there are a lot of great systems out there for everything that you can imagine, but not one of them is perfect for every use case.” Pippin Williamson of Easy Digital Downloads said that on his podcast Apply Filters in episode 38 and I think it is a very intelligent and true quote.
- Last time I searched the WordPress directory for the keyword “ecommerce” there was over 700 plugins. How many of those are designed for general ecommerce use? Like for selling shirts and bags. How many of those are designed for selling images? Lets break that down even more. How many of those are designed to display images or manage images in any way? If you go through all 700+ plugins you’ll likely find a handful designed specifically for images. Most likely the solution you will want is dictated by the target market.
- Another difference between many of the plugins is the business model. Many of the popular ecommerce plugins are a freemium model where the core plugin is free and added functionality will cost money. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Sell Media and Exchange are great examples of this. Others are a premium model where you simply purchase the plugin for any use at all. Sunshine Photo Cart, ProPhoto Proofing and NextGEN Pro are examples of this. You might argue NextGEN Pro falls under freemium, but the ecommerce aspect is only available in NextGEN Pro. Of course then there is 100% free model, like PhotoPress. There is not necessarily a downside to either method. But your target market can dictate a preferred business model.
- Next up is the platform/extension model vs the single plugin model. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Sell Media, PhotoPress and Exchange all fall under the platform/extension model.
- The platform/extension model is more commonly used and beneficial for developers as many of the time developers want simpler code with less functions, easier to create their own custom functions and also to pick and choose which extensions to add. Module based plugins fall under this category as well. A popular non ecommerce plugin that uses modules is Jetpack made by the Automattic team.
- The single plugin model, in a way is the opposite. This is designed for the end user in mind. Where all the functionality that the end user will utilize in their workflow is included within the plugin. There is no reason to add more extensions as it’s all included. However, that doesn’t mean extensions are cut off. In fact, many single formatted plugins still have extensions available by third parties. NextGEN Gallery is an example of that. Knowing that, single plugins are also easy to customize.
- The common trend within the last few items is target market. Plugins designed for ecommerce may not be best suited for selling images, whereas plugins designed for images may not be best for selling t-shirts. For example, NextGEN comes out of a market for photographers, so it appeals less to the WordPress developer community who prefer simple over more features, and want to write their own customizations. However, it appeals to the end users, being photographers and other advanced imaging professionals. So determining the target market of the website should help narrow down the best choice for selling images on a WordPress website.
- As I talk about a few ecommerce plugins, I want to point out that each has its own flaws in their own respective areas. Not every plugin is right for every task, or every target market. It is important to keep in mind that the WordPress community is just that, a community. So if you see something you believe can be improved, reach out to those developers with that feedback. Don’t be negative, but rather be helpful. As developers, be willing to hear that feedback and roll with it.
- WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress ecommerce plugin, for so many reasons and has over 1 million users. It is an amazing and feature rich ecommerce plugin that is designed to handle nearly any ecommerce task you throw at it. As you may have guessed, WooCommerce is designed as an ecommerce plugin for general use. But when coupled with the photography extension and product grouping plugin, users are able to create collections of photographs to sell on her website.
- Adding the PayPal Express and Stripe extensions means users can accept credit cards and PayPal efficiently. WooCommerce has the ability to sell physical products as well as digital downloads. While it may not have a gallery management system built-in, the photography extension’s collections feature makes it fairly simple to sell multiple photographs with similar pricing. I know a few photographers who are using WooCommerce and are happy. However, they rarely change what’s available for sale due to the amount of work it takes to do so, which in turn takes time away from making photographs.
- iThemes Exchange is like WooCommerce as its a feature rich ecommerce plugin. iThemes offers a pro extensions bundle so you can utilize all their extensions at one annual price. Also like WooCommerce, it has the ability to sell physical and digital products. So you can sell prints and image downloads. However, there are no image specific extensions so pricing is limited to per product.
- I personally use Easy Digital Downloads on my website to sell my ebooks and Adobe Lightroom presets. I love the simplicity of the plugin for that purpose and I have to give Pippin and his team so much credit for keeping the plugin so simple and so functional at the same time. Easy Digital Downloads is another plugin designed for general ecommerce, and really digital downloads specifically. With a couple extensions physical products can be sold and watermarking of images is possible. However, there is no bulk image grouping feature like is possible with the WooCommerce photography extension.
- GraphPaperPress is a popular theme company among the photo industry and Sell Media is their ecommerce plugin. Being designed for images, this is a good example of a target market oriented plugin. Sell Media offers a price group feature that can easily be adopted to bulk images. The plugin is also an extension model so you can offer physical prints, watermark images and many other features with additional plugin extensions. If you need a simple way to sell images of any kind, then Sell Media is a great plugin to look at.
- ProPhoto is another popular theme development company in the photography space. In fact, many of the photographers in my local networking group use their themes. ProPhoto recently launched an ecommerce plugin called Proofing. As you may have guessed, this is extremely targeted towards photographers. The plugin is featured with pricelists, print sales, digital downloads and proofing. The major drawback unfortunately is the requirement of using the ProPhoto theme and its gallery system. I have not been able to test this fully as I don’t use the ProPhoto theme. But please know it’s out there.
- My friend Peter Adams is the author of WordPress for Photographers and also a co-manager (alongside me) of the WordPress for Photographers Google Plus Community & Facebook Group. PhotoPress is designed more for developers as there is very little as far as user interface. You use the default [gallery] shortcode from WordPress, add desired PhotoPress parameters and then you have your ecommerce system. Peter has made the plugin extremely simple, which means you also have to price each image individually.
- Sunshine Photo Cart has been around for a couple years. It is designed 100% with photographers in mind, and also happens to originally be a fork of Easy Digital Downloads. The developer added many image centric modifications. It is powerful, but there is one unfortunate limitation where galleries can only be private. That means you can use it for proofing and ecommerce, but not for public galleries at all.
- Then comes NextGEN Gallery, which has over 1.3 million users. It is packed with features like watermarking, backups, resizing for front end display and many more image centric features. There is even an Adobe Lightroom plugin that allows for seamless offline management and publishing. If you recall I mentioned that some developers feel an image centric plugin like NextGEN is too feature rich. For some developers that may be true, but for the target market it is exactly what they want. NextGEN has its own gallery management system outside the Media Library. Some developers dislike that. Photographers don’t mind at all. NextGEN Gallery is designed for advanced imaging users who work with hundreds and thousands of images regularly.
- But NextGEN Gallery is not an ecommerce plugin. That is where NextGEN Pro comes in. Remember I mentioned the extension and single plugin model? NextGEN Pro is a single plugin that sits on top of NextGEN Gallery. All the ecommerce functionality is built into the one plugin. The plugin allows users to manage multiple pricelists, assign them to specific galleries and override individual images. PayPal Standard, Express, Stripe and even Check payments are included. The backup system of NextGEN Gallery means users can display web optimized images on the front end and sell the full resolution on the backend. They can even use the proofing option to determine which images their clients want to be edited.
- NextGEN Pro is designed for a target market, which means it’s incredible for selling images. But it’s not perfect. It doesn’t have robust tax and shipping features like the other plugins… yet. It doesn’t have the incredible selection of extensions that the others do. But then again, it’s not designed for general ecommerce use.
- So how do we, as WordPress consultants, developers and users, convince other users to stop mixing their WordPress site with a SmugMug site (or similar)? WordPress needs to offer features that are competitive with those services. We’re seeing WordPress developers move in this direction with either an ecommerce to imaging approach or an image centric approach. In the end, offering an ideal solution for photographers is how we convert those photographers from a multi-solution to WordPress alone.
- Talk about, create and offer products that answer the questions your target market asks. Make it easy for users. Give them the features they want, without making them do much research. And make it work. That is what is driving photographers like Colby Brown to migrate from other photo systems to WordPress.
- My name is Scott Wyden Kivowitz and I am the Community & Blog Wrangler at Photocrati & NextGEN Gallery. I am a photographer, a blogger and work with many photographers on improving their WordPress websites. As someone that is happy to offer advice whenever I can, I am so honored to share what I’ve learned with you, and now I’d love to show how you can set up a site to sell images in under 10 minutes.