Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
UPDATE: February 2012 – I’ve long since disabled the Fotomoto plugin as part of general redesigning – it never generated a single penny anyway! Ah well.
A few photoblogs I visit, such as Daily Dose of Imagery and Chromasia, have recently added the Fotomoto toolbar to their front page and seeing as it’s pretty damn good, so have I. It’s currently free and requires nothing but plopping the Javascript into the HTML code for your photoblog installation. There’s also a little bit of CSS customisation code if you need to tweak it, which you probably will if you don’t want large blue underlined links spoiling your design!
Then you set the prices for every conceivable permutation of print, select which photos you don’t want to sell for any reason, and you’re done. Fotomoto take 15% of any sale, and you automatically get sent a cheque every time you accumulate over $200 in profit (although if you haven’t made that much you can still request an early payment). The toolbar also allows people to send e-cards of any image for free. Finally, it tracks what images have been bought as prints or sent as e-cards, which you can check out when you log into their site.
All in all, there doesn’t seem to be a downside really, as it’s a completely free service to sign up to with Fotomoto’s 15% commission only being taken when you actually make a sale. Hopefully it will stay that way – although there’s a slightly ambiguous line in the Quick Start documentation:
Thereʼs no subscription fee for using the beta version of Fotomoto. This means that adding Fotomoto to your site is free!
Will they start to charge a subscription fee once it’s out of beta?
The only other caveat is that they currently only accept US Dollars and the printing service they use is in North California. At present I’m not sure what the standard delivery charges are around the world* so that might discourage UK or EU customers – although they can always just get in touch directly and I can order from my UK printer.
Having said that, according to the Mint statistics for my site currently 26.45% of my visitors are from the US and 16.29% are from good old Blighty, so I suppose it makes financial sense to appeal to the largest market…
Anyway, to celebrate the incredible ease of buying a print I’m offering 50% off all prints for the next month – just use this code at the checkout: 0A0D5C
Enjoy!