Pixiq

I don't write reviews.  I never have.  What I'm comfortable with is telling stories, and this is the story of a very tired photographer that was spending all his time packaging, ordering cardboard, matting, printing, labeling, signing, did I say ordering supplies?  I think I did. This is BeckermanPhoto.com which I began in 1999.  My idea was to sell quality prints at a reasonable price.  At the time, it was a new idea.  After about ten years business picked up to the extent that I dreaded getting orders.  The dilemma was that if I raised prices, then there were no sales.   At first I was selling darkroom prints from my little New York apartment.

I would wait for several orders to arrive, and then wheel out a table that opened, mix chemicals and all that.  It was all pretty crazy, and I was working full-time back then.  I kept experimenting with inkjets for black and white photography and when the Epson 4800 arrived, and Crane/Museo Silver Rag was introduced - I was set.  Good-bye to the Zone VI enlarger and the constant smell of Dektol and Fixer in the house.

Every year, print sales increased.  

Last Christmas, it dawned on me that my online store for selling my black and white prints, had reached a point where I didn't take pictures any longer.  The longest walk I took was with packages to be dropped off at the Fedex store.  And I was in a rut.

Look, ruts come and go in any creative business.  But to be in a rut because I was dealing with a large number of orders - somehow that didn't seem to be the proper use of my skills.

I believe it was a few years ago that the founder of Fotomoto (I think he was the founder) approached me with their idea of offering a way to easily integrate printing and packaging with existing websites, including (for example my own Wordpress store). 

At the time of this writing, I must be clear: Fotomoto works with Wordpress, which is what I'm running, but it does not work if your site is hosted by Wordpress (i.e. you have an address like my-great-site.wordpress.com)

As 2011 began, I remembered Fotomoto.com, read through their site, and was impressed.  The fellow who had contacted me had actually done it.

You probably want to know how it works. I'm not going to repeat what's on their site.I downloaded the Fotomoto widget.  Uploaded it as I would any widget to the plugin directory.  Plugged a unique number into the plugin.  I went back to Fotomoto site where I could control what should pop up where.  In other words, you don't usually want the Fotomoto box to popup over say a graphic, or a thumbnail. 

There may be pages you don't want it to popup on at all.  This can all be controlled.

You then get into what you want to sell, pricing, etc.  Again, I don't want to repeat what you can find on their site other than to say that it is very well thought out.  What that means is that if I were doing it - that's what I'd do.

It is a program that is dedicated to photographers and thinks like photographers.  For example:

Fotomoto has something called Auto Pickup. 

I should've said this at the outset - they are not storing your high resolution files.  They are not hosting your web site.  Their code is scanning your site looking for images that according to your setup are for sale.  And when a sale is made, they can pickup the files from where you have the high resolution stored via FTP or SFTP.

What happens in a typical case is this: they read the web image and determine it's aspect ratio.  In my own case, I have three ratios, 2/3, 4/5 (from my old view camera shots), and 1/1 (or square, from my medium format negatives).

*This was the most time-consuming part of the process for me.  My web images were not all cropped to the exact ratio of the print.  I use Lightroom for just about everything.  I spent several days going through every image for sale.  I created an export preset for the web shot and one for the high resolution file.  In short I have about 300 images in my store and I went through each and every one of them, and made sure that the web image was either 2/3, 4/5 or square.  I then uploaded all the high-resolution images.

So when the user presses Buy Print, THE FOTOMOTO BOX POPS UP and if the image is in the 2/3 ratio, the sizes that you offer will be 4 x 6, 8 x 12, etc.  You have complete control over which sizes are offered, both at a global level and at a single print level.

You also have complete control over pricing, at a global level or a print level.  I have been using global levels for everything.

They offer Premium Prints (C-Prints), Fine Art Prints (high-end inkjets) and Canvas.  I have never liked the Canvas option for b&w so I just don't show that.  And I don't think that the Ultrasmooth Epson paper works for all b&w images, so I don't currently offer the Fine Art option.

There were a few nice surprises.  I realized that they would print and package and take credit cards (no Amex at this point); and no Paypal. 

My previous cart was home made and used Paypal.  I could offer discounts, because I was the programmer, but it wasn't built into the Paypal system.  FotoMoto offers online coupons as a way of giving customers an incentive.

You can set when the coupon expires, how many times it can be used etc.  Much more sophisticated than anything I could do without a lot of programming.

That wasn't the surprise.  The surprise was that one day after I had a discount offered, I looked at my Fotomoto account and saw that a large order had been cancelled.  The Fotomoto dashboard shows the process from the initial order, through print confirmed, to printing, to shipped.  In this case I saw that a large order had been cancelled.

Hmmm.  What was that about.  I emailed the customer and found out that they had a problem understanding how to use the coupon code.  A few seconds later, I received an email from a Fotomoto support person (sorry - forgot who it was) telling me that they were on the phone with the customer, talking them through it.

Now - that's something that in the past I would've been doing.  The order went through.  I suggested that they put up a page explaining how to use the Discount Coupon and a few days later, I had that page, with a link to it from my site.  Nobody has had a problem since.

Premium prints are C-prints.  Glossy, Lustre and Metallic. 

Fine Art prints are done on various inkjet papers.  The top of the line Ultrasmooth is okay, but not great for black and white (though some will say this is a matter of taste).  But it is not in the style of either the Crane/Museo Silver Rag or the Epson Exhibition F Gloss paper I had been using which are very very close to the look of the Ilford Gallerie paper I used in the darkroom. 

It's true that it has a nice "feel" or hand - but it doesn't have the dynamic range of the previous papers I've mentioned.  Still, it depends on the print.  I suggested a paper change and they are open to it though it isn't something that will be done overnight.

So I simply removed the Fine Art offering and stuck with Premium Lustre which has been fine for customers.  It's just not a double-weight paper. 

But the other surprise was the turnaround time for the C-Prints..  An order comes in.  You confirm that the correct high resolution file has been picked (in some cases).  I'm not sure, why sometimes I'm asked to confirm and sometimes not.

At any rate, you confirm.  Next thing you know the thing is printing.

Turnaround time for a small Premium order might be one day or two from confirmation to shipment.  It used to take me between two and three weeks to get orders out.  Their Fine Art prints take longer (as you'd expect with high-end inkjet) but generally under a week.

Yes, you can order prints at cost sent to yourself.

Yes, people want to know if there's a way to do a signature.  There is only one way to do that, and it is on their todo list.  The user chooses to have the prints signed (in my view they may pay extra for that) and the prints are sent to you, along with a label addressed to the customer.  So it is going to be extra work, since you'll need to unpackage, sign, put it all back together, and stick the customer's label on.

But frankly, I can't think of any other way to do it.

Finally, I was nervous about one thing.  I'm offering 30 x 45 prints and what if the high resolution file wasn't up to a print of that size.

In the past what I would do is run it through my interpolation program and create a file with the necessary resolution.

So, when the first order came in for a 30 x 45, I immediately received an email from Fotomoto showing the order and in nice big red letters a note saying that the resolution for this print wasn't high enough, with a suggested resolution.

Great. 

I work the file up (I happen to use ProZoom) so that it is 240 dpi at that size and upload it.  I could have setup things differently so that if I had a file for that size it would find it, but I haven't done that yet.

And so - that's my Fotomoto story.  Have orders dropped off since I began?  No.  If anything they've increased.  January is a slow time, and I won't really know all the ins and outs of this for a few months, but yes, you are reading the review of a very happy camper who now has time to take pictures, or do write-ups like this one.

My site, in case you want to see how it's been implemented is: www.BeckermanPhoto.com

But for the real low-down, visit www.Fotomoto.com

P.S.  I sent this to Fotomoto, so that they could fact check it.  Frankly, the only thing that concerned them was that this was all so positive readers might think I was paid to write it. 

No.  The truth is, I generally only spend the time to do a write-up like this for a company or product that I actually use, like and want to see grow.  The only negative thing that I can possibly say about Fotomoto is that I would love it if they'd offer either Crane/Museo Silver Rag or Epson Exhibition Paper F.  But frankly, given the two day turnaround on the C-Prints - it's not as big an issue as I originally thought.

P.S.S. If you'd like to read a day-by-day account of my experience with Fotomoto, you can go to my Photoblog where I documented this in real time.  Just do a search for Fotomoto.

Steve Rosenbach

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Aaron Shepard

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mattbrooks123

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Dave Beckerman

Pixiq Expert

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Alice

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