My Online Shopping Cart

[christos]

I have received a good amount of e-mails regarding my online photography shopping cart so I figured it may be easier for me to write it out once in a post. I hope the moderators don’t mind.

I use Photo Cart by Pictures Pro for my entire online shopping cart that can be found here. Photo Cart runs on my own web host and is a one time purchase it is integrated with Pay Pal and from my understanding can be integrated with authorize.net as well.

The benefit that I have seen using Photo Cart is one, I don’t pay the high commissions that can reach up to 18% that other online fulfillment services carry. Two I’m in control of the files that get uploaded to my lab and three my bottom line has increased because of it.
Now I realize and agree with that any professional service a charge is usually associated with it. But I don’t produce such a high volume of reprints that I’m not able to keep up with. That is the reason I decided to go with Photo Cart.

Christos

[Photo-John]

Interesting. Can I integrate it with any gallery software or online print service that I happen to be using? I use Printroom for printing and fulfillment and I'd love to be able to integrate a shopping cart on my own Web site so that a customer doesn't actually have to leave my Web site. I know someone that wrote their own script to interface between their site and Printroom. But I'm not a programmer...

Thanks for posting this. I think it's a great post for this forum.

[christos]

John, I’m not a programmer either but I do have a background in technology. Photo Cart its self is a gallery that can be used to sell photographs to your clients, it even has an option to allow your clients to download high resolution digital files.

The way it works is rather simple, I upload all my images from an event to my cart and I e-mail my client the password. The client logs in and orders the prints they like and they check out via paypal. I receive two e-mails one from paypal informing me of a payment and one from photo cart informing me of an order. Once I login to photo cart the order is within the customer and order management sections.
What I do then is edit the selected images from the originals and upload them to my lab. I receive the prints and then mail them out to my clients.

I know the creator Tim is looking for a professional online lab that is willing to provide him with API’s. This will allow the ordering system to be totally integrated with a pro lab, as long as you are willing to allow the prints to be drop shipped directly to your customers without viewing them first. You can always call or e-mail Photo Cart and see if any additional customizations can me done specifically for you and your needs.

If you want to poke around login to the Photo Cart admin interface, it’s rather cool.

Chris

[Photo-John]

There's a lot more detail in that admin section than in the Printroom control panel. But what I'm really interested in is fulfillment. I don't actually even have my own Web site right now. I just use the Printroom pro system. And they handle all the money, printing, shipping - everything. When I had to do my own print orders and shipping, it would take me forever to complete an order. I need to keep it as simple as possible.