Photography eCommerce Websites
We built our first website to facilitate photo sales in 2000 and we’ve never looked back. Since then, we’ve helped millions of customers find their photos online, executed over 14 million transactions, and processed more than $700 million dollars in orders for our clients. If you need to sell photos online, we are the experts.
Velocity Squared has worked with high-volume event photographers from California to New York and across many markets — sports photography, school portraits, commencements, weddings, and more — to develop retail web sites that address the unique needs of package-based photo sales before, during, and after the event.
A Custom Experience for Individual Purchasers
With nearly two decades of experience in custom software development projects of all sizes, we pride ourselves in building custom solutions perfectly tailored to your workflow and business needs. Our team has a winning history of building solutions that either integrate with existing systems or those that are new and entirely standalone. We value long-term relationships with our clients and have the experience to know how to get the most out of your budget.
Offer Management
Another challenge with selling photos online is the range of complexity in packages and pricing. For example, photographers generally like to entice the customer to buy more photos through price breaks at larger packages.
Additional complexity is encountered when the offer and pricing change by event or by other factors such as geography. We’ve built intuitive interfaces to help simplify the management of the offer catalog. Offers can be configured with default copy and pricing that can be overridden on an event-by-event basis. Segmenting offers can be complicated, but our solution provides massive amounts of flexibility in an easy-to-use interface.
We facilitated $100 Million in sales in 2017.
Digital Rendering
Another aspect of photography ecommerce sites is being able to show certain products with the customer’s photo included, whether the product is a three image frame or a Facebook cover photo. We’ve created systems that allow photographers to make their products stand out with custom borders or overlays. The final version of the image is rendered either for the customer to download or to be sent to print.
Order Fulfillment
Over the years, we’ve integrated our eCommerce solutions with multiple vendors to fulfill orders. Where possible, we have fully automated API integrations with orders being sent to the vendor within minutes of the order being placed. We’ve even handled challenges such as photo retouching or enhancements being applied to the photo prior to the final product being created. For digital downloads, we’ve created custom solutions that allow the customer to download their image from the cloud at their leisure.
Optimization & A/B Testing
The extreme seasonality of the event photography business makes A/B testing of different ideas a necessity. Many of the new ideas that might improve conversion rates or order averages need to be vetted prior to going live. We’ve integrated with a number of different A/B testing providers over the years and we’ve even created our own A/B test runner within the offer management portion of websites to ensure the most effective efforts are implemented, leading to maximized sales.
Marketing Campaigns
Having photos of a customer is only worthwhile if they view them on the website. Over the years, we’ve built custom marketing campaigns as well as integrated with partners like MailChimp, SilverPop, and Twillio, to send marketing messages to customers that lead them to view their photos and packages for purchase. Each photo event can have a custom message and delivery time, and tracking of open rates and click rates happens automatically. Follow up messages can be targeted only to people who haven’t ordered, and special one-off messages for things like holiday sales can be created and targeted across the entire library of events. In the last 5 years, we’ve facilitated over 200 million marketing messages.
In the last 5 years, we’ve facilitated over 200 Million marketing messages.
Key Features
- Multi-tenant Systems
- Production Design and Visualization Tools; Custom Layout Fulfillment
- Digital Downloads, CD/DVD, and traditional print fulfillment
- Third-Party Lab/Fulfillment Integrations
- Payment Integrations
- Automated Image Retouching
- Card Abandonment Marketing
- Image Security
Technologies and Skills
- Microsoft ASP.NET MVC (C#)
- Vue.js
- Microsoft SQL Server
- High Availability
- Third-Party Integration: Address Validation, Sales Tax Processing, etc.
- Apple Pay, PayPal, Authorize.Net
- Azure: CDN, Blob Storage, Compute
"We had a need for a custom app in our industrial business. The team at Velocity Squared helped us design, develop, and implement that solution with great success. Over the years, they have been incredibly flexible and adapted with us as we continued to enhance and make changes. My expectations often border on absurd, and these folks pull it off. If only all business relationships were so refreshingly easy"