Print sales

Galleries → Selling → Products. Set what you sell and what you charge. Clients add photographs to a basket from inside the gallery and pay through your own Stripe account. Print sales are part of Studio.

You keep the margin. Meridian Photographers takes no commission, on prints or on anything else. Our part is the subscription; your sales are yours.

Before you start

1. Connect payments. In Settings → Settings, under Payments,

press Connect payments and follow Stripe's steps. Until this is done, galleries show no basket.

1. Leave ordering switched on. In the same screen, under **What your

clients can do, Prints and products can be ordered from a gallery** should be ticked. It is on unless you have turned it off.

Add a product

1. Go to Galleries → Selling → Products.
2. If this is your first product, give your price list a Name (for example

Standard) and press Create.

1. Press Add a product.
2. Fill in:

- Name — 8x10 print. - Type — Print, Canvas, Acrylic, Metal, Album, Frame or Digital file. - Description — optional, shown to the client, such as *Lustre finish, white border*. - What the lab charges you — optional, but needed to show your margin. - Size — type sizes like 8x10 or 24x36 and they are read as inches; add "cm" for metric, as in 20x30 cm. Leave it blank for something that is not a physical print. - What the client pays.

1. Leave Offer this to clients ticked and press Add product.

As you type the prices, the form shows what you keep after the lab cost (and GST, if you charge it). The Products screen shows the same for every line, which is the number that tells you the $40 8x10 is better business than the $220 canvas you assumed was the money-maker.

To stop selling something, press Retire beside it. Past orders keep it.

To sell the files themselves, see selling digital files.

Is the file big enough?

When a product has a size, each photograph is checked against it before the client can pay. If the file is too small to print that size sharply, the order is refused with the largest size it will carry, so a soft print never reaches the lab.

Prints, albums and frames need at least 150 dots per inch at that size. Canvas, acrylic and metal are held to 120 instead, because they are hung on a wall and looked at from across a room. So a file that will not make a sharp 16x20 print will often make a perfectly good canvas the same size.

Orientation is never a mismatch: a landscape photograph in a portrait frame is the same print turned round.

How big is that, really

Clients cannot picture 500 x 700mm. When they choose a size, each product with a size is drawn to scale against a three-seater sofa, so they can see what it will look like on the wall.

What the client does

1. In the gallery, they press the + button at the bottom-left of a

photograph and choose a product. They can add several photographs and products.

1. The basket shows the total and postage. They fill in Your name,

Email, Where to send it and, if they have one, a Discount code or a Gift voucher code (see gift vouchers).

1. They press Pay and order and pay on Stripe's secure page.

Postage

You set it. On Galleries → Selling → Products, in the Postage panel, type the Postage on each order and, if you like, the amount an order must reach to post free under Free on orders from, then press Save postage.

• Leave Free on orders from empty to always charge postage.
• Set postage to 0 for free postage on everything.

Orders

When a client pays for an order, you hear about it on the bell (New order), as long as your role lets you see money. See notifications.

Business → Orders shows every order, what was paid, what is owed to the lab and what you keep. Click an order to see its items and where to send it.

If a payment is reported twice, the order is only counted once.

Getting them printed

Choose your lab

On Galleries → Selling → Products, in the Your print lab panel, choose **Who prints your orders and press Save lab**. The list includes Atkins Pro Lab, Pixel Perfect Prolab, Queensberry, Bay Photo Lab, nPhoto and Another lab. The panel then tells you how orders reach that lab.

For these labs, orders are placed with the lab by hand: none of them has a way for us to send an order to them, so nothing is sent automatically. (If WHCC appears in the list, it is the exception: paid orders go to WHCC by themselves, and any that do not go through show under Orders.)

If WHCC prints your orders

WHCC is an American lab. It appears in the list only when there is a WHCC account to send through: either Meridian's, or your own. To use your own, ask your WHCC representative for an API key (it starts with sk_), paste it into Your WHCC account key in the Your print lab panel, and press **Save lab**. Orders are then placed on your WHCC account and WHCC bills you.

WHCC prints from its own catalogue, so each product you sell through WHCC needs a WHCC product code. Open the product on **Galleries → Selling → Products and fill in WHCC product code**: the product's name in WHCC's catalogue, then each of its options as option=choice, separated by spaces. For example:

photo-print size=8x10 photo_print=lustre_photo_print

WHCC asks for every option the product has, so list them all. WHCC can give you the names, or they are in WHCC's product catalogue for developers. A code that cannot be read is refused when you save the product.

An order goes to WHCC by itself only when every product in it has a code, the original photographs are still stored, and the delivery address has a street, town, state, postcode and country. Otherwise it is not sent, and it waits under To send on Business → Orders with the reason beside it, so you can send it yourself or fix the problem.

When WHCC takes an order, the order shows WHCC's order number. WHCC does not yet tell us when the prints are made or posted, so check progress in your WHCC account and record it here as usual.

If WHCC refuses an order, WHCC's reason shows beside it under To send. Before you send that order to WHCC yourself, check your WHCC account: if the reason says WHCC already has the order, it does, and sending it again would print it twice.

Sending an order to your lab

1. When an order is paid, it appears under To send at the top of Business → Orders.
2. Press Order sheet to download the order as a spreadsheet file with the

delivery address, products, quantities and your cost.

1. Send it to your lab the way you usually do, with the photographs (the order

page shows each item's photograph number).

1. Press Mark sent so it leaves the list.

When the prints are posted to the client, open the order and press **Mark as sent**, with a tracking number if you have one. See [tracking numbers](/shipping-tracking).

Discounts

See discount codes. They work on prints, on digital files, or on both. To email an offer after a gallery is delivered, see Selling after delivery in selling digital files.