Photo Cart runs on your website hosting and just a one time purchase. No monthy
fees or commisions. Plus free upgrades!
Flexible image pricing
When setting up your sizes and prices you create “Price Groups”. These price
groups hold you set of pricing that you apply to galleries. The price groups allow
you to price galleries differently, so you can have one set of sizes and prices
for portraits, and another set of sizes & prices for weddings. There are no
limited to how many price groups you can create.
For you’re a la cart pricing, you create your sizes like 8X10, 5x7, etc… each
size has options like: Size name, price, taxable or not, additional shipping cost,
multiple image options (like select paper type), and quantity discounts for multiple
prints of the same image.
Also with your price groups you also add which packages to offer.
Packages
Photo Cart lets you offer packages as well. There are two types of packages:
“Traditional Print Packages” and “Custom Packages“.
Traditional print packages are packages where you can include for example: 1)
8x10, 2) 5x7, 8) wallets and you can select 2 poses. The customer will add the
package to their cart and select the slots where they want the image.
Custom packages are a bit different and flexible. These packages the customer
just selects the amount of images you set that come with the package. You can
also add options to the custom packages for things like collages, posters and
more. Custom packages can be used for (these are just examples):
- 5 images on a CD
- Select 20 images for a story book
- Select images of a collage
- Select 2 images for a poster and enter in your name and select a size.
These are just examples and are flexible so you can create your own options.
Also with packages, you can offer “Purchase this package and receive X% off of
a la carte pricing“. You can enter in the percentage of discount when creating
or editing packages.
Gallery items are items you can offer on a per gallery basis. This might be something
like “All image on a CD” or “DVD slideshow of all images”. With gallery items
the customer just adds to cart and there is no images selecting.
- Photo Cart keeps track of your customers and are viewable in the admin.
- Create customer categories and sort and export by categories.
- Sort orders by customer & view total sales per customer.
- View customers favorites & shopping cart from the admin.
- Apply price group pricing to customers
- Apply credits to customer accounts
- Invoice customer directly from admin
- See last time customer was active
- Copy gallery access from one customer to another
- Use calendar for relevant dates of customers.
- Export customer information to text or CSV file
- Make your galleries public or private - private requiring access code to view.
- Select pricing (price group) on a per gallery basis.
- Create subgalleries in subgalleries, multiple levels.
- Set expiration date for galleries
- Select different color template for galleries or use the default
- Adjust thumbnails per rows and number per page
- Remove watermarking on a per gallery basis
- Disable shipping on a per gallery basis
- Change the preview image for galleries
- Change the display order of images in the gallery
You can even create categories to put your galleries in. These categories can
be used for your reference only in the admin or you can make them available on
the customer side.
There are three ways to upload images to Photo Cart galleries: 1) An upload form
in the admin to upload 6 at a time OR 2) FTP your images to the gallery and have
Photo Cart go through and add them to the database and NEW 3) the
Photo Cart Uploader for Windows.
Either way you upload, Photo Cart will create a display image, zoom image (optional)
and thumbnails. You also have an option to crop thumbnails or not for a uniformed
gallery.
FTP is a much faster way, especially with a large number of images. The process
is
a) Create a gallery in the admin. When a gallery is created it creates a new
folder on the sever
b) Upload your images through an FTP program to that folder.
c) In the Photo Cart admin, there is an FTP process link in that gallery. There
you will see a list of images that you uploaded and are ready to process. Click
a button and Photo Cart will create thumbnails, display images and add the information
to the database.
You can do hundreds at a time with the FTP feature. You can also do a bulk subgallery
creation by uploading folders of images.
Please note either way you decide to upload your images it is best to reduce
/ resize them for upload for the sake of speed in uploading and processing. There
are many programs that can do a batch resize very quickly.
Gallery splash pages
The gallery splash page is a feature to when if used, the customer will see a
splash page before seeing the thumbnails in the gallery. If you have the Photo
Cart Slideshow add-on, you can use that as a splash page. You can also use your
own HTML in there as well.
Cropping and Black & White / Coloring Previews
When adding sizes & prices, you have the option to turn on crop previewing
for that size and enter in the dimensions. With crop previews turned on, when
the customer selects a size from the add to cart form, Photo Cart will automatically**
center crop that image to that size. For example, they select an 8X10, it crops
to an 8X10.
** The automatic crop previews work on the “Drop down menu” add to cart form.
The other add to cart form they will have to click a crop preview to view.
You can offer and black & white preview / coloring options as well. Coloring
would be something like sepia tone. You can also create other types in the admin
like blue tint, green tint, etc….
When the customer selects the black & white from the menu, Photo Cart will
automatically convert the image to black & white.
Customizing the look of Photo Cart
You can easily customize the look of Photo Cart right from the admin with using
the “style settings” and “website header & footer”.
In the style setting you enter in the color that you want for your background
colors, font colors, select your font style and more. Photo Cart comes with several
style templates and you can edit those or create your own. (For the techy, this
information us used to create CSS on the fly.)
The header & footer section is HTML above the Photo Cart pages and HTML below
the pages. This will allow you to add your own header, logo, additional link and
more. You will need a little HTML knowledge if you wish to get fancy with this.
Edit the text on the Photo Cart pages
You can easily edit the text that is displayed to the customers on the Photo
Cart pages. This is done by turning on text edit mode. Simple change a word or
phrase and click update.
Also you can create multiple languages to offer and your customers can select
a language. (note: Photo Cart only comes with English. You can duplicate English
and translate the words and phrases. )
Offer coupons & early bird discounts
You can create coupons in Photo Cart and give the coupon code to customers. These
coupons can be set as a percentage discount or a dollar amount discount. You can
also set a minimum order amount and if the coupon can be used more than once.
Early Bird Discount can be used also. This is a global settings and can offer
“Order within 30 days and get a 10% discount off of your order”. This is a global
option, but you can turn it off and on on a per gallery basis.
Baby / Bridal Registry
The registry allows your customers to create their own bridal or baby registry
(or whatever you can come up with) and have other people come to your website
and add money to their account.
The customer can create a registry from the registry section of Photo Cart or
you can create it in the admin. When they create a registry the will be given
a registry code. For someone wanting to put money on someone’s account they can
go to the registry section and search for them with either the registry code or
that customer’s email address.
The registry purchase will be added to the cart and checkout as normal. When
that order is paid, that registry purchase amount will be put into the customers
“Credit” system and they will be able to see the purchases and total credit amount
when they view the registry section of Photo Cart.
Tax options
In Photo Cart you set your tax percentage for your state and select whether to
tax your customer based on their account address or shipping address.
Canadian GST & PST taxes are also available the Canadians and also VAT setting
is available for those countries that need to charge VAT.
You can also mark most items (sizes & prices, packages, etc..) as being taxable
or not.
Order Shipping & Pick-up Options
You can offer the customers to either pick up their order or have it shipping.
You can turn either one of these off also incase you only want to offer shipping
or give no shipping options.
There are 2 type of shipping calculations: 1) A base rate plus $.XX per order
dollar amount and 2) Shipping charts where you can say “If the order is between
.01 - $49.99, charge $5.00 for shipping, $50 - $150 charge $8.00 for shipping,
and so on. You enter in your own variables and shipping charges.
Also you can add additional shipping charges on a per item basis. So if you want
to charge more shipping is someone purchases a 16X20, you can add that additional
shipping charge in the sizes and prices when editing 16X20.
Additionally you can also charge more shipping in the States and Countries sections
on a per state and per country basis.
Image security & watermarking
Of course your images IS your business and you don’t want people swiping them
without paying. Photo Cart does many things to help protect your images.
Photo Cart regenerates the image before it is displayed to the browser. During
this process it will take your watermarking file (and optionally logo file) and
put it on the image then displays it to the browser. Also, the image scripting
is set not to cache the images.
Thumbnails also can be watermarked if you with. Both the view images and thumbnails
using encrypting and extra file names to hide the image path in the source codes,
so even if someone was to view source, they wouldn’t see file paths.
You can create your own watermarking and logo files. These are “png” files which
are transparent files.
Email Notifications & Default Emails
When an order is placed, a customer registers and other things happen in Photo
Cart emails are generated and sent. So when a customer places an order you will
get an email notifying you.
Photo Cart uses default email where you can edit them in the admin and customize
the wording to your liking.
When a customer checks out an order is generated. These orders are kept in your
administration area where you can manage them.
One nice thing about the orders is that first the order is generated, then the
order is paid. This allows you to be able to accept checks, money order and cash
as well.
The order will show you everything they have ordered and the images will display
the thumbnail, image name and the gallery it was ordered from along with quantity,
price and any options. There is also a printable version of the order available
where it can be printed in portrait mode.
You can also create custom order statuses to sort your orders in. By default
you have New and Closed, but you can create your own order statuses such as in
processing, waiting on lab, etc…
Also available on orders is a work list where it just displays the image name,
quantity, options, and gallery where you can easily use to process the order from.
Admin Calendar
There is a calendar available in the admin where you can enter in dates for yourself
and also dates of your customers. This is a nice feature to use to keep track
of relevant dates such as birthdates, anniversaries and such for your customers.
Sales reports
The sales report tool allows you to run reports of your orders and will break
it down by total sales, tax, shipping and discounts. You can run these reports
by any timeframe you need.
There are several payment options methods integrated in Photo Cart.
Pay by Mail
This simply tells your customer that they can pay by mail and you give them your
mailing address and pay to information.
PayPal Website Payments Pro (USA Only)
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-pro-overview-outside
This service is offered by PayPal and is basically a merchant account. This option
allows the customer to either pay with their PayPal account or pay by credit card.
When they pay by credit card, they enter their credit cart information on your
website and don’t see PayPal.
SSL Required
Payment Gateways
The Following are payment gateways that work with an existing merchant account.
If you want to use your merchant account, contact your merchant services and see
if they work with any of the following payment gateways.
Authorize.net (SIM)
http://www.authorize.net
The Simple Integration Method is used and the customer enters in their payment
information on a secure area of the authorize.net website.
No SSL required
Standard Form to Collection Information
This standard form method basically collects the payment information and send
it to you where you can process it manually.
