PhotoShelter's integrated print labs offer members a quick and easy way to automate fulfillment for print and product orders placed over your PhotoShelter site.
- Integrated Print Vendors
- Setting Up an Automated Fulfillment Pricing Profile
- Crop Preferences
- Print Vendor Order Review
- Order Issues
Integrated Print Vendors
To automate the printing and shipping of print/product orders through your website, you can use one of our three integrated print vendors. To create an auto-fulfilled print/product, you must create a Prints and Products Pricing Profile and set prices with the integrated print vendor of your choice. Our integrated print vendors are:
- Printique (formerly known as AdoramaPix) (NY)
- Loxley Colour (Scotland, UK)
- White House Custom Colour (MN)
Note: A single Prints and Products Pricing Profile can support prints/products from multiple vendors. However, be aware that each vendor will charge your customers a shipping fee. We recommend that you try to consolidate with a single vendor and avoid using multiple vendors to fulfill a product of the same size and/or description (e.g. 4" x 6" print).
Setting Up an Automated Fulfillment Pricing Profile
1. From the Navigation Bar click “Sell” > “Pricing Profiles.”
2. Click the “Add Profile” button. A pop-up box will appear; select “Prints & Products.”
3. In the fields provided, enter your “Profile Name.” This name is for your own internal use.
4. If you’d like to add a public or internal description, fill in the relevant fields.
5. Choose your Crop Preferences. For more information on how cropping works, check out this section.
6. If you want to review an order before it’s sent to the lab, check the box for "Print Vendor Order Review." For more information on the benefits of this option, check out this section.
7. To set your prices for the different prints/products you wish to sell, choose “+Add a Vendor.“ To determine which vendor is right for you, click “Compare Vendors.”
8. After choosing your vendor, a full list of prints and products offered by that vendor will appear. In the fields provided, enter the price at which you want to sell that print or product. If you do not want to offer a particular print or product, leave the field blank.
9. Click the “Save Profile” button at the bottom of the page when you’re done setting your prices.
After you've created a Pricing Profile, you will need to configure your payment processor and apply your pricing profile to the galleries or individual images that you want to make available for print and product sales.
Note: The wholesale price indicates the price you will pay for printing. When you make a sale, we will assess these costs and charge you on the vendor’s behalf on your next monthly statement. On that statement we'll also charge you for the shipping (same as the client pays you) and our transaction fee. Consider marking up your prices accordingly.
Crop Preferences
The typical digital camera sensor has an aspect ratio of approximately 3:2. However, common print sizes such as 8x10 don’t have the same width:height ratio. Therefore, we give you the option to specify whether you’d like the images to be cropped (wherein some of the image might not make it into the final print) or fit to the size ordered (which means the image will be shrunk to fit the print size ordered, which may mean the image is printed with white borders).
No Crop
The image is sized such that the entire image fits within the print size ordered. This may lead to large white borders on the top/bottom or left/right, depending on the aspect ratio of the paper size.
Auto-Crop
The image is centered and printed so that the shortest side of the image matches the shortest side of the paper. This may lead to an arbitrary crop in which the long side of the image falls off the paper.
Note: If you check the box next to the option that says “Allow buyers to set their own crops at checkout," the buyer will be able to override this default setting and select the crop of their choice.
To read about your buyers’ cropping preferences, please see this article.
Print Vendor Order Review
Enabling print vendor order review gives you the opportunity to review the order before it’s sent to the lab to be auto-fulfilled. Checking this box allows you to replace an image in an order (e.g. high res retouched images), or adjust the customer’s crop (only if you check the box next to "Allow buyers to set their own crops at checkout."
We suggest enabling Print Vendor Order review for any pricing profiles that contain a Gallery Wrap canvas so that you can review the image for potential issues. WHCC suggests adding a 2” white border to the file to avoid the photo itself being lost in the wrap.
Replacing Images
When replacing images for your clients, there are a few things to note. You might notice that the thumbnail and the filename for an image you’ve replaced does not update immediately to the newest version of the file. This is due to our servers processing the changes behind the scenes before updating things on the front end. Rest assured that the correct version of the file will be sent to the lab for printing.
Order Issues
In the event that your customer requests a refund for a print or product order, please note that PhotoShelter is not the merchant of record. Customer refunds must be issued by you via your chosen Payment Processor (Stripe or PayPal).
Our Support team is the point-of-contact for our integrated print labs. For general quality or delivery issues, please contact our Technical Support team for assistance.