Webpage Design by Zenfolio

I just started to upload some of my images since they do have a free 14 day trial period. However, now the big question... I see some of you have used them (this is how I found out about Zenfolio) but,
did you SELL anything through them??? If anyone has, please let me know how it worked for you.
Thanks so much for your input,
Judith

I made a few sales through my site, but only to folks I had targeted (largely friends and family). I have not made any sales to anyone in the general public who might have stumbled upon my site.

I'm actually planning to turn the shopping cart off this year and have people contact me directly when they are interested in a purchase. I want to have more of a discussion with them about what they want and personalize the service a bit more.

I was just checking them out too because I didn't like ImageKind. What I don't understand is how you can have large prints made from a 12MB file (their size limit). Seems like you have to down-rez your image for uploading, then have them up-rez if needed for a print.

Hi Jamie and John - Thanks for your kind input and reply. Before I permenantly sign up with Zenfolio, I will definitely clear up some questions. Namely, do they do any advertisingand and/or are they connected to google, etc. If I have to do my own marketing, I really might not need them. I was under the impression that they are helping to market our photos.
Ofcourse, I might be wrong.
Thanks - Judith

I used zenfolio for a while and really liked the things they 'did' offer. Unfortunately I needed more customization options. And after multiple requests asking them for needed features them and being turned down I switched to smugmug which I like more. On smugmug you can create your own pages with prices and turn off the shopping cart. You can also add many other custom features and pages which just aren't there in zenfolio.

You can see my site here for an example of this: http://www.landandseaphoto.smugmug.com/

However neither market your work for you. That is something you do on your own.

Derek

I use smugmug and Zenfolio and we have made sales but not cold just by people wandering to our site. We sell when we have a gallery showing and then we have a web gallery with the same photos for sale. Zenfolio is nice because the clients can pick one of those 16 different frames. We put a screenshot of the frame selection on the brochure that we leave at the exhibition. Smugmug is easier to use and easier to customize and certainly easier to make your own prices, but the products are better thru zenfolio and they drop ship in a plain white box so the client does not know where it came from. And I love their frames (from MPix).
Lisa

I checked out Zenfolio in Dec 08. I liked the product availability but there didn't seem to be an easy way not to offer certain products. For example, I am an artist and am not interested in having my work on a deck of cards. Maybe I missed the function to do this, but I didn't see it. Also, I had a few clients compare Zenfolio against my current site and they liked the current one the best. I didn't care for the search feature on Zenfolio as it takes you to other sites instead of just around your site. I compared it to BetterPhoto which has been hosting my site for two years and decided to stay with BetterPhoto.