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Mark Till Consulting in the Press
Article from Photo Imaging Entrepreneur
February/March 1999
Sell Your Photos Over the Internet
Mark Till of Till Photography in Natick, Mass.,
knew there was potential in a website to offer the photos he takes
of Boston area weddings long before he discovered the services of
E-Prints.
"I was in the process of talking to companies about custom-designing a web page so that I could do exactly what E-Prints now does for me," he said, but that was going to be very expensive. The quotes were just too high.
About then, Till noticed a reference to E-Prints in a newsletter from his lab. "They were offering exactly what I was trying to do on my own," he said.
What Till had been trying to do on his own was to figure out a way to make the wedding pictures of his clients available for friends and family to view and order copies while protecting the privacy of his clients' pictures.
E-Prints offered just that. Till now charges customers $200 to upload wedding pictures to the web for a period of six weeks. For each additional week, he charges $25 more. Customers are given user ID cards with the couple's name and password to protect privacy so that out-of-town, out-of-state and even out-of-country wedding guests can view and order pictures through the E-Prints website.
"I make money two ways with this," Till said. "I make it by charging my clients for the service and I make it by the orders placed by their guests. I'm getting orders from people I would not have gotten orders from otherwise... One of the problems I used to have was a guest coming up to me asking to take their pictures. I'd never hear from them. But now I give them a card with the user ID for these pictures and they can log on to view and order their pictures."
Till's usual minimum charge to photograph a wedding is $4,000 and averages over $6,500 after orders are placed. He estimates that E-Print service brings in $500-$1,000 extra for most weddings he shoots
"People who sign up for this service think it's the greatest thing in world," he said. I live in an area where people travel from all over the world to go to a wedding, because there are so many colleges around. I've done weddings where the families have been from Africa, Argentina, Hong Kong, Holland or just other parts of the country like California. What's great this service is the person from Hong Kong can get these pictures as easily as a person from South Carolina."
The fact that more than one person can view his/her pictures is what Till most appreciates about the opportunities E-Prints and the Internet can afford.
"Wedding Pictures used to have to make their way from one family to the next," he said. "People would hold onto them and not want to give them up. This really speeds up the turn-around time for me an my customers."
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