What’s New in Fotomerchant 2

Introducing the all-new Fotomerchant

For the past 12 months we have been toiling away to bring you a completely new platform for promoting your photography business and selling photos online. The new Fotomerchant provides you with all the tools you need to have a professional online presence to market your photography and to build a more profitable business. The new Fotomerchant is designed to upload and share your photos faster, allows you to manage your website more easily and will enable you to better manage your online store.

Our main goal was to improve on everything we had in the old system and to redesign our architecture so that we can deploy more features much more quickly. So if you’ve ever used the old PhotoMerchant you will notice a lot of the same concepts, they’ve just been improved and refined to be easier, faster and more robust.

 

New interface

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We’ve given the Fotomerchant interface a complete makeover using the latest ‘responsive’ web design techniques to provide you with a greatly improved experience that is fast, intuitive and allows you to work quickly with little fuss. You can administer your website and store on your desktop and mobile device, meaning you manage orders, update your photo blog and upload photos wherever you have internet access.

Galleries now fill the full width of your desktop screen, you can select multiple Gallery and Photo items at the same time and our new bulk action tool bar makes organising your photo library easier than ever.

You’ll also appreciate the new drag-and-drop functionality that allows you to re-order Photos, Galleries, Categories, Web pages and Products. The kind of things you should expect from a modern web interface. And for power users we’ve added Hot Keys and a Bulk Action Tool Bar for mastering your photo library.

 

Everything is faster

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With the new Fotomerchant image processing engine you won’t believe how quickly your photos are uploaded, processed and published to your website. With a growing range of uploading options (including our new ‘drag-and-drop’ uploader) your photos will max-out your internet connection and upload at up to ten images at a time.

Your customers will love your zippy new website. Photos are instantly shared to our state-of-the-art Content Delivery Network (CDN) which makes your website and photos load super quickly.

 

Blogging made simple

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Blogging shouldn’t have to be a chore – it should be a simple matter of posting a couple of updates, sharing your latest work and the occasional rant. Fotomerchant’s blogging tools have removed all the complex elements of hosting and managing your own blog and provide you with the essentials for publishing your work.

It’s easy to schedule posts, insert animated sliders, photos and video clips from social sharing sites like Vimeo and YouTube.

Plus, your blog is an integrated part of your website which can dramatically increase your search engine ranking.

 

Photo Management

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Organising your photos is a breeze with the new ability to drag-and-drop photos and galleries in the order you need them, and the new enhanced porfolios extend the way you promote different facets of your photography business. Create a portfolio page of all your art photography, another portfolio page for your latest instagram photos and another portfolio page with password protected client galleries, each with it’s own set of unique layout options.

Watermarking is even more flexible with the ability to have multiple watermarks across your site. This allows you to apply a unique visual brand to different parts of your portfolio (e.g. apply an intrusive watermark on your event galleries, a more subtle design for your portfolio photographs and even a personal signature for your digital download products).

Our new thumbnail process produces smarter cropping by focussing around your subjects eyes and uses the laws of the Golden Ratio to provide great looking photo thumbnails.

 

Cart Checkout improvements

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We’ve refined the checkout process making it faster and easier for your customers to buy through your website. Purchasing digital download products is as quick as it gets and payment processing now uses PayPal Express for an enhanced checkout experience for your customers.

You can order the items in your pop-up shopping cart and taxes are now dynamically included based on your customers location.

All of this is designed to make a better experience for your customers and to get you more photography sales.

 

Product creation

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We’ve re-invented how you offer and display products to your customers with Products and Catalogs. A Product is an individual print or digital product that you make available for sale, and a Catalog, is a collection of products that you want to make available to a Gallery. This new system is super flexible and enables you to offer unique products and pricing on a per gallery and per image level. That means you can offer the same products but call them different things and give them different prices, plus, you can offer unique products on selected images in your gallery.

Not only that but you can offer a mix of Do-it-yourself printing (Use your own printer or lab using Self Fulfilment), automated printing and shipping via our partner labs (Direct Fulfilment) and digital download products all in the same gallery, giving you complete control over the products you can sell.

Oh yeah, and you can even sell any of your print and digital products for free (if that’s your thing).

 

Time saving order management updates

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Do you need to upload hundreds and thousands of photos but you don’t want to have to upload them at high rez so you can sell them at high rez? We heard you. You can now upload a higher resolution file after you have made the sale, potentially saving you a gazillion hours if you’re doing big events. Simply upload your files at a resolution that’s good enough for display and then you can replace the image with the original file or a re-touched version. You’re welcome event photographers.

You can also view the contents of your customers favourites if they have created an account on your website, allowing you to contact them and close the sale. And as the start of big things to come, you can now add notes against your customer records to track phone conversations, queries and order notes.

 

And many more new features coming soon…

There’s a load of little features that are too small to detail here. We’ve got big plans for the new version of Fotomerchant including an entirely new paraigm for your website design, starting with a brand new theme and all new versions of our Lightroom Exporter, Packages and more.

The best way to experience the new features is to sign up for a free 14 day trial. It’s risk free, does not require a credit card and takes less than ten minutes to get a website, blog and store up and running. Check out the full feature tour, view some example websites or jump straight in with a free trial.
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