During the beginning of this year work has been continuing on WordPress Sell Photo – the new plugin to help photographers and digital artists quickly and easily sell digital images from a WordPress website.
As a result of feedback from the beta version a greatly improved admin panel has been designed to give more control and flexibility over applying prices and shipping fees to pictures both individually and by category.
This post is a quick overview of how the new admin control panel can help you to quickly set prices for your work across your whole portfolio or at an individual picture and product or print format level.
The admin panel has five tabs laid out in the order that you would use them when setting up.
Tab 1 – Add Buy Buttons
The WordPress Sell Photo works by using a WordPress Widget to display a drop down list of print or product variations based on your prices and a Buy Now button.
This is a modular system which will allow developers to connect any 3rd party widget based payment button to the website. The included widget uses WP Ultra simple Paypal Cart due to it’s simple configuration.
As most websites will not want a buy button on every single page where there is a sidebar you can choose what types of pages or post types display a buy button with the simple tick boxes shown below:
Tab 2 – Set Prices By Category
The top section of this page is a simple form which allows you to enter a print format or product type that you can sell at a specific price.
You can enter a default price and shipping fee here to automatically add the product as an option to buy for every picture with a Buy button. This section is also used to quickly edit and delete existing products.
The lower section of the page is where the power of WordPress Sell Photo’s pricing system comes into play. The plugin allows you to enter prices for any WordPress post categories you have set up to organize your collection of images.
If you have a particular category of higher value pictures that you would like to sell at a premium price all you have to do is tick the category and enter the higher price and all pictures will automatically be displayed for sale at the new price for print format selected in the product drop down.
When pictures are in more than one category the highest category price is used.
Tab 3 – Set Individual Picture Prices
This tab is for pictures with their own unique price.
At the top of the page the Product section is displayed again so you can quickly choose or add print and product formats.
The lower section shows thumbnail previews for all individual pictures and allows you to set the price the picture will be sold at for the selected print format.
Payment Methods
As mentioned above payment options are modular and can use any 3rd party Buy button and documentation will be released soon for the API that allows developers to create compatible widget.
Order Fulfillment
Order Fulfillment lets you choose what happens to your orders after they are placed and is the most exciting area of the plugin currently under development.
While this first version only provides the option to received PayPal invoices and arrange for prints to be sent out yourself, a future version of the plugin is being created with the ability to connect to a 3rd party print order fulfillment service.
This will be a hugely powerful feature for the busy photographer that would prefer not to deal with the logistics of receiving and sending out orders themselves.
The API that I am working towards integrating is provided by Pwinty who have an amazing system for providing premium quality prints internationally on a white label basis – meaning your customers only see your website or company name when they receive their orders.
You can find out more about the service on the Pwinty website.
Plugin Release
At the time of writing final testing of version 1 of WordPress Sell Photo is in the final stages.
The plugin zip file will be available for download as soon as testing and documentation is complete.
If you would like to be one of the first people to try the plugin and to provide feedback to help shape future versions of the plugin you can register your email address at the page below to receive the new release:
http://www.creativetransmissions.com/wp-sell-photo-wordpress-plugin