The Print Store Experience

Earlier this year, I made a collection of twenty photographs available as prints through the Zenfolio online store. I went with Zenfolio primarily because of their partnership with Mpix who produces fantastic quality prints and ships them with care. The upside is that everything is totally automatic. You order, wait a few days, and receive your quality prints. The downside, like buying anything online for the first time, is that it’s hard to know as a customer what is going to happen.

My friend Mike Clark has demystified the process over on his blog which details the Zenfolio and Mpix experience from the customer point of view. It’s totally fabulous and he’s illustrated every step of the process. For example, here’s one of the prints as partially unpacked:

Here’s a 12" X 18" print after he had it framed at a local shop:

Read the whole post for more detail. Many, many thanks to Mike for putting this together. Also, if you want to see another take on how the prints come from the print store, Ryan Irelan posted a few interesting pictures to his Flickr photostream. Thanks Ryan!

I should note a few things about the print store since I opened it up. When I first took the store live, Mpix offered a few frames without glass. It was a pretty basic offering. Recently, this has now changed fairly substantially. There’s a lot more frames to choose from and you can choose to add either regular or non-glare glass. Additionally, white and black matting is an option as well.

In addition to the framing options, you can also order up a print that’s simply mounted to backboard or foam core. All in all, things have expanded nicely into a fairly complete offering.

Another new product offering from Mpix that you can select through Zenfolio are called standouts. A standout display consists of the print mounted on a 1.5" thick, lightweight Gatorfoam with a lightly textured black or smooth white trim around the edges. The looks to be a cool way to put images on the wall. I’ve not yet seen these in person, but I’m ordering up a couple to check them out for myself and have enabled them in the Zenfolio shopping cart.

At this point, there’s only one last niggle to the store front and that’s international shipping. Right now, Mpix only ships to North America. The folks over at Zenfolio are very aware that this is a problem and are looking at ways to solve the issue. Of course, being prudent, they aren’t providing a time frame for doing so. To help ease the problem in the short term, I’m considering setting aside a time period in December to personally take orders from those living outside North America and reshipping the products personally. If this would be of interest to you, please feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment here.

So what’s coming up in the future? That’s an excellent question. First, I’ll be adding another group of photos to the store in the next month or so. It’ll probably be a group of ten or so added to the current twenty photographs. I’m still debating which photos to add and how many, but I am trying to keep the selection to a manageable size. After that, I’ve got something else in the works. I’m still working out the specifics, but for now I’ll just say that I’m looking at produced a set of extremely high quality signed edition prints. Obviously, they’ll be at a higher price point than the current offerings, but not insanely so. More details on this later as I nail things down.

All in all, I’ve been pleased with the print store so far. I started it off knowing full well that it’ll take time to build this up to where I want it to be. There’s a lot more I want to do with it and I certainly have more than a few things to learn along the way, but I’m really looking forward to further building out the offerings. Your comments and thoughts along these lines are always appreciated and welcome.