jAlbum is great for sharing travel pics or showcasing your portfolio, but nowadays more and more people use it for business purposes. Beyond selling photos it can be used for selling products as well. There are a few ways of doing this, just read on.
PayPal Shopping cart
PayPal provides an easy-to-integrate payment gateway, which allows customers to pay with their Credit Cards or pay from their PayPal balances. Your customers don’t need a PayPal account for the card payment. However, you will need to have a PayPal account to accept payments. Sign up for a Business account at their site.
Holding the account alone does not involve any fees. PayPal makes money on transactions. They keep 2.59% of every transaction and they also have a minimum fee per order. You can read more about their checkout model here and the pricing here.
PayPal isn’t the cheapest, but no other payment option is as widely trusted and globally available.
Once you are ready with the registration you can use your registration email (“Primary email“) or your “Merchant ID” for jAlbum’s “Seller ID” box. Note, that the ID is mandatory – the shopping cart will be disabled without that.
Besides the ID, you should set up a global pricing scheme as a minimum configuration. Naturally, you can provide per-item pricing too, through the Edit mode’s Image data panel. This works also for complete folders.
In the “Shop options” box, you can also add the shipping fee after a “+” sign. If you wouldn’t like to add a per-item shipping fee, you can use the global “Handling fee” instead, which will be added once per order.
Naturally, a lot more options exist to fine-tune the cart. Find more details here. Because Lizard, Photoblogger, Story, and Tiger skins all use the same shopping cart module, Tiger skin’s Help page applies to all.
Here’s what a shopping cart looks like in the Photoblogger skin:
The album provides selection boxes for a smoother shopping experience:
The Shopping cart combined with Filtering offers exciting new possibilities.
Here’s another example with another skin (Lizard) where the Tag cloud helps in finding individual images:
Because this cart is such a simple payment solution, it has some drawbacks too. For example, it cannot verify if payments were successful or not. Hence, no automatic delivery is possible either. After every purchase, you’ll be notified by PayPal and you have to accept the payment. Once accepted you’ll have to fulfill the order by sending out the goods physically or digitally within a few days. No stock management exists either. If you run out of something, the album has to be updated with the item removed. If we aimed for automatic delivery and stock management, that would require server-side scripting and database management – a new level of complexity for the user – which we would like to avoid.
Feedback repurposed as Kiosk
The feedback tool, available in a few skins – Tiger, Photoblogger, Story, and Lizard – is a simple way of collecting user feedback through email. This makes this tool a good candidate for collecting orders for those who wouldn’t like to run the orders through a payment gateway. In practice, you receive the list of the ordered items (with optional parameters) in an email, and it’s up to you how you manage the rest.
Here’s a sample album demonstrating the feedback feature used as a kiosk, with detailed instructions on how you can reproduce the same:
Fotomoto
Fotomoto is a print service in the US (CA), that offers a few more options – like T-shirts mugs, and pillows – on top of digital prints.
To use this service you have to sign up with them and upload the originals (or high-resolution versions) of the photos you are selling. You can also specify the prices and almost everything.
In the skin’s settings, you only have to enter the “Store ID“, so the service connects the album with you.
In the following sample album, the PayPal cart is combined with Fotomoto.
