So… for all of our non-US photographers:  Now you can sell in your local currency.  Euro is enabled, and other major currencies will be enabled over the next 10-12 hours.

With our new release the following will be taken care of via the Fotomoto system:

• You can set your prices in your own currency – you don’t have to do US Dollars anymore.
• The system automatically shows the shipping costs in your local currency when a buyer is buying from you.
• The print prices (your cost) is now presented in your local currency.

To change your currency simply log into the control panel, go to “Store” and then “Settings”, and you will see “Currency” under “Site Settings”.

Please notice that while we automatically convert shipping and print costs, we do not change the pricing set in your pricing table.  The main reason is that in most cases if, say, you have set a price to be $60, you do not want that to be changed to something like EUR 43.21 — you probably want it to be EUR 45, or maybe even EUR 60.  It’s a subjective decision which is up to you.

This means that if you change your currency, you should review your pricing and update your prices to whatever you want in your local currency.

If you have any questions or see any issues please let us know.  As mentioned, please give us a few hours until all the major currencies correctly populate in the system.

We hope this make it more convenient both for you to price and sell your photos, and for your buyers to buy — we understand that typically most of your visitors are from your own country.

Needless to say, regardless of where you are if you decide to keep your pricing in USD you can do that – the choice of currency is completely yours.

Cheers,

–Nasser

Greetings everybody!

Another couple of weeks and we’re here with a new release.  Most of the new features are directly based on what you had asked for:

• Currencies: This is a popular one, specially given the fact that we now have photographers from 50 (yes, 50!) countries.  Be prepared to set your pricing in your local currencies!  I will explain the details in a separate post.
• Dual Preview: For those of you who felt the preview of the photo in the first page of the widget can be too small when the visitor selects one of the smaller sizes (such as 6×8 or 8×10) — we have good news.  Now the widget zooms in when the photo size is small.  So you will see the couch and the photo enlarged (and the poor girl goes out of the picture!) for small sizes.
• Shopping Cart in Control Panel: Now while you are in the control panel you can order multiple prints from your photos.  What used to be the “order a print” link in the photo details page is now “add to cart”.  So you can add multiple photos to the cart, and check out once.  That brings more convenience to you.
• API: Fotomoto API is out and ready.  We are looking for brave people who would want to call Fotomoto directly from within JavaScript code for ultimate flexibility.  This would help us enable templates such as Lightbox or SquareSpace soon.  If you are interested in details please contact our support line (support -at- fotomoto -dot- com).

I’d like to thank the engineering team at Fotomoto – it’s been a lot of work and eveybody has been doing more than one thing at the same time.  We hope you guys like the new features and find our efforts worthwhile.  We would love to hear what you think.  Comments, suggestions, issues, anything…  Please post to the forum and we will respond.

Last but not least, the free shipping promotion will end in about a day, and shipping costs will start showing up upon check out.  If you happen to be thinking of printing something this is the last day to get them shipped free – hurry up!

Best Wishes,

–Nasser

One of the cool features of the Fotomoto widget has been showing the photo in perspective using the lady and the couch, so that the user has an idea how big the print will be.  People really liked it.  In fact we disabled it for one day a while ago and we got complaints!

A number of photographers asked us to do something about the preview image that is shown on the widget for small sizes:  If you click on “Buy Print”, and select a small size (such as a 6″x9″), the preview ends up being too tiny.  Some of the photographers are only selling smaller sizes, so that tiny thumbnail was not the best to present their photos.

We thought about this quite a bit.  It was obvious that we needed to show two different background images to create two different perspective references for the photo when the selected size is small comapred to large.

But there was another issue:  It would become hard to compare sizes once you jumped from the large size to small size or vice versa.  So finally we came up with something we like a lot:  The background image will change in a way that it feels like zooming in / out.  If you select a smaller size, the couch will show up larger, so the photo will be shown bigger, and at the same time you do not lose the perspective.

This will be part of the new release that will be launched over the next few days.  We hope you like it!

Hello everybody!

Based on community feedback we are about to launch a very simple JavaScript API to access Fotomoto features from inside JavaScript code.  This will allow you to:

• Add Buy Print or Send as E-card (and soon Postcards and more) anywhere you want, anyway you want.  In other words, you will break the toolbar into pieces — you control where each link goes.
• Integrate Fotomoto seamlessly in any Dynamic HTML or Ajax gallery or template.

The API is live, but we have not publicized it.  We are interesting in feedback from anybody who wants to use the API.  In particular, if you maintain an Ajax gallery or if you create and maintain templates you may be able to use the API to easily add photo commerce features to your software.  If you’d like to give it a try let us know and we will send you more information!