March 2012
2 posts
Improved Payment System
In our new widget, we used to send buyers to a separate secure page for their credit card transaction. As part of our new design, we are using an embedded secure page for accepting payment information, which helps buyers go through the entire process without leaving the seller’s site.
Of course, all credit card information is safe and goes through a secure connection (even if the...
Fotomoto Widget 3.0
We have been working on the new version (v3.0) of our widget for a while now. After testing it on selected websites for a couple of weeks, we are happy to announce the public release of the new widget to all users.
We have completely redesigned our widget. The photo preview area is now bigger, all products are accessible from the main window, selecting the crop-area is much more user friendly,...
January 2012
2 posts
New Print Product: High Quality Wall Peels
Wall Peels, Wall Murals, Sticky Prints, Self-adhesive Posters… these are all different names for the same product, a new product that we just started offering to our community.
Wall Peels have been around for a while, and we have wanted to add that to our product offerings from early days. But after testing a good number of print labs, we realized the quality of this product was not good...
Behance Enhanced by Fotomoto
Behance is the latest company that has integrated Fotomoto into their platform and has made it available to its photographers and artists.
Behance’s core product is the Behance Network, the leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. Creative professionals, from across industries, use Behance to create multi-media portfolios that showcase their work within the Network,...
December 2011
2 posts
Cards & eCards Improvements
This week we have made a couple improvement to our Cards and eCards services. For both products, you can now customize the credit and copyright text. To do this, simply go to your Store > Collections, click on Card’s or eCard’s Settings, and customize the credit message.
Also, we used to have our full logo in color on the back of the cards. Some members mentioned that this makes...
Improved eCard & Social Share
There have been some changes in Google’s social life: Google Buzz is out, and Google Plus is in. While we were updating our Share feature to apply these changes, we thought we should improve the eCard service as well, cleaning up our eCard UI has been long overdue.
In our server update this week, we have combined the eCard and Sharing into one button and one window, simplified the eCard...
November 2011
2 posts
Rolling Stone (and Facebook)
If you like music - any type of music - there is a good chance that you are a fan of Rolling Stone Magazine. They have been publishing since the late 60s, and just looking at those covers can make you emotional. It’s almost imposible not to want to hang some of those covers - old or new - in your room, or your office. And now we are happy to announce that they are using Fotomoto to offer...
Fotomoto Product Updates
We have been quiet here in our blog, but we have been busy working on a lot of improvements:
We have completely redesigned and combined our Image and Products page and improved the way we handle product offerings and pricing. The new page, Store, is simpler, cleaner, and more streamlined.
We changed the layout of the product pricing table in the Dashboard, organizing the product pricing section...
August 2011
1 post
Printless in Europe - No More!
Good news: we finally have our European print lab partner up and running!
Some history: based on the feedback from our European community, we first talked about expanding our print lab network to Europe back in early 2010, and now it’s 2011! We were lucky in finding good print lab partners here in the US, and we naively thought adding labs in Europe would be just as easy. Since then...
July 2011
1 post
Changes in Non-USD Accounting
Fotomoto has been offering it’s services to both US-based and international members. International members using non-USD currencies may have noticed that we added a small feature in the “Orders > Details” and “Orders > Accounting”. All sales and earnings can be viewed in two currencies - selected non-US currency and USD. This was to prepare for a change that...
June 2011
1 post
Changing Our Processing Fee Model
When we started Fotomoto we only had premium prints, then we added fine art prints, then cards, and then digital download (with more coming soon!). Digital downloads and cards usually have a lower average price, to the point that our 15% transaction fee would not cover the credit card processing fees, so we added a small processing fee for cards and downloads. Now we are seeing larger orders for...
May 2011
2 posts
Fotomoto Got A New Home!
We designed our last home page more than 1.5 years ago. That’s a long time in the internet age. With all the changes in our company and products, a new home page was long overdue.
Functionality-wise everything is pretty much the same, except for the featured artist section. Our featured members seemed to change their sites more then we do, and that resulted in broken links to featured...
New Fotomoto/Lightroom integration via TTG
For Fotomoto members who use Lightroom, The Turning Gate’s TTG Highslide Gallery Pro has long been an excellent tool, allowing the creation of full-featured and flexible image galleries, automatically enabled for photo commerce with Fotomoto.
Our friends at The Turning Gate recently released version 3.0 of their plugin, now titled TTG Highslide Gallery CE, which offers users more design...
April 2011
5 posts
Upload with Style!
One of the major updates in our new release was our order page. We have bigger image previews, and our high-res management buttons (such as upload button and request via Auto Pickup) are more visible and accessible. With the new order page our members can also see the ordered image and the uploaded one side by side.
Last night we updated one other part of the orders page: the uploader....
First New Product Upgrade: Fine Art Papers
We started our upgrade to the new version of Fotomoto last week, and the process turned out to be a bumpier than what we had thought! Everything seems to be under control now (even though the image import from all the member sites is still going on).
Now we are ready to start rolling out our new features and products. Our first update is on our Fine Art papers. After offering 5 completely...
Update on Update!
So, as we announced before, we started the process of porting our servers from some dedicated servers to Amazon’s cloud servers yesterday. The process itself was supposed to take a few hours, and the worldwide DNS update should have taken up to 24 hours (depending on viewer’s geographical location and ISP). This was / is the biggest change since we launched Fotomoto, and based on...
Server updates are coming, be patient!
Starting tomorrow morning (Wednesday, April 6th), we will be updating our servers and porting our data to our new datacenter. Our servers will be down for a few hours, and will be going online and offline during the next couple of days. Please be patient with us while we are working on the update.
To get the latest updates and news, follow our twitter @fotomoto
Fotomoto 2.0 is coming next week!
As you all know, we have been working on a complete restructure of our service for a while now. The new structure lets us expand our service much faster, without any scalability issues. I am happy to tell you that our system is almost ready to go out. All the visible changes are in our dashboard, there will be no change on the widget side. We sent it out to a handful of members last week,...
March 2011
4 posts
The PrintAid+ Project
A few members of our Fotomoto community, Pete Carr, Dan King, and Matt Thomas, have created a great international project to help the victims of the Japan earthquake: The PrintAid+ Project. This project was up and running just a few days after the earthquake and now has grown to about 20 35 photographers and designers. We are proud that Fotomoto’s solution let these artists make this...
Supporting our members helping Japan
To support tsunami victims in Japan, Fotomoto members Oliver Fluck and Stefanie Hoepner started a campaign named “Photographers for Japan”. Most participating artists are donating all earnings they are receiving through print sales until April 14. Donations go to the American Red Cross and will mainly be used for medical support of survivors in evacuation centers. We at Fotomoto...
Getting Started with Fotomoto with RC's help
About a month ago Rafael (RC) Concepcion (Photoshop Guy) contacted us to tell us about his new book, Get Your Photography on the Web (available on Amazon). To our surprise, there was no less than 8 beautiful pages about Fotomoto! This is a great resource for anyone who needs step by step guide for using Fotomoto.
And for people who prefer seeing over reading, he also has video instructions...
Blog and Twitter Clean Up
We are cleaning up our services and getting ready for our big 2.0 release. As part of the clean up process, we have moved our blog to tumblr and are using a cleaner template.
Also, we are now using a different twitter address for our Featured Artist announcements: @fotomototoday. Now you can get Fotomoto news and our featured artist news from separate twitter channels.
Some major changes are...
February 2011
2 posts
New and Improved Community and Support
A couple of months ago we launched the new Fotomoto Support Center, complete with new knowledge base and support articles, FAQs, and GetSatisfaction community forums. These are the highlights of the changes, and what we have tried to achieve by switching to the new system:
Everything’s in one place: you can find articles, see recent community activity, and even track shipments all on one...
"Fotomoto Changed My Life"
…this is the most humbling title for a post about Fotomoto, and I’ll talk more about it in a little bit. It’s also the best way for us to re-start writing our blogs – which we have been neglecting for a long time.
We have been quiet for a while, but we have been working hard. We have received new funding, several great new team members, and we are working on a completely new version of...
September 2010
2 posts
Auto Pickup: Free Valet Service for Your High Res...
Here at fotomoto we are trying to make the process of selling artwork as easy as possible. Using our simple script, our users can easily add a “Buy Now” button to all of their photos on their own website in a few minutes enabling them to offer a full e-commerce solution that is specifically designed for photos and images. To offer a good and convenient service, what we offer is as...
Canvas Yourself!
Offering your photos and artwork on canvas is just a click a way!
We are now offering giclée (fine art) prints on museum quality canvas using high quality ink, wrapped around a stretcher frame, a thin board, or mounted on a thin gator foam-board. In perfect detail, beautifully mounted, and several hanging options, our canvases are ready to go on the wall! You can read more about our canvas...
July 2010
2 posts
Fine Art prints are here!
Fine Art prints are finally here! After several months of trying different print labs and services, we finally feel we are ready to offer you a great quality giclée prints using the best Epson printers on 5 different high quality paper types: Enhanced Matte Poster, Premium Glossy Photo, Satin Premium Lustre Photo, Elegance Watercolor, and UltraSmooth Fine Art (see the complete information here)....
Adobe Lightroom, Squarespace, Flash and more
When we started Fotomoto, we wanted to change the way you sell your prints: instead of asking you to take your photos to different services and “build” a store to sell your prints, we thought we should bring the service to your website - no matter where the site is and what it looks like. We started with supporting a few sites and services, and little by little we expanded our list...
June 2010
2 posts
Fotomoto's New Simplified eCard
Previously our eCard consisted of two parts: an email with a small preview of the card, and a message which included a link to our site along with the big photo and complete message.
This week we updated and improved our ecard system.
The new eCard includes a bigger photo area and has complete message embedded within. Now as soon as the recipient opens the email - and views the image - the...
Fotomoto featured in Photoshop User Magazine
We had a surprise last week. One of our users told us that we were featured in the Photoshop User Magazine a couple of issues ago - and we had no idea about it!
Since bookstores only carry the latest issue of the magazine, we couldn’t find a copy, and it took us a few days to finally see the article.
When we did we were very pleased: from the entire 2 page spread on “Selling Your...
May 2010
1 post
New widget, new design, and upcoming new products
We have been working for a while on making several fundamental changes to our widget. The challenge that we are always up against is how to add new features and products, without making the UI too “busy” and difficult to use. We have seen this happen a lot: a perfectly easy product launches, but then the feature-hungry developers keep adding features to it, and everything becomes a...
February 2010
5 posts
License / Download is available now
After a couple of weeks of limited release of download / license features, we are finally releasing this feature for everyone to use. When you log in to your Fotomoto account, you will see a new product under “Site > Products”: Download.
For this new feature we are offering two different types of usage:
Digital download: this is mainly for event / portrait photographers who want...
Fotomoto API v0.7 (Updated: June 22)
We just updated our API and added a few functions there. Fotomoto API is a set of functions that allows users using javascript to use the basic functions of the Fotomoto widget.
To use Fotomoto API, the Fotomoto widget must be changed to API mode. Normally, the widget is in non-api mode, which is automatically running on the page.
For more information, please check the API section of our...
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!
After a few months of having an “unofficial” version of our API (our friends at The Turning Gate have been using it for a while), we are finally ready to announce the first official version of our API. Using this API, developers will have complete control over how the toolbar and buttons are presented on the website(s). We tried to keep the API as simple as possible - take a look...
“Fotomoto aims to change the playingfield with a fresh solution to the proces of...”
– Fast Media Magazine
“The startup refers to this decentralized way of selling photos online as...”
– TechCrunch
January 2010
2 posts
V is for Valentines!
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, we are working on using the increasing traffic that comes to our site in order to promote more artists and photographers. After introducing the ‘Daily Featured Artists’ section in our home page late November, last week we introduced a new section on our home page: Collections. From all the 500,000+ photos that we have in our database now, we...
Fotomoto: Commerce without Conformity
Here at Fotomoto we love photos, and “Commerce without Conformity” has been our motto since we started working on this project. There are several sites out there in which photographers and designers can showcase their art while selling prints and other products. But we feel that most (if not all) of these site are like “Supermarkets” - basically, a place where you have...
December 2009
2 posts
All Major Credit Cards Are Accepted Here!
On the surface, credit card processing seems to be an easy feature to add, but when you want to add multi-currency and international payment support, it gets much more complicated. We pushed back direct credit card support as much as we could, but our users started to complain about the difficulties of using PayPal and the fact that they force buyers to register before they can pay (we know...
Prints: Flexible Sizes vs. Standard Sizes
About a month ago we started offering a “Standard Sizes” option, and I thought I would take this opportunity to explain “Flexible Sizes” and “Standard Sizes”. When we started our service this summer, we only offered a “Flexible Sizes” option. Since our first target users were art photographers we knew they don’t like to crop their photos to fit them into standard print...
November 2009
4 posts
“Instead of forcing potential customers to leave your blog or website to purchase...”
– AppVita
“Fotomoto offers photographers an easy-to-use e-commerce solution directly on...”
– New Media Photographer / Rosh Sillars
“Wouldn’t it be great if selling your photographs was a great deal easier?...”
– rebstech
“Fotomoto is solving a problem that professional photographers have had for a...”
– TechStartup
September 2009
3 posts
New to Fotomoto? Some Quick Tips to Promote Your...
Many of our existing customers (or potential customers) may have questions about pricing and best practices to help promote your new Fotomoto store. As such, I thought I would throw together a quick guideline with some of the best practices I’ve seen from other photographers selling with Fotomoto or elsewhere.
We would recommend broadcasting that you’re now selling with Fotomoto on any social...
Ten Great Reasons to Use Fotomoto to Sell Your...
Looking for an easier way to sell your photographs online? If so, Fotomoto has a number of attractive features that will make selling your photos on your website or photoblog much easier than some of the other solutions out there. We thought we would highlight ten great reasons to use Fotomoto.
Setting up Fotomoto on your website or photoblog can be done in a matter of minutes. A few lines of...
Fotomoto Greeting Cards and Postcards: Shipping...
Fotomoto is happy to announce that we were able to negotiate the shipping and handling costs to a 50% discount from previous prices.
New shipping and handling costs for postcards and greeting cards:
USA is now $1.49 (down from $3.00).
Canada shipping is now $1.99
Other international destinations: $2.49 (down from $5.00).
Based on your feedback we also changed the big watermark logo to a...
August 2009
5 posts
Fotomoto and TTG Highslide Gallery Pro for Adobe...
We are pleased to announce the integration of our APIs into a popular template: The Turning Gate (TTG) Highslide Gallery Pro for Adobe Lightroom. Matthew Campagna, proprietor of The Turning Gate (TTG) and I started talking about this a couple of months ago and TTG became one of the early adopters of the Fotomoto API in order to add e-commerce capabilities directly into the template.
The result...
Order Accounting
The “Accounting” page is now available: Go to Orders > Accounting. You can now see your Balance Summary, Payment Summary, and detailed Order Accounting. The balance basically tells you how much you have sold so far, how much the printing costs and transaction fees are, and therefore how much money you have made. Then it shows and deducts the sum of any payments we have already...
Cards: Ready to Roll Out!
We’re finally there!
We will be rolling out cards to all sites around midnight (pacific time) on Saturday August 8th. This will give all of you from different countries to see how it looks like on your website on Sunday. If for any reason you decide not to offer cards (which includes greeting cards, flat cards, and postcards) of your photos, you will be able to log into your account and...