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 seller’s site is not secure). Buyers still have the option to use a stand-alone secure page to enter their payment information.
This feature is enabled for all user starting today.
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, check-out process is two-steps shorter, and the overall design is cleaner and more beautiful. Beside that the new design will let us reduce the number of toolbar buttons to a single “Buy” button (which will be coming soon!).
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 enough for our community. The material most of the labs use for Wall Peels is a fabric that absorbs ink, which makes colors look dull - especially darker colors. So we decided to wait, and test more labs.
A few months ago we finally found a great lab offering Wall Peels using a very good quality vinyl material. We tested several photos, and they all came out with vivid colors. Happy to have found the right product, we started integrating and adding this to our offerings. Today we are happy to announce that we have added Wall Peels to our print product offerings!
There is virtually no limit to the Wall Peel print size. Wall Peels are printed on 40”-wide roles of vinyl, and they can be applied to the wall right next to each other (just like wallpaper), so orders can be as big as almost any wall size. Applying Wall Peels is very easy and needs no special equipment or expertise, almost anyone can do it in a few minutes. We also offer something that most Wall Peel labs don’t have: we can offer Wall Peels as small as 8” x 8”. And all of that comes at a very affordable price.
To enable this product in your store, simply log in to your Fotomoto account, go to Store, select the Collection you want, and turn on Wall Peels.
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, as well as dozens of other partner sites and industry-specific, curated online galleries. Partners include LinkedIn, Art Directors Club, AIGA, TED, and others.
In addition to the Network, Behance offers Prosite. Leveraging the cutting-edge technology that supports the Behance Network platform, ProSite is a revolutionary new way to build, host, and manage your personal portfolio website. Tailored to the needs of the modern creative professional, ProSite allows users to create a fully customizable website, without touching a line of code. And, it seamlessly syncs your portfolio with the Behance Network for maximum efficiency and exposure.
With Fotomoto’s seamless integration in Behance Network’s platform, Behance Network and Prosite members now have the ability to sell prints of their portfolio content using Fotomoto. You can receive promotional pricing on the Prosite offering if you mention Fotomoto in the signup form.
Step-by-step instruction on adding Fotomoto to Behance accounts is here.
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 it look like their cards are from Fotomoto, and they were right. So we have changed the logo to a smaller, black & white stamp-looking graphic.
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 UI, and replaced Google Buzz with Google Plus.
Social sharing can now be turned on / off in the Dashboard under the eCard section.
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 authentic reprints of their covers, both on their website, and on their facebook fan page!
Very soon, you will be able to offer Fotomoto’s service to your fans on facebook too!
We have been quiet here in our blog, but we have been busy working on a lot of improvements:
As always, we welcome your feedback and comments in our Community. We will be rolling out several new updates and products during the next couple of weeks, stay tuned.
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 our members have been asking for this repeatedly: first with excitement, then with patience, and recently with frustration; and they are right to be frustrated - we got frustrated too. The problem is the right combination of quality, technology, and automation seems to be rare when it comes to print labs in Europe. While we were able to find good quality print labs, most of them didn’t have an API for automation. And the very few that did were mostly offering “snappy-fishy” print quality which is not suitable for our community.
After almost 2 years of “research and development”, we are happy that we finally found a great lab that offers (German) quality prints: WhiteWall. You may know them for the wide range of print products that they offer and their award-winning print quality. We have been quietly using them for a few weeks to make sure everything works before we announce it, and now we are excited to finally and officially say that we have a print lab partner in Europe! At this point we are only using WhiteWall for Premium Print orders, but soon we will be offering EU fulfillment for most of our products.
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 is coming to our accounting system.
Our members can offer their products in 5 different currencies: USD, GBP, EUR, CND, and AUD. As a US-based company, we can only keep our balance in USD. While we are going to continue offering these currencies to our members and their customers, we will have to keep everyone’s balance in USD. Starting July 18th we will convert all users’ balance to USD (based on the exchange rate of the day that the transaction happened). There will be no change for our US-based member. Non-US members will see all balances in USD as well as their transaction currency. We will continue sending you checks and PayPal payments in USD, but if you are using PayPal, you can simple receive your payments in your own currency (even if it’s not one of these 5 currencies).
If you have a non-USD balance and would like to receive your balance in your currency via PayPal, make sure to submit your Payment Request ( found in the Dashboard, Orders > Accounting page) before July 18th.