Selling your images online can be seriously complicated. You can try to submit images to some of the larger stock image marketplaces, but getting approved is tough. Even if you do get some of your images through, the marketplaces will take up to 85% of your royalties away from you.
The alternative is doing it yourself, but it’s complex and time consuming, and things things start getting expensive pretty quickly. Build a site from scratch and it’ll cost you thousands. Online website builders charge a premium for e-commerce add-ons, selling prints is another add-on, and fulfilling them is another add-on on top.
Picfair Stores might have just changed the game.
If you want to have a look around a Picfair Plus Store, check out Picfair Photographer Stefan Ferreira’s at https://shop.stefanferreira.com
For the last few years, Picfair has existed as an open-to-all fair photography marketplace. They let you upload your images, choose your own prices, and instead of taking 85% of your royalties away from you when you make a sale, they just add 20% on top of whatever price you’ve set. The community is pretty big - over 35,000 photographers in 130 countries - and through Picfair they’ve sold images to National Geographic, Google, CondeNast, Jack Daniels and many other global brands. If you’ve got images on the platform, you’re also eligible for commissioned work they source via their Picfair Studio agency.
The Picfair marketplace
But a few months ago, Picfair did something huge. They gave every single one of their photographers their own free store. Yep, you can now sell digital downloads and prints from your own personalised store… and Picfair’s marketplace ... at the same time. It’s like Wix, Shopify, and Shutterstock merged into one, with the photographer in full control of everything, and paid fairly.
Best of all: it’s incredibly simple. All you have to do is upload your images and set your prices, and they’ll appear in both your Store and the Picfair marketplace straight away. If someone purchases your images, you cash out ... and that’s it!
Under the hub, Picfair powers everything: it allocates licences for downloads (editorial, commercial, and advertising), and manages your print orders from production to delivery (giclee art prints, framed prints, and canvas wraps, shipped globally).
The Stores themselves are sleek and minimal - with super-simple checkout options in multiple currencies, and all of your images are protected with a watermark including your name. For full store customization, their Picfair Plus package lets you add albums, custom image ordering, and multiple image layouts including full-screen images. Picfair Plus also allows you to connect your own domain, add your own social media links, and strip away the Picfair branding.
You can select multiple display options, from albums to full-screen images
The dashboard for controlling your Store is simple and intuitive - you can organise your images in multiple ways, choose what you want your visitors to see as your homepage, select light and dark themes, and select from multiple images sizes. The interface for connecting your domain is superb - you can have your Picfair Store running from your own domain within minutes.
It’s easy to manage your settings
You Can Customize the Appearance Your Store From Your Picfair Dashboard
Picfair Stores is another big step for a company that has always prided itself on putting photographers first. In an industry where the most important people - the photographers - are often thought of last, Picfair seems to be always working to make things better. Alongside their radically-fair royalty splits, their work promoting female photography and emerging young photographers has also garnered a lot of attention, as has their campaign against free image sites.
For anyone wanting to sell their images online, Picfair has now become a one-stop shop, meaning you can spend more time doing what you care about most: getting out there and taking beautiful images.
You can sign up and get your own free photography store here.
Looks interesting. I'll check it out!
Since this is a "sponsored" post, I'd love to see Fstoppers do an impartial review of Picfair.