lovelifey: [Photography] Instaproofs Review: An All-In-One Platform to Sell Your Photography Online

The post Instaproofs Review: An All-In-One Platform to Sell Your Photography Online appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Jackie Lamas.

Looking for a better way to share and sell your photos online? Then Instaproofs might be the right solution for you.

Whether you do in-person sales or online, Instaproofs can help you organize your sessions, sell products and prints, and even help with contracts. Read more about the platform in today’s article review.

Instaproofs Review: An All-In-One Platform to Sell Your Photography Online

What is Instaproofs?

Instaproofs is a subscription-based platform online that helps photographers use online galleries to sell products, prints, and digitals to their clients worldwide.

They have been around for 15 years and over time have improved their platform to offer beautifully-designed galleries, easy user-friendly cart systems, and create more avenues for photographers to earn more after completing their work.

They are similar to other services like Pixieset and require a monthly subscription. Although, they do have a free plan available for those who use online galleries for in-person sales and can work within the 3GB limit.

Here are the current monthly options for Instaproofs that you can choose from:

Key features

The key features that Instaproofs offers are:

Online gallery platform and shopping cart with custom pricing and products
Cloud storage
Contacts and invoicing
Mobile apps
Digital delivery
Reports
Multi-lingual
Marketing tools and email tracking
Managed accounts for multiple users
Migration services from previous online gallery service (extra charge for this $3 per gallery).
Lab fulfillment services
Watermarking
Quick payments through Stripe

The service also offers a 14-day free trial so you can poke around and see if it’s right for you and your business.

In-Depth Review

Galleries

These three the are the biggest features that Instaproofs provides. Whether you are a digital delivery photographer or focus more on prints, there are endless features that you can take advantage of to get you more sales.

The online galleries support high-resolution images up to 50MB per image making sure that you’re able to offer your clients the best image quality available for their images. You’re also able to upload smaller resolution images if you’re looking to present the images during in-person sales. This can save you storage space the monthly plan.

The galleries also have the option of choosing the image you want to be featured for the entire gallery as well as category featured images which can be different. You’re also able to upload the HTML code for a video slideshow if you’ve created one – all to captivate your clients right from the start.

When setting up your galleries, you have all the options in the same window so that you can set up the purchase minimum, slideshow music, whether you want the photos to display mostly horizontal or vertical, choose a price list for the gallery, and categories.

Currently, they’ve added the option to upload to multiple categories simultaneously for faster uploads making it easier to organize and categorize the images for your clients.

Adding custom links and music to the slideshows is also a great way to engage your clients during the selling process. Another great plugin: Direct uploading from Aperture, Lightroom, or FTP applications.

Not into selling digitals? You don’t have to. The galleries offer the photographer to have a minimum purchase amount, offer only web-sized digitals or only watermarked digital images.

You have full control over how you want to set up each individual gallery. You can give your clients permission to hide images, download all, or none, and a customized link. You can also have guests who enter the link to only be able to purchase images and not download at all. Each gallery is personalized as much or as little as you want.

From the galleries, you’re able to create mobile apps that hold 50 images from a particular gallery. You can also make one without a pre-existing gallery, where the client can save the mobile app onto their smartphone and have 50 images to view and share on the go! Especially useful to do sneak peeks/previews.

Shopping cart and selling

Instaproofs’ motto is “Sell more prints” and that is exactly what they aim for. More than a digital delivery service, they make it really user friendly for photographers to set up price sheets, sales, coupons, and products to the storefront for clients to purchase.

You can also choose to create add-ons so that you can maximize the sale. Rather than just selling a print, you can also add on the frame and offer your clients more value for their purchases.

When creating the shopping cart, you can also use lab pricing and a certain markup percentage to make it easier to set pricing. This can be really useful for beginner photographers who are getting into selling products and don’t really know how to go about pricing their prints and products.

From the cart, you can activate whether you’ll want to sell prints in black and white and/or sepia. This is a preference and each photographer can set up the cart as they wish.

There are many features to the shopping cart that gives the photographer full control of what to sell, how many, bulk pricing, options for black and white or sepia, cropping to help clients crop properly, lab fulfillment, pricing sheets, discounts, sales, coupons, promotions, and much more.

It’s a complete selling platform for you and user friendly for your clients. You will need a Stripe account in order to activate the storefront in order to get paid.

Contracts and invoicing

Instaproofs have added contracts and invoicing to their services and allows photographers to create their own contracts or use a pre-made template.

Choose templates for weddings, portraits, model releases for both adults and minors, independent contractor agreement (freelance work or similar) or you can make your own.

Just fill in the fields and required information, then choose to save a draft or finalize and send it to your client for signature.

Right from the contracts window, you are also able to create an invoice for your client by filling in the information fields for the invoice.

You can also choose an online gallery for the invoice in the event that you’ve already made a gallery.

Choose to attach the contract to the invoice, add an auto-reminder, and save your invoices as templates for future use.

Reports

Another great feature for photographers is to get reports of what you’re selling, products most purchased, email deliveries, and much more. This can be really great to see how your business is doing year to year.

Pros and cons

The biggest pro for signing up with Instaproofs is the number of features it offers photographers all from the same platform. Meaning, you don’t have to use different services to send gallery invites, emails including cart and expiration reminders.

The service allows photographers to ultimately customize the entire interface from adding your logo to the galleries, custom links, custom products, and print options, add-ons, and pricing sheets.

Instaproofs also has a referral program that gives existing users the opportunity to get more storage (2gb per referral) when a photographer signs up and says you sent them. It’s a great incentive if you’re a satisfied customer.

The con may be the price and limited galleries in the free and basic options.

There is also a commission fee for the free option and limited cloud storage.

We’ve rounded other top services so you can compare them and determine which is best for your business.

Instaproofs leads in cloud storage in the bottom level monthly subscriptions but doesn’t offer an unlimited version for companies with a higher volume. Which is a big con if you’re a multi-photographer studio that needs unlimited galleries and storage space for high resolution selling and viewing.

Also, it’s important to note that Instaproofs isn’t an online archiving site and so if you’re looking for a service that backs up your digital files, you might want to look elsewhere. It’s primarily for uploading client photos and selling photo products.

Conclusion

Instaproofs has a lot of features that aren’t just bells and whistles. Many of the top photographers like Jonathan Canlas, Laura Murray, and Abby Grace use Instaproofs for their own businesses.

Having an all-in-one platform for both product-based photographers and digital format photographers, with customization in all of their features, gives you a great advantage in generating more sales and offering a beautiful and easy to use interface for your clients to view, enjoy, share, and buy their images.