About a month ago, we announced that we will be working on adding e-commerce functionalities to picu in some form or another, and created a quick survey to learn more about how our customers would actually want to use this in the real world.
We got a lot of answers and some really great ideas back in return, and wanted to share a quick update on the current status, what we learned and what decisions we made so far.
Some quick facts from the survey:
- With 87%, almost anyone wants to be able to sell Digital Files, followed by Prints (66,7%) and Albums (45,8)
- Existing use of e-commerce plugins is split fairly even between 45,8% with no e-commerce plugin at all and 41,7% on WooCommerce
- Same for Payment Gateways, where 69,6% are experienced with PayPal and 60,9% with Stripe
As for the detailed workflows, we left the question intentionally wide open to get a better picture of what people envision when they think of selling images.
What stuck out the most, is that the actual payment functionality and extended shop settings seem to be a nice bonus for many but the most important step is communicating prices to clients and make them aware what options they have. This came as a little bit of a surprise but – together with the numbers above about existing shop usage – gave us a much clearer picture of what we should build first.
So, here’s what we decided to tackle first:
- Set a price per image in a gallery
- Set a bundle price for a gallery with options to upsell additional images
- Display those prices in the frontend to the client
- Display the final total in the approval form (which in this case becomes more of a cart/checkout)
- Display ordered images in the backend for the photographer
- Bonus: A very basic first integration with Stripe and/or Paypal
This functionality will cover a lot of ground and will allow our customers to sell images through picu, but we’re not going to stop there. Technically, this will just be a first stepping stone in the direction of more extensive e-commerce integrations.
To make sure we get this right, we plan to release a beta version first to let a few people test this properly, for which some of you already volunteered (thanks everyone!). If you would like to be added to our pool of beta testers, please get in touch.