The three ways to sell photos on the Internet

Whether you are a photography amateur or passionate, it is quite possible nowadays to monetize your activity to make ends meet or really makes it a living. In this article, we present you three techniques to stack all the odds in your favour.

This is the most common and the easiest wayto earn money quickly with your shots. Indeed there is a strong demand from companies in terms of photos, images. The first sources of images for professionals are the image banks.

What is an image bank? An image bank, also called “microstock”, is an online image database acting as a marketplace between buyers and sellers.

The advantages of an image bank:
• Simplicity (registration in a few clicks, instant uploading).
• Visibility (important traffic: the more visitors, the greater your chances of selling).

The disadvantages of an image bank:
• High commissions (from 30% to 60% depending on the case).
• The competition (which will unfortunately force you to lower your prices).

Here are the 3 main image banks on which you can sell your photos:
• Shopping
• Shutterstock
• iStock

No need to beat around the bush, if you want to sell your photos independently, there are three solutions:

The first is to create your own merchant website. In this case your only limit is your imagination. But be careful because it is a long and winding road. You will need good computer skills to create and reference a website by yourself, especially if you want to sell your photos from your site and register online payments.

The next is to solicit pre-designed interfaces such as those provided by Photoshelter. With this solution you can enjoy your own website in a few moments by paying a monthly subscription starting at 10 € a month. Please note that Photoshelter is convenient because it is completely turnkey but relatively expensive because they are puncturing 10% on all your sales, in addition to transaction fees.

The last one is a mid-solution between the two we just evoked. You can create your own website using simple but effective tools like Wix or Squarespace. We talked about it in this article. And thanks to Payfacile’s digital file sales module you can add a purchase button for your photos. Your customer pays online on the Payfacile sales page that you have set up and a download link is sent to your customer once the payment has been validated. This is the cheapest solution on the market: € 12 a month for access to the add-on module with unlimited secure hosting + 1% commission, in addition to transaction fees. Much cheaper than Photoshelter!

You don’t want to spend time creating your own website? You can take advantage of the social networks such as Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest to present your work and simply copy and paste the URL link of the sales page of your photos in the comments. Creating a sales page for a photo or a pack of photos only takes a few seconds with Payfacile.com and does not require any technical skills. No more need of a website! Visitors of your Facebook page will simply have to click on the sales page’s web address to order the ‘source file’ of the photo and pay online. WithPayfacile a good part of the photographers simply send an e-mail to their client with the link of the sales page: the customer opens the mail, clicks on the link, pays online and receives the download link for his photo with the confirmation email and the invoice.

Here is our complete guide for selling digital files.