Serve more customers by organizing your images (Part 1)

My next series of blog postings will focus on the benefits of properly organizing your images when selling onsite during events. I will discuss various techniques that can help you maximize your onsite sales while eliminating some of the headaches usually associated with selling your images onsite.

Every time I attend a conference or seminar about selling images onsite, the main focus points when looking at maximizing sales are the location of the event, the age group of the participants and how much money is spent to participate in this activity or event.

One subject that I feel is often left out; is how to convert customer interest into a sale. What does this mean? Let’s say you are at an event with great exposure and parent are eager to buy images.

What needs to happen for you to get a sale?

• Images need to be presented to the participants
• Participants need to place an order
• Payments need to be collected.

If by chance any of these steps take too long, customer interest will drop and the sale might never happen; which means you lose money.

3 keys to closing the sale

• Allow your customer to quickly view their images
• Allow your customer to easily place an order
• Make sure you or your staff can easily view orders and collect payments.

So what’s the big deal with organizing your images? For a customer to buy his or her images, they need to be able to quickly see the images you have to offer. Having to browse through thousands of images will make them lose interest and diminish your chances of making a sale.

By organizing your images, you will make sure that your customers will be able to view only their images. Quickly viewing their images also leads to a faster checkout; therefore allowing your viewing stations to handle more volume.

Benefits of organizing images

• Keeps your customers' interest level high
• Convert your customers' interest into more actual sales
• Quicker checkout allows you to handle larger volumes of customers.

A powerful workflow system that allows you to easily organize your images, combined with self-serve viewing stations is the most effective way of achieving your goals. Keep this in mind the next time you cover an event. If you feel it can generate a lot of customer interest; make sure you focus on key points that convert interest into hard sales.

How can PicSphere help you?

PicSphere is proud to launch a brand new feature designed to help photographers convert customer interest into actual sales. This feature was inspired by your feedback and we want to thank everyone who has participated in the creation of this ground breaking addition to our solution.

Visit our website to learn how ExpressManager with its new Customer PhotoFilter feature can help you.

4 viewing stations using one computer

In February, Pascal (our CTO) started testing devices from NComputing. They have some really useful technology that makes it simple and affordable to build viewing stations.

NComputing's multi-user terminal boxes allow you to add three users to an existing PC. Each terminal box connects to its own screen, mouse & keyboard. These small terminals are then connected to a desktop using a normal network cable.

Basically it creates a mini network of terminals and shares the computing power equally among them. Each terminal works independently from the other. Here is an overview video:



Pascal has tested the X300 and the L230. Both hardware models worked with PicSphere's kiosk solution, but he recommends the X300. It is simply less demanding on the network and that is a big advantage. A local photographer chose to try it out at a recent event, so we jumped in to the car to witness it in a "real-world" environment; they ended up working great. Here is a review of using NComputing's X300 to run viewing stations.

Pros:

• Very affordable.
• Easy to install and setup.
• Compact to transport and display.
• Low power consumption (the network cable supplies power eliminating the need for separate power adapters).

Cons:

• Not touch-screen compatible.
• The maximal screen resolution is 1024x768 (we updated the PicStores Kiosk to run on that resolution and it looks great).
• If something happens and the host PC goes down, you lose the linked stations.
• The maximum distance between the units to the host PC is 10 meters (15 feet).

Note that most of these limitations do not exist for the L Series Ethernet-based access terminals.

Price:
Tigerdirect is selling the NComputing X300 3 User Expansion Kit for $219.99 and 3-User Terminal Computing Bundle for $734.99 (included 3 screens, mousses and keyboards). You will also need one desktop computer.

Overall, it is a very affordable and a practical way to run viewing stations. It will suit the needs of most of our users but as always feel free to discuss your particular needs with our engineers before you make a hardware purchase.