Thoughts on using Squarespace-Smugmug-Zenfolio as a sales portal?

mauckcg

Senior Member
I'm looking at ways to subsidize my gear lust and travel habits. There are plenty of opportunities at swap meets and various shows for physical sales, so that isn't an issue.

I'm not sure where to go with a website with built in sales capability. Squarespace, Zenfolio, and Smugmug are the first three that come to mind. All three have some form of built in sales capability. Each from what I have seen are easy to set up, maintain, upgrade, and are flexible enough to grow with you. What kind of experience do you guys have with these sites?
 

RocketCowboy

Senior Member
I haven't tested Squarespace yet, but it looks to me like they potentially have the best analytics around how your website is being accessed. I do have both Zenfolio and Smugmug ... in that regard using Google Analytics with Zenfolio has been pretty interesting as well ... except that Zenfolio jumps the ecommerce portion of your site outside of your domain name for SSL purposes, so Google Analytics loses track of users at that point. I really like Smugmug and used it until I wanted to start selling product ... I liked the fulfillment options with Zenfolio better, plus the ability to put up event pictures with a quick rough edit for preview, and then have any sales need approval prior to shipping to the labs. This lets me take a second edit on purchased prints before they go off to print, so I can correct crop, etc for the actual print size ordered.

Between Zenfolio and Smugmug, I felt that Zenfolio had a better selection of themes to work with, and it was easier to customize their appearance for what I wanted. I was looking to have tight integration between either Zenfolio or Smugmug back into Wordpress as my ideal scenario, but both seem to be missing that. Smugmug might give easier access to CSS/html customization over Zenfolio's theme interface in that regard. Both Zen and Smug would need to work as subdomains under your main wordpress domain.
 

carguy

Senior Member
After consideration, I went with Zenfolio a couple of years ago. I love the site, easy to use, etc. S
Shortly after I set it up, I found out about Squarespace. I may have chosen that instead, but Between the two, it's pretty close for me.

Maybe a member here has a discount code for squarespace and I have one for zenfolio if you're interested :)
 

mauckcg

Senior Member
From what I have read through on both Zenfolio and Squarespace, Squarespace seems to have the better integrated ecommerce end of things. I don't think I need Smugmug. NationsPhotoLab so far for me has been perfect, and they are able to ship straight to a client using my shipping address as the return label.

I think i'm leaning towards Zenfolio or Squarspace at this point. I will need something up and running before the end of May so I have a bit of time to research this through and take my time setting something up.
 

RocketCowboy

Senior Member
I just did my first event with orders going through Zenfolio to mpix for delivery. I'll let you know how that goes once shipments hit customers. I'm also getting set up with mpixpro, but it looks like Zenfolio makes a lot of that integration automatic...in other words, I don't have to have accounts with the labs directly, the product flows through Zenfolio to the labs direct.

That said, I've heard a fair number of Zen users switch to not having Zenfolio fulfill the orders for them, and consequently giving up 7% of the sale price to Zen. If/when I get to that point, alternatives like WooCommerce make a lot of sense, but I also don't want to be a road block in the work flow either.


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