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Selling photo prints is one of the best ways to turn your passion for photography into meaningful income – but how can you seamlessly bring your photos to life and get them into the hands of interested customers?
With a passion for helping our customers thrive doing what they love, we searched long and hard for the optimal way to simplify the online selling experience for professional photographers across the country. This search led us to create an integration with Squarespace, an award-winning company that helps users just like you build beautiful and high functioning custom online storefronts.
Within just a few hours, you can go from staring at photos in a folder on your desktop to browsing various product options on your very own store. Extend a few hours into a few days, and you could be marketing your prints, driving sales, and watching happy customers display your proudest photographs in their homes – without ever having to put your hands on the product yourself.
To help you get started with a pivotal ecommerce site of your very own, we’ve outlined every step of the process down below.
If you prefer to learn through videos, you can find an extremely detailed and easy-to-follow guide to building a Squarespace ecommerce site here. You can also see our video guide to integrating your Squarespace storefront with Printique below.
For best results, we recommend watching both videos, then reading the guide below while you complete each step.
And with that, no further ado – here is our guide to selling your photo prints on Squarespace.
1. Create a Squarespace Account.
The first thing you’ll want to do is visit Squarespace.com and create a Squarespace account.
Note: If you already have an email address you use for your photography business, we recommend using it when you sign up.
2. Create a Squarespace Website.
Once you’ve created an account, you’ll want to create a Squarespace website. Squarespace offers a 7-day free trial for website creation. You can also connect your website design to a custom domain name once your website has been built – but definitely start to think about what you want your domain name to be!
Note: You will want your domain to be finalized before syncing your Printique products, for the easiest syncing process.
3. Choose from the available “online store” website templates.
Designing a Squarespace store isn’t complicated, thanks to their beautiful, professional, and functional website templates. Choose a template you love from their “online store” options. Choosing from this category ensures that your template will translate perfectly once you sync your photo products.
4. Add relevant business information to your website.
Now that you’ve selected your template, customize it with your business’s information. Add a personal logo, your business’s name (even if it’s just “Your Name’s Photography”), a summary of what your business does, and the contact information for your business.
In short, preview your website’s display and replace any of Squarespace’s default text with information relevant to your business.
5. Add payment and shipping information.
We’ll go into more detail about selecting your shipping options down below; for now, select between flat rate shipping and carrier calculated shipping and connect your PayPal or Stripe account for Squarespace payouts.
6. Connect your store to your Printique account.
Visit Printique.com and click the “Connect Your Squarespace Store” button.
7. Adjust the settings of each listed product.
Once you’ve connected your store, you’ll be prompted to edit the global product settings of the products made available to your site.
This means toggling product availability on and off (ex. Turning off canvas as a print option for your photographs) and editing the available sizes of your photos (ex. Restricting your products to a smaller size by unchecking any sizes larger than 8×10).
8. Choose and upload the photographs you want featured in your store.
Create a new Printique gallery and upload the images you want to list in your store.
Note: To upload a photograph to a Printique gallery it will have to be a JPG file. You can batch convert other file types to JPGs with IrfanView.
9. Edit the crop and name of each image.
Once you’ve uploaded all of your preferred images, you’ll be prompted to name each of your images. These names will be displayed as the product name on your storefront, so choose carefully.
On this step, you’ll also be able to adjust the way your image crops on various print sizes. If one of the sizes crops your image unfavorably, remember that you can turn off its availability.
10. Adjust your pricing markups.
Now that your photos have been uploaded, it’s time to adjust your pricing markups. When setting your markups, you can either select to use the same percentage markup for each category (ex. 300% markup on every product) or set unique markups for each category (ex. 200% markup on canvas, 600% markup on standard prints).
11. Choose your shipping preferences.
Next, you’ll be prompted to specify your shipping options. When choosing your shipping options, you can either select flat rate shipping or dimension dependent shipping.
With flat rate shipping, Squarespace will defer to the flat rate shipping cost you’ve input on the back end, through your Squarespace account. This self-selected flat rate shipping cost will be factored into the pricing and markup information that Squarespace will receive from us and use to calculate payment values shown to customers.
With dimension dependent shipping, the dimensional and weight information of each product will be sent to Squarespace. Squarespace will then apply their shipping cost scale to these numbers, and provide your customers with a cost of shipping at checkout.
12. Make sure your Squarespace shipping preferences align.
Once you’ve selected your shipping preference on the Printique side, make sure you align this selection from the backend on Squarespace. As we referenced in the previous step, if you’ve chosen flat rate shipping, you need to choose flat rate shipping and assign a shipping value through Squarespace as well. If you’ve chosen dimension dependent shipping, you will have to select the “Dependent on Weight” or “Carrier Calculated” shipping option from your Squarespace account.
13. Edit your billing preferences.
When you reach the billing preferences page, you’ll be able to choose between automatic order processing and manual order processing. We recommend selecting automatic order processing for quickest turn around time. This will remove the need for you to approve and process orders one at a time before Printique can begin printing the order.
To proceed with automatic processing, simply add a credit card to be charged when an order is placed on Squarespace. You will only be charged the base cost of printing, and you will receive the total order value (your marked up price) as soon as the payment is processed and paid out from Squarespace to you.
14. Upload your reseller certificate.
On the next step, you’ll be able to upload your reseller certificate so that you won’t be charged tax.
15. Make final edits to your uploaded products.
Finally, review your product listings and make final edits to your product descriptions and available sizes.
16. Sync to your storefront.
Select your site from the drop down menu of site options under each image, and set your products live to your storefront!
17. Visit your Squarespace store.
Visit your website and explore the products your customers now have at their disposal.
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