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Old 26-09-10, 12:27 AM
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GeoffWessex GeoffWessex is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Kingston, Ontario
Posts: 1,288
Smugmug and Zenfolio work a bit like that..... secure galleries so that you can give the password to whoever your single customer is, they can pass that to as many wedding guests (plus those that couldn't make it) as they like. They have quite a nice choice of print finishes and albums etc and pay online, direct to smugmug or zenfolio... credit card or paypal. Smugmug takes an annual fee of under $40.... Zenfolio is, I think, less.

The companies take commission (15% for Smugmug) on the prints they make and mail/courier to the customer. They are both American companies but deal with mixed currencies and I think they both have partnerships with printers in the UK - in fact Smugmug has only two print partners, one in California and one in the UK, so there's not one in Canada and I'm looking around here for a company that might supply the same service..... pretty ludicrous to mail/courier prints across borders and about 3000 miles. They're the biggest suppliers of what they call "Print Fulfillment" in USA/Canada so they regularly send prints from California to the East Coast - totally and utterly NOT environmentally-friendly, but they haven't even heard of 'carbon footprints' on this continent. However, with their UK printer the distances must be much more reasonable.

Anybody with a couple of million pounds to spare, and who knows some tame programmers, should leap into this business and concentrate on smaller territories before it's all gone. Plenty of people in the UK are looking for alternatives (though maybe they don't realise that Smugmug also prints in the UK). Try Googling for 'Smugmug UK' and see how much interest there is in finding somebody as good as them, but local to them in UK.

I'm still looking for somebody like that in Canada - I hear there's one in Winnipeg but even that's got to be 1000 miles away - it's certainly a solid two days drive.
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