Interesting discussion on marketing youth sports photography.
Jay
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Performance of On-line Commerce in School Photography, Part 1
Online photo ordering has recently gained a lot of traction in school photo marketplace. Our company, Marco Photo Service, has been engaged in the online model for a number of years. We've been collecting data for some time and thought it would be interesting to make some of it public, and possibly start a discussion.
Everybody's raging right now about pre-pay online services and web-enabled proofing which have really begun to hit their stride this year. These areas are probably going to prove the tipping point for our industry that takes us from cash or check into the internet age, but we'll look at these in a different post.
On-line re-ordering has been around a little longer and we've got more data on it. Here's a summary, but if you would like to know more about it you should contact us. We'll be happy to go into detail.
Hard Facts
Number of subjects offered opportunity to order online: approx 200,000
Average sale to those who ordered: $48.00
Purchase rate: About 1%
Things to Think About
As a rule, if you assume $15.00 - 20.00 per unit retail, getting participation at or above one percent is the key to profitability. If you can drive participation past one percent, profitability is almost assured.
Don't get fixated on only the hard numbers. Remember that outsourcing your customer service to the web can be a great money saver. Example: one large studio processed 305 reorders through their site last fall. At 30 minutes total labor saved per reorder at $15.00 / hour (that's conservative, we think) that studio saved 152.5 man hours -- or $2287.50.
Schools with great pre-pay buy rates will probably not be net profitable, simply because most of the parents have already purchased. They are just going to be less likely to order again.
Novelty items like coffee mugs and aprons do sell -- but not very much. The overwhelming leader in terms of sales are still traditional flat prints with no enhancements.
Again, if you want to know more, drop us a line.
What have others experienced?
Jay
Everybody's raging right now about pre-pay online services and web-enabled proofing which have really begun to hit their stride this year. These areas are probably going to prove the tipping point for our industry that takes us from cash or check into the internet age, but we'll look at these in a different post.
On-line re-ordering has been around a little longer and we've got more data on it. Here's a summary, but if you would like to know more about it you should contact us. We'll be happy to go into detail.
Hard Facts
Number of subjects offered opportunity to order online: approx 200,000
Average sale to those who ordered: $48.00
Purchase rate: About 1%
Things to Think About
As a rule, if you assume $15.00 - 20.00 per unit retail, getting participation at or above one percent is the key to profitability. If you can drive participation past one percent, profitability is almost assured.
Don't get fixated on only the hard numbers. Remember that outsourcing your customer service to the web can be a great money saver. Example: one large studio processed 305 reorders through their site last fall. At 30 minutes total labor saved per reorder at $15.00 / hour (that's conservative, we think) that studio saved 152.5 man hours -- or $2287.50.
Schools with great pre-pay buy rates will probably not be net profitable, simply because most of the parents have already purchased. They are just going to be less likely to order again.
Novelty items like coffee mugs and aprons do sell -- but not very much. The overwhelming leader in terms of sales are still traditional flat prints with no enhancements.
Again, if you want to know more, drop us a line.
What have others experienced?
Jay
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