Do you have an eye for photography and a desire to sell pictures online? Before you start your new adventure in digital sales, it’s wise to explore all your options. While microstock sites might be the starting point for many new merchants, they’re not the only option. In fact, they’re also not often the best choice. When you sell the rights to your work to a microstock site, you’re typically not able to control the selling price for your work, and you’ll never earn as much as the products are worth. Whether you take a one-time lump sum or settle for a fraction of the earnings from each sale, you’re still only reaching a small percentage of your total sales potential. The alternative is to run your own web store, which too many new merchants immediately dismiss as an option due to misconceptions about the cost and labor involved. Choosing the right systems and services from the beginning can make an independent web store feasible on even the smallest budget while boosting your earning power exponentially.

What You Need to Sell Pictures

While it may seem like a complicated and labor-intensive prospect, starting and maintaining a web store can be quite easy. The key to success is choosing systems which streamline and simplify the process while providing all the tools you need to sell pictures.

First and foremost, you need reliable and trusted payment processing systems. Names like Google Wallet and PayPal are trusted by your customers, and also provide you with the tools you need to manage payments received. While these systems make quick work of processing payments, they don’t provide the secure file hosting you need to protect your work. They also don’t manage content delivery, so order fulfillment is also left for you to manage. This is where a dedicated eCommerce platform can make all the difference. By seamlessly integrating PayPal and Google Wallet while also hosting your files and automating order fulfillment, a services like PayLoadz.com streamlines your entire business model. Choosing a high-quality service also allows you to skip the expensive professional website in favor of free blog sites or inexpensive template sites you build yourself. There’s more to a great eCommerce platform, though. Since you can’t sell pictures if no one knows your business exists outside of your extended social network, taking advantage of built-in marketing systems is vital. Fortunately, the marketing tools included with a quality eCommerce platform take the risk out of marketing.

How Affiliate Networks Make it Easier to Sell Pictures

When you invest in prepaid advertising, you’re essentially gambling with your marketing budget. You have no way of knowing how many people will click on your ad and ultimately make a purchase, versus the number of people who will simply keep scrolling right past your ad or sponsored social media posts. Whether you make no sales or a hundred, you’re out the same amount of money.

Affiliate networks built in to your eCommerce service connect you with marketers who essentially work on commission, earning a small portion of the proceeds from only those sales they generate. You’re able to boost the signal and expand the reach of your brand without investing money you don’t have in expensive marketing. By bringing everything you need together under a single virtual umbrella, an eCommerce platform makes running a web store cheaper, easier and more lucrative than working with microstock sites. Get started today, and find out just how easy and rewarding it can be to sell pictures as stock images online.