[Murtasma]

The more and more I read up on these photo selling sites the more I keep getting the impression that these sites are all rip offs. What I'm noticing here is

1. They charge you for an account (while at the same time making money off pictures you sell. Some sites don't even give you more then a few GB of storage. Come on I bought a domain name for $3.00 a month with unlimited storage and bandwidth.)
2. They take a very large percentage of your sale. (On some sites you can increase your percentage but all this does is effectively increase the cost of the print to the customer)
3. They only often pay you if you reach certain amount of sales


After having several images on Redbubble for over a year with many of them having several thousand views and 0 sales this is beginning to look like a waste of time. If I spend the time to solicit my photography and generate an interest in it Redbubble will always make more money then I do on a sale. If I want to make $80.00 off a 11x14 image I effectively have to charge a customer $200.00. At those rates it will be less expensive for my customers if I was able to print and mail my own images from home. I could also probably sell more images because they would be priced much lower then if I was to use one of these online services.

The business model for these sites appears to be the following.

1. Create a website for people to upload photos along with a merchant account to process credit cards.
2. Take other peoples artwork and sell it for them while often times taking 70% of the profit.
3. Print the image and mail it (charged to the customer and photographer so you don't loose any money)
3. Do nothing and wait for more orders to be processed.

I think I'm in the wrong business.

I think a Business model that would be much more fair toward photographers and customers would be a set amount of money the company takes based on the size they want printed. After that the photographer can select how much they wish to make on an image.

Why is it that I have to increase the cost of a print if I want to make more money when it costs Red Bubble the same amount of money to print and mail the image? I have to increase my margin almost 100% on Red Bubble to take anything home that would be of interest thus making my prints very expensive to purchase.

Note: The past year my images have been for sale with a %30 markup the default. A 11x14 at these rates sells for about $50.00 and I barely make over $10.00. At these rates that's just a plain rip off. I can get my work into a local gallery here for free, probably sell more images and make more money working personally with galleries.

I can sign up for a merchant account or use pay pay to process orders. Purchase a nice printer that can print 11x14s and work with customers personally through my website to ensure them a good fair price on a image. It's not like we are sitting her selling 1,000's of images a day. I can easily handle a few sales as they come in and pocket much more money then going through some 3rd party that uses my photography to turn a dime. I can purchase a nice dry mount press for a few hundred bucks if that on craiglist if I'm patient enough. Perform my own matting and framing. This will also ensure the print quality I receive is spot on (having a calibrated monitor and printer) the only thing I don't think would be viable is metallic prints. I haven't done any research into this so I don't know what is required to make prints like this.

I could actually make more money as well if I just took the customers order and had an online printing company print the work for me usually for about 5 - 10 dollars at 11x14. Receive the print at my house and do the mounting here then deliver the image to the customer. This process may even be the more viable road to go down.

EDIT: None of this pertains to stock photography sites which sell images for a few cents but it's much easier to generate a sale when a sale only costs the customer a few cents. This is a totally differnet business model and for a differnet set of customers. What I'm talking about here is stictly sales to a private collector.
What are your thoughts on this people?