My Storefront, a new feature of PhotoWorks.com, allows users to create an e-commerce site to sell photo books and other products containing their images.PhotoWorks, a Seattle-based imaging software company and photo printing service, has launched a new self-publishing service for photographers. The new service, called My Storefront, allows users of PhotoWorks' site for photographers to create an e-commerce site to sell their work in print or book form.
PhotoWorks, which shifted to digital photography software and services in 1999 when it changed its name from Seattle FilmWorks, launched PhotoWorks.com in 2004 as a photo sharing site, competing with sites like Shutterfly and Flickr.
The new My Storefront allows users to set prices for self-published photo books and prints. "We're going to incorporate all of our products into Storefront," said PhotoWorks CEO Andy Wood in an interview with Publish.com. "By October, users will be able to sell their own designs and themes (for PhotoWorks.com sites) as well."
The My Storefront service is free; PhotoWorks makes its revenue off the printing services that support the site. Users can set any price for the products sold through the site above and beyond the printing cost.
PhotoWorks is hardly the first site to dive into self-publishing. LuLu.com, a book-publishing service started by Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, was one of the first web-based publishers to provide on-demand publishing of user-created content in book form. Café Press started providing storefronts for users to sell their own images on t-shirts, posters, and other products in 1999. And Flickr and other photo sites already offer printing of images from their users in a number of formats.
But Wood said the differentiator for PhotoWorks is its focus on photographers, and its e-commerce capabilities. "Those other sites are very focused on one aspect of this. Flickr doesn't have commerce, and (the other self-publishing sites) are mostly print-oriented."
Most of the initial interest in My Storefront—which in its first 10 days of operation has been used to create over 160 e-stores—has been for "cookbooks, travel guides, and wedding photos", Wood said. The new service has generated thousands of visitors in the first week, and while Wood would not share revenue numbers, he said that they were proportional to the visitor growth, and that "performance is in line with expectations."
