7. Sales & Business Management

Newsletters are a great way to communicate upcoming sales or convey special messages to your customer audience. Similar to communication profiles, they allow you to target specific types of customers and automatically pull in personal data using the placeholders. The primary difference is that a newsletter is a one-off notification that you manually send, while communication profiles are a series of notifications that are automatically sent based on the job triggers.

Within your photo job, go to your “Selling” tab and scroll down to Newsletters.

Once your job is set to selling, get ready for the orders to start coming in! Once an order has been placed in your online shop, it will appear in your Orders tab. In many cases, a paid order will be immediately transferred to the lab you are using in your price profile (see Quick Tips for exceptions).

You should notify our support team at support@gotphoto.com immediately if you need to make a change to an order that’s already been placed.

To view your placed orders, go to Orders.

GotPhoto can fully support photographers who choose to fulfill some/all of their own orders. This functionality is an advanced feature that has to be added to your GotPhoto account, so please contact our customer support team at support@gotphoto.com if you would like to use this feature.

If you already have the Production feature added to your account, any orders that you need to produce will appear in the “Production” tab on the main taskbar, or simply by clicking Production.

If you turned on Manual Revision in your job settings, orders that have been placed will be held in your Manual Revisions tab, rather than being sent straight to the lab. Orders that are in Manual Revision will need to be reviewed/modified and then manually released to the lab for production.

You can access your manual revision queue by going to Orders → Manual Revision, or simply by clicking on Manual Revision.

If you have selected batch shipping for your job, your orders will either:

• Remain in the batch shipping order collector until your batch deadline has passed (automatic processing), or
• Remain in the batch shipping order collector until you manually release the batch (manual processing)

Go to Orders → Batch Shipping, or simply click on Batch Shipping to view your batch orders and release them for production (if applicable). 

When it comes time to do your accounting, all invoices that were issued to customers in your name are permanently stored in your GotPhoto account and can be viewed by going to Orders → Invoices, or simply by clicking on Invoices.

Here, you can export the invoices as a data list to simplify entry into accounting software. Or, the invoices can be downloaded collectively as a ZIP file and then saved locally. 

You will regularly receive an invoice for your GotPhoto account basic fees and service fees. The invoices are issued in two situations:

• Regularly on the last day of the month, and 
• For each payment that is made. 

These invoices are also permanently stored in your GotPhoto account and can be downloaded as a PDF or CSV file at any time. 

You can find them by going to  Your name → Your account → Invoices, or by clicking on Invoices.

Statistics are an extremely valuable tool for deriving key insights about your photography business.

GotPhoto’s reporting allows you to drill down on revenue, order values, and products so that you are always clear about what’s working well and what needs improvement. With this knowledge, you can be strategic about exactly what you need to do to grow your business.

You can see statistics for a job by opening up the job and heading to the Statistics sub-tab, or you can view overall reporting for your account by going to Statistics on the main taskbar at the top of your account.

Complaints are never fun and you do everything you can to avoid them, but they are a reality of any business. 

Handling a complaint is just as important as handling the sale itself, as a complaint experience can either restore the customer’s trust or permanently put them off. Your GotPhoto account has a complaints management feature to help you seamlessly manage customer complaints.

The best part of GotPhoto’s complaints management feature is that everything is stored in one place, from the original order, to the complaint, how it’s handled, and finally resolved. It’s also integrated with the lab so that issues involving the lab can easily be assigned to the lab for feedback and resolution.

You can view customer complaints by going to Orders → Feedback / Complaints, or simply by clicking Feedback / Complaints.