Thank you for your interest in The Holga Print Shop. I will try to explain a few things about my idea, dream, thoughts and experience.
First of all: I love Holga photography, and Lomography. But Holga is my favorite – and I think there is a market potential for prints and products with these characteristic photographs worldwide. And I have not found a good marketplace for this kind of photography yet. So I made one.
Some sell their work through Etsy and their website, but what about building a shop with hundreds of Holga images for sale as posters, framed posters and canvas?
How it works
To be able to handle a shop like this I found a «partner» in Printful. They are a print on demand company and a drop shipper. Which means – they produce the products ordered, they pack them and ship them to the customers. The Holga Print Shop is just the marketplace
Our shop uses WordPress and Woocommerce to build the shop and import the products directly from Printful. When a customers order a poster, the payment for the product and shipping goes to us, and Printful charges us the cost for the product and a shipping fee. Our earnings is then left.
You can decide what the earnings per product should be, it is entirely up to you to put the price as you like. But there’s a couple of things to keep in mind – overpriced products will probably not sell as much as fairly priced products.
This leaves us to one of the key questions: What are your expectations? What is a fair earning for you per poster sold?
There is also a transaction fee. All the payment providers charge a fee for processing the payment. Our provider has a percentage of the total order amount + a fixed price – per transaction.
This is not a project where I am going to be rich and famous. And listing your pictures on The Holga Print Shop will be free of course. But we will have to charge a cut per item/order to keep the store online, advertising in social media and cover some of the fees, like the transaction fee.
So the next question is: What do you think is a fair cut for The Holga Print Shop per item or order?
All of you receiving this email are interested in knowing more about this. We are going to be as transparent as possible with the price structure, fees and expenses as we can when we know more.
Our online system will keep track on your earnings, orders etc, and you will get your own login details where you can get reports of sales and earnings. Doing this in the way we are doing, has some pros and cons. The cons are a bit high product base cost and the earnings may a bit lower than they should be. On the other hand, we can collaborate from all over the world, and the products will be printed at a facility as close to the customer as possible. To be a contributor, or vendor as it´s called, you will get an own user and be able to make your own products, or let us make the products. The last alternative is probably the best – if we want the shop to have the same look through all the same product categories.
When a product with it´s variation is ready, we will publish this on our website. We will not charge for the listings, only if some of your products is ordered by customers. How much you want to earn per product, is entirely up to you.
Our online system will keep track of any sales and you will be able to see the reports on your user administration page. We will then pay your earnings. Usually it could be a good idea to do so when the amount reaches a threshold or at certain dates.
How to calculate your earnings?
We found the best way to calculate the earnings is by setting an amount, and then calculate the price instead. Let´s say you want to earn about $5 per poster sold and give an example. Printful charges $7.73 per 10×10 enhanced matte paper poster and from $4.99 is for shipping of one poster, depending on destination. $12.72 is charged by Printful for product and shipping. Out of $19.99 there is $7,27 left where you will get $5.07 in this example and the rest will be transaction fees and our cut. For framed posters the earnings might be a bit higher, like $11-12.
Then the price in the shop should minimum be like this for enhanced matte paper posters:
Size (in) | Price incl shipping | Earnings (approx) |
10×10 | $19.99 | $5.07 |
12×12 | $20.99 | $5.13 |
14×14 | $22.99 | $5.24 |
16×16 | $23.99 | $5.60 |
18×18 | $25.99 | $5.47 |
For premium luster paper posters:
Size (in) | Price incl shipping | Earnings (approx) |
10×10 | $23.49 | $5.40 |
12×12 | $24.49 | $5.17 |
14×14 | $24.99 | $5.06 |
16×16 | $26.99 | $5.17 |
18×18 | $28.99 | $5.29 |
Now I want to have your thoughts on this? What do you expect from this and from us?
Please let us know – by using this survey – click here to answer