Review our idea and MVP: Sell your Flickr photos

[shabda]

Quick Summary:

Saas app allowing Flickr users to create a portfolio site automatically and Charge for them via Paypal.

MVP Site:

www.flickrcommerce.com

More details:

We(agiliq.com/whoweare) built it over a period of 24 hours, for the Yahoo Hack Day, Bangalore event. All code for this is open sourced at http://github.com/agiliq/yahoo-hack-day-2010 . I cant think of licences so we can keep this opensource, but still keep a reasonable competitive advantage, so I am open to suggestion there as well.

I am looking for feedback mostly on the idea, as we have a lot to work for the site. (But it should be usable anyway).

API's used.

Flickr API with flickrpy Paypal Website standards payments (until we can get our Paypal app approved) Paypal adaptive payments.

Also this looks a very obvious idea to me, so I cant think of why this has not been done before. :)

(Also, if you have not looked at Paypal Adaptive Payments API, you should look at it. Its much saner than their older API, and allows some neat things like chained payments, which means you accept payments from a single user to a single user, and transparently split it, which means we can make a simple cost structure with percentage of Photos sold, without having an upfront charge.)

Edit: Also asked on onstartups: at http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/13098/review-this-idea-and-mvp-sell-your-flickr-photos

[olefoo]

Here's a bug report:

Hit the login with my flickr id, log in, get redirected to a non-existent page, because (for reasons of Yahoo!) my flickr ID has spaces in it.

My flickr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/laprice/ and the page you construct for me is l.%20a.%20price.flickrcommerce.com It looks like you need to sanitise urls before recording them, or maybe you aren't using the correct field in the API but one that is usually OK, but not this time.

Any how, I would love to try it out, and having my photos be another income stream would help me to afford the lens habit I've acquired this summer.

[shabda → olefoo]

http://laprice.flickrcommerce.com/

Updated. Please set your Paypal username, that will allow to show the Paypal links.

[olefoo → shabda]

OK, I've updated it. It works now.

A couple of things I notice about the rest of the application:

1. using a square aspect ratio for presenting the pictures squashes some pics stretches others, it's not appropriate and looks really grotesque. You need to respect the work if you're presenting art.

2. You're violating flickr's terms of service for the API; each picture should link back to the flickr page for that photo, that will get you shut down more quickly than having flickr in the domain name.

3. I'm not exactly clear on what people would be buying with this. Are they getting a physical artifact (i.e. a print, a transparency, what?) Or just a download of the image at the largest size? If so, how is this any different than getty images?

4. On the configuration page you left the admin documentation link in the template but didn't install the documentation, either remove the link to Documentation or make it go somewhere useful. And you provide no navigation back to the the user's page. Your admin workflow is fairly rough right at the moment, most people don't like to deal with more than 5+/-3 items at a time, throwing 24 items at once and not providing a means of grouping them is poor UI.

[scorpion032]

The problem with selling of photos is that the owner is not "selling" the photo away, at least he would not be willing to in most practical situations.

What the owner sells is the "right to use the picture" and the price of the sale depends on where it is being published. If a college student wants to include it in his presentation, the owner would be willing to give away the permission for free and if Conde Nast wants to include it as a magazine cover, then the owner would be willing to charge a 1000 dollars.

Your assumption of "selling" the photos to some one for some fixed price, is not sufficiently sophisticated and is unlikely to appeal to the target audience, the photographers.

I think what you should do, at least for the start is: Allow the owner to sell the printed copies of their photographs and ship them, and donate all the profits to a social cause: http://www.acumenfund.org/ This lets the photographer put up a banner saying, buy the printed copies of my photo and help the children in India get education.

[nudge]

You might want to get a new name / domain. You may have problems using another company's name as part of your own.

[shabda → nudge]

Agree with that. However, what would be a good way to show connection with Flickr, as it is a Flickr focussed site, without infringing on trademarks etc?

[nudge → shabda]

I wouldn't know, I'm not a lawyer. I imagine it's perfectly okay to use the word 'Flickr' to describe what your product does. "Sell your Flickr photos!" Just not to name your product.

[toxicflavor]

How will you promote this? The big challenge is getting the word out to people with Flickr accounts.

Another issue - I don't know if it's your problem or not - is people selling photos that don't belong to them by uploading copyrighted content to their flickr account and selling it from your site. But let's say someone buys an image without realizing it's copyrighted until after the purchase - do you allow them to get a refund or do you provide some way for them to report the problem?

[toxicflavor]

How long does it take for a Paypal app like this to get approved? Do you need a merchant acccount to act as an intermediary between the buyer and seller?

You mentioned that you are using Paypal Website Payments Standard "until you get your Paypal app approved". After it's approved, what happens? Will you have to pay a monthly fee (Website Payments Pro) to keep your Paypal app going?

[shabda → toxicflavor]

No merchant account needed. Paypal needs to enable App for adaptive payments. All business Paypal accounts have API access, which is the only thing needed for Website Standard.

Until we have the Adaptive app enabled, we cannot take a cut. (To enable payments to two accounts, we would need the buyer to authorize twice, which makes a much less seamless exp.)

With the adaptive payments API, user just needs to pay to one account, and the developer can split it between two Paypal accounts. After our app is approved we will move to Adaptive payments.

[toxicflavor]

I like the design and the site seems responsive - who are you using for hosting?

[shabda → toxicflavor]

Design: We did. Hosting: Linode