Common Mistakes When Selling Tour & Activity Photos Via an Online Store

**Finding photos. **Can your guest quickly and easily find their photos? First, count how many clicks it takes to get to an album. Next, how much thinking is the guest required to do to? If the guest has to recall information that they might not know and/or click through multiple steps, there is a big problem. How long do they have to spend searching for their photos? The more steps, the longer it takes, the higher your drop off rate will be. This will directly translate into you making fewer sales.

**Adding photos to the cart. **Is it easy and simple for your guests to add photos to the cart? Do they have to sign in to add multiple photos to the cart? Do they have to favorite photos before they can add them to the cart? Is there a ‘favorite photo’ button and an ‘add photo to cart’ button next to every photo in the store? How easy is it for guests to add a full album to the cart? Are the buttons big and obvious? Confused yet? So are your potential customers. There shouldn’t be confusing calls to action when the only thing you want guests to do is to purchase their photos and immediately start sharing.

**No confusing steps or hidden buttons. **Your guests, without hesitation, should know what to do next. The store should feel comfortable for all types of users. This means that they can easily navigate from finding, to adding photos, to buying. Ensure that there are no confusing steps, like having to create an account to buy or having favorite a photo button right next to adding a photo to cart button. Does the guest know where they are in the checkout process? How easy is it to find the checkout button? Do I know what I’m purchasing? If there are confusing steps, your guests will leave your store before making a purchase and your photo sales will go down.

**Mobile first. **Everyone is on mobile and if your store doesn’t work with mobile, then you are losing sales. Visit your store on your smartphone and ask your friends to do the same. Does it make it easy for mobile devices to find, add to cart and purchase photos? If the site was not built mobile first, it makes it hard for your guests to purchase photos and your photo sales will go down.

**Selecting 1 photo should not make an additional 100 buying options appear. **When a guest selects their photos, do a ton of product offerings appear for purchase? This makes buying photos really hard and confusing for guests. Buying photos shouldn’t be as hard as buying a car, having to go through the whole catalog to view all the add-ons that you do not want, when all you want is something to take you from A to B. This confuses and frustrates people. It makes it hard and frustrating to buy. It also makes it confusing to buy. Keep photos simple. If you do offer multiple products, make it an easy sell, not an overwhelming one.

**Easy to sell. **Do you or a staff member have to approve every order, print or digital? Why are you wasting your time approving these orders, when it should happen automatically? You have a million other fires burning and something this simple should be taken care of for you.

**Photo gifts are visual. **Do you offer photo gifts for purchase? Do your guests have any idea what their gifts will look like when they are ordering, or do they have to pray that it comes as they envision? When you are selling them, do you offer real photos of the products to entice users? If you offer 10 options of one type of photo gift, for example, 10 different sizes for one canvas print, do you list all the options on the same webpage when a guest selects one photo? If so, this clutters up the easy to use interface and makes it difficult for the guest to buy. Make it really easy for guests to select their size on checkout, without being overwhelmed with so options. If it is a confusing, nonvisual experience, then your sales are going to go down.

Have more questions about how to improve your online photo store and increase your tour and activity photo sales? We’re happy to help. Give us a shout at 1-866-706-9005.