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Lesson Info

Online Ordering

So, the online ordering though, the pre-ordering thing has been big for us. That was something we struggled to find a good solution for for a lot of years. And we finally stumbled on some things that work. It's actually like a three part system for us. And we use Squarespace for all of our websites. And we use Authorize dot net is a credit card processing company. It was just like, PayPal. It's like, it's like Square. It's like all of those. Big. Huge. Massive company. You can go sign up. Get your own account there. It's easy. Takes five seconds. And then we use Prepaid Systems dot com. My friend Brian Box owns this company. I don't get any money by endorsing it. He's just a really cool guy, and I really like the product. But the Prepaid Systems allows us to put up events and things that we have going on. Ad we can send one link through our website that lets parents click on. We're able to put restrictions on when it's active. If they have to pay a late fee. That's all built in. It's r...

eally cool. So if you were to go to our website this is what you'd see. Click on through. And we have a order online. You'll come on in. We say pick your logo. Where's your kid go to school? It will instantly take you to a screen like this. This screen gives parents the ability to see a PDF of all of our packages and products. Or, they can go to the online ordering. We have a lot of people, I don't really get it, but we have people that will like, they just want to go online and see our packages. For some reason they just like to see it online. And then they'll still send in a paper order form. Okay. Whatever. And other people will go through the whole process. It is crazy though when you start doing online ordering. I need to stress this to you guys seriously. It needs to be so painfully easy. Like it just needs, like it needs, when we get phone calls and we have to walk people through it, it's, okay, click where it says buy here. Like, but you have to make it that easy. Because even when you make it as simple as possible, some people will get confused. So you have to take away as much friction as possible. To encourage people to buy. And make sure it's a simple process. Okay. So, when you click on the order form it would allow you to download the PDF if you wanted to. We also have another screen that gives you all of the dates and the locations for every sport. So you can go on there and just say, okay, we got this at this time. This is where they're gonna be. This is a really good piece of information. A really good thing to post. The only problem that we've encountered with this is it's awesome if the schools and the leagues that you're working with are really, if they've really got it dialed in. It can be frustrating if you have schools that have a lot of reschedules. 'Cause then you have to go in and keep updating your website to make sure the information that's going to parents is correct. So, you go in, you'd pick your sport, you'd pick your team, and the first thing that would pop up would be a page that would look like this. And it walks you through all of the products that we showed you guys. It's just that easy. Takes a little bit of time to set it up. But once you go through and you set it up correctly, if you don't have a ton of different collections, like if it's all pretty much the same ordering process for all of your sports, it's easy once you do it. So, take an afternoon. Set it up. And if you were to purchase a package a, it'll even take you to don't forget the extras. So we're driving up more sales. It's interesting, like, it's interesting to watch consumer behavior when it comes to credit cards. Do you know that McDonald's, before they started taking credit cards, they did a huge study on it. And they were debating on whether or not, whether or not they were gonna take credit cards. It was like a big issue. Like, is McDonald's gonna take credit cards? 'Cause we're gonna lose percentage points to the credit cards companies. Are we gonna come out ahead? So they tried it. And they found out that consumer spending at McDonald's went up 30%, if they use a credit card over cash. They are more likely to 30%. 30% more than they would otherwise. So, we do encourage it. And we do see higher averages. From our online stuff. Once you go to the next page, you're gonna see it just give you your package a. If you add the digital negative, that's half off. It's $15. And we do charge a convenience fee. It's a buck. And a lot of people will ask questions like, do you get pushback about having a convenience fee? I've had one phone call ever with a parent asking me how do you justify a convenience fee? And I said, well, we have a Squarespace, Authorize dot net and Prepaid Systems, and they all take a cut, and our option was to raise the prices on everyone. Or to charge a small convenience fee. And she said, oh. Okay, that makes sense. And she paid the convenience fee. So people just, they might ask questions, but if you have a reasonable response. And you can walk them through why it makes sense. We don't do a ton of jumping around on our rates. We really don't. Our pricing stays pretty stagnant unless our costs go up. We just, we don't do a ton of jumping around. Our packages are pretty, pretty similar. To go in, oh it does also say, all of this stuff is customizable. So you can have this say whatever you want. The special instructions we say, don't forget to bring this. Print this out and bring it on photo day. They never print it and bring it on photo day. We put it on the form in bright red letters. And they never print it out and bring it on photo day. So we'll talk about how we deal with that later. But, it is a true thing. All right, the back end of this software is crazy cool. To help you understand the analytics of your sales. Okay. It goes in. We have all the different leagues that we work with. Okay. Flip through. It has all the packages that we can edit and sort out by. It allows us to go in and put, if we're gonna do a single pose, we've done school pre-paid stuff where they have different options on cropping so that's one of those things, the little girl with the cropped in head. That would be one of the, which crop would you like on your picture. Or, if you want to order a team or an individual. If they add a five by seven they have to specify, is it the team or the individual they want the five by seven of. So this is all broken down in this service. Flip this over. And it gives you all of the galleries, or all of the markets that we have. And what's cool is we can go in and I can search specifically how many package a's did we sell to this group? How many add on's did they purchase? How many orders did we have and what was our total average? It gives me all that information, like that. I'm so predicable with my life. I am. I get to work at the same time. I leave work at the same time. I work on stuff in a very, very regimented order. And it kind of seems like, sometimes that's frustrating for me, 'cause I wish I was a person who's more spontaneous. But if you look at really, really successful people, in general, successful people have successful rituals. I am a man of rituals. I am so, this is what we do. This is why we do it. And being able to have this data, being able to look at that, this is part of my rituals. I am obsessed to my core with figuring out how to run the best volume-based business I can. I'm obsessed with running a profitable business. Like, consumes me. And this is a huge aspect of it. And obsession's like a word that I think gets, like, it comes with a negative connotation. I'm frickin' obsessed. I'm obsessed. And if you want to be great at something, it requires intense obsession. So, sorry, rant. You go in, you set your tax. We don't charge sales tax on our sports orders. We do tax it. The tax is built into the original price. So it doesn't come up as a by-line. It does of course we pay sales tax on all of our sales. This is where you can put in, if you wanna do shipping and handling. If they want to, if you wanna charge them for that, this is where you would put in their information. If you're doing a convenience fee, what you want to call it. It gives you tons of options. We joke at the studio sometimes, we joke about this, I said I'm gonna write, like, one day, I just wanna try to put, if you don't print this out, we're going to delete your kid's pictures. And then see if more people bring it. But we just say bring this on picture day. And they don't bring it. All right. Late orders. Late orders get kicked in. Tells you when. The good thing with the late orders through this system is I don't get notification of orders if somebody just places an order. Like, it, it's in this. But I don't get an email. I don't get a notice. I don't get anything. Okay. If it's a late order this gets emailed to our email account. The general info account. And it says, hey, someone just placed a late order. So it means that it's something that we need to pay attention to. Something that we gotta deal with. Otherwise, what we would do with our extreme, like the big, big, big jobs that we do, we'll go through and we'll just print out all of the online orders. Whether they brought 'em in or not. We print 'em out. And then we divide them up by the teams. So we just make sure that no order gets overlooked. Put in your time zone. You can put in your own logos. Your websites. And it's pretty easy stuff. It's nothing that's too complex. It certainly, I mean anybody who's done Wix website or Squarespace, or anything like this, this is totally, totally, totally within your grasp. Of knowledge. Then, when you're all done with it, it gives you a little link. And that little link is what goes on the Squarespace website. And that's what directs them to the user interface that they will see. Okay. So that's Prepaid Online. Yeah. What's up? So, this whole system, is there like a monthly? Or do they take? So, it's like 2%. Something like that. Yeah. I don't know. It's like, I should pay more attention to that but, I know Brian and he just sends me a bill. And it's like a few hundred bucks. And we just, it's so easy. It's so easy. Really geared towards having a gallery to look and buy in. I passionately don't wanna do that. So this was the best option that we could find without having to go down the road of loading images. Yeah. I just wanted to double clarify for people, because they're really excited about looking more into this. This is PrePay Systems? Prepaid Systems dot com. Can you review again the different softwares you use. Auth dot net. Was that another one? Authorized dot net. Authorized dot net is huge, huge, huge company. That's just like signing up for a Square account or a PayPal account. That's a massive company that just does the actual credit card processing. Prepaid Systems is owned by Brian Fox. He runs, like, they do like hundreds of thousands of yearbook photos out of Miami. Like it's like crazy business. Like, they're huge. And so he developed this system. And then he sells it out to photographers. It's reasonable. You should be in line with what, with what you'd pay anywhere. So, Authorized takes a percentage. And, Prepaid takes a percentage. And then of course you have a website that you gotta pay for. Which is all why I charge a convenience fee. Because I don't think it's fair that I have to pay, I add these expenses to make it more convenient for you to pay, and it's the same amount as the person who gives me a check. Which costs me substantially less.