PhotoBox Blog

Here’s the winning photo from our DK Eyewitness Travel Photo Britain competition shot by amateur photographer Frame Muller. Congratulations Frame, you even gained the approval of world-renowned photographer and judge, Tom Ang.

The photo was entered in the Heritage category and captures the magnificence of Leeds Castle basking in the late afternoon winter sunshine. The photo will now appear in pride of place on the front cover of the DK Eyewitness Great Britain Guide 2010. Frame wins £1500 of Landmark Trust holiday vouchers, £100 worth of DK books, £100 to spend at PhotoBox, and a PhotoBox Canvas Print of his fantastic winning photo.

A selected collection of entries will be exhibited at the Waterstone’s flagship store in Piccadilly, London from 6th-31st July.

Linda
The Editor

It’s been another exciting week at PhotoBox. On Monday we announced Craig Hughes as the winner of our Dishy Dads Competition. We received a total of 14,739 votes! He was delighted to win and plans to give some of his £1000 Red Letter Day prize to a children’s hospice charity auction, so he’s a nice guy as well as Dishy Dad!

I then had the fun task yesterday afternoon of joining the judging panel of our DK Photo Britain competition. Thank goodness that with almost 8000 entries the best ones had been short-listed for us, otherwise we’d still be there battling it out to find the winning photo for the next cover of DK Eyewitness Great Britain.

The standard and variety of photo entries was staggering, and the amateur and under-16 categories certainly gave the pros a run for their money. Having decided on a winner for each of the 12 categories, it proved a much tougher job to agree on just one overall winner. Thankfully a designer mocked up a front cover of the guidebook to show us how a couple of our favourite photos would look, and we all agreed that one image fitted the space perfectly. Right now our winner is still top secret – sorry but come on, it’s only polite to let them know first! I promise I’ll update this post with the winner’s details just as soon as I’m allowed to announce it.

As for the rest of the week, we’re left to compete with either the mass of mud that’s likely at glorious Glastonbury, or watch Andy Murray in the toughest tournament of his career so far. Go Andy go!

Have a great weekend everyone

Linda
The Editor

Use your voting power to have your say on two important issues – new Pro Gallery features and decide our Dishiest Dad!

Calling all Pro Gallery owners
If you haven’t voted yet now’s the time to have your say. We’ve set up a Pro Gallery feedback forum so you can tell us exactly what’s on your mind. This makes it easy to vote for the features you’re keen to see introduced on Pro Gallery. You can vote for ideas that have already been suggested, or share your own new ideas with us. It’s really quick to do and will help ensure we’re offering you the service you want. Just click ‘Want to improve Pro Gallery?’ at www.photoboxgallery.com. 

Vote for the Dishiest Dad
After last week’s blog post inviting you to enter our Dishy Dads Competition you didn’t let me down. We’ve had loads of great entries and having endured the tough task of finding our 12 finalists, I’ve handed over the job of picking our one lucky winner to the public vote. So take a look at our handsome hunks and vote for your favourite. Over 3000 of you already have and the two front runners are currently neck and neck. We’ll announce our Dishiest Dad on the site on Monday, so please vote now!

Last but not least a very Happy Father’s Day this Sunday to all you dads out there

Best wishes

Linda
The Editor

Well my mailbox has certainly been interesting over the past couple of weeks! Entries for our Dishy Dads Competition have been pouring in and the photos have certainly created quite a stir in the office.

If you haven’t heard, in the run up to Father’s Day we’re on the hunt for the Dishiest Dad. If you think that’s your dad, partner or husband, enter our Dishy Dad Competition and you could win him a fantastic Red Letter Day worth up to £1000.

You’ve only got until midnight on Sunday 14th June to send us a photo of your dad so don’t hang around. We’ll then pick 12 Dishy Dads and put them to the public vote from 15th - 21st June so that you can choose the winner. So send us a photo of your dad today and then come back and vote for him next week. May the Dishiest Dad win!

We’ve also got loads of great Father’s Day gift ideas you can surprise and delight your dad with to ensure this Father’s Day (21st June for anyone who needs reminding) is a really special one.

Have a great weekend and I look forward to checking my mailbox again on Monday!

Linda
The Editor

A few weeks ago I told you about the changes to our shipping charges. On the whole most customers have been fine with the changes, but it’s clear from blog comments and other feedback that there’s been a specific issue around photographic print orders.

As a result of the changes made, anyone ordering a mix of standard & enlargement prints got charged two lots of shipping, even if you just added one 6”x4” print to an order of enlargements, or vice versa.

In response to your feedback, we reviewed pricing and decided that it makes a lot more sense to put standard & enlargement prints into the same product category as far as delivery charges are concerned. So now when you place an order for both standard & enlargement prints you’ll be glad to hear that you’ll only be charged once.

So keep the feedback coming, and we’ll continue to improve our service as fast and as effectively as we can, directly according to your views. We can’t please everyone – but we’ll do our best!

I look forward to hearing from you

Mark Chapman
Managing Director

Photos are very precious to most of us and I bet most get paranoid about storing them on just our home computers. I know I am and more so since losing all my honeymoon photos! I had saved these on to my external drive and hadn’t backed them up elsewhere. One day my external drive decided to corrupt and I could not access my photos anymore. This was hugely upsetting for me and more so for my wife who subsequently asked the IT experts at her work how we could retrieve them. It was possible and we have them back safe now, backed up in several places including PhotoBox but this was only possible after a huge bill from the company we used to get them recovered.

This brings me round to PhotoBox and our current free storage quota policy. I think this is potentially a great free service we offer with the added piece of mind that goes with it but we realised that it wasn’t easy for you to retrieve your photos back. Today, we have added back to the site a backup DVD service to please much of you who had emailed or called us about it.

“My Account Backup” is a DVD backup of all the photos in your account, which means even if your computer lets you down you won’t lose your photos. These DVDs are also great for sharing copies of your photos with family & friends.

Regards,
Antonio
Product Marketing, PhotoBox

Hi

We’re launching today two important updates for all our Pro Gallery owners. We believe in both cases that they make the service easier to use, and indeed both changes are as a direct result of your feedback and the continuing success of Pro Gallery.

Firstly, Pay Me is the new way to claim your earnings from your Pro Gallery. It’s now an entirely self-service process that you can use at any time. You’ll find the Pay Me button on both Gallery Admin and your PhotoBox sales reporting page. To make a claim simply:

o Complete seller details (inc VAT status)
o Choose either:
    1.Transfer to PhotoBox cash account for spend on the site (2 year expiry and 5 day lead time) 
    2. Or PayPal account (14 day lead time).Please note that lead times are there to protect you from fraudulent claims
o You can make up to one claim a day for either part or the full amount of earnings
o A £1 handling fee is applied if the PayPal request is under £50
o For invoices go to your PhotoBox Order History page
o Please be aware that email requests for bank account transfers will only be honoured until end August 2009
o For more details on Pay Me see our FAQ section

You’ll also be glad to hear that the new password protection feature is now live. That means as a seller you can now add a password to individual collections and send this to the people you want to be able to view the collection. To set a password, just go to your collections tab and click ‘Set password’. The ones you’ve password protected will be indicated by the padlock icon, you’ll need to be logged out to see this on your own gallery. People can then click on the link you send them and will be asked for the password. You can remove or update the password any time you like.

Please let us know how you find these changes and any other comments you have on our Pro Gallery service.

Best wishes

Mark Chapman
Managing Director

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the launch of sharing your photo books online. Well hot on the heels of that photo book revelation I’ve got another exciting addition for you. Now not only can you share any photo books you’ve created, you can also add a markup and make money selling your photo books!

We’re calling this Simple Selling because that’s exactly what it is, as you’ll see on our new sell page. You just make your photo book and click ‘Share’, followed by ‘Simply set your price here’ to add your chosen markup. Next you decide how you want to share your book and click the relevant share tab. Every time someone then buys your book you keep your markup, less a 10% PhotoBox ecommerce fee. So you see it really is simple!

This way of selling is ideal if you’re an amateur photographer looking to make a bit of money for your local school, club or charity by selling fundraising photo books. Or if you’re a pro photographer wanting to sell photo books for your own profit.

We’d love you to put Simple Selling to the test and post your comments. It would be great to see some of the shared photo books you’re selling too. We’ll then showcase a selection of the best books. To share them with us simply post a link to your marked up photo books here on our blog.

Happy selling!

Best wishes

Linda
The Editor

We’ve had masses of entries to our Photo Britain competition. The standard is proving incredibly high, not to mention diverse. It’s very inspiring and I’m looking forward to getting together with the other judges to find a winner, although I can tell it’s going to be a tough one.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the competition is in partnership with DK Eyewitness Travel, The Landmark Trust and Waterstone’s. The first prize winner gets their photo featured in pride of place on the front cover of the next edition of DK Eyewitness Great Britain, plus £1500 of Landmark Trust holiday vouchers and more. There’s plenty of great runner up prizes too. Just submit your favourite photos of Britain, from iconic London landmarks, Britain’s amazing castles and cathedrals, to anything that’s just typically British like enjoying fish & chips at the seaside. See the competition site for inspiration and to enter.

The deadline for entries to Photo Britain is 29th May. Competition fans can also enter our latest Facebook competition where the theme is wedding photos and you could win a Large Personalised Photobook. Enter your photos today!

Good luck and enjoy your weekend

Linda
The Editor

Hi everyone

For a while now we’ve been contemplating changing the way we calculate shipping costs for orders placed at PhotoBox. Like many online services, we charge different amounts depending on what you order, however we’ve felt that we haven’t been particularly good at communicating how we come to a particular price for shipping an order. This has also come though from feedback from you via our customer services team.

Our original philosophy was that since the Royal Mail basically charges by weight bands, so we would too. Unfortunately, this has always meant that it’s hard for you to understand just how we got to a price, which didn’t always obviously correlate with the number and type of items in your order.

So we’ve changed the whole model, hopefully for the better. After much debate, we’ve moved to a simple, quantity-based calculation, which you can see in detail on our Delivery Information & Prices page. It’s now much easier to understand (we think) just how shipping costs are calculated, and exactly how much adding an additional item to your basket will cost. Very soon, we’ll add a new service feature so that you can get a detailed calculation in the basket, as to exactly how shipping was calculated.

Let me know how this affects you. We’ve tried to impact as few orders as possible, but inevitably there will be some winners & losers as a result of the change. We honestly believe however that the change makes our service easier to understand and use; and I assure you we’re not making any more money in shipping charges overall as a result of these changes.

As always, feedback on this or any other topic is much appreciated.

Mark Chapman
Managing Director, PhotoBox