e-Commerce for Image Libraries

Automated printing via PhotoBox™

We have partnered with PhotoBox™, one of Europe's most experienced digital printing labs, to provide IMS customers with a fully integrated printing and delivery service. IMS allows you to sell a wide range of prints, including large poster prints and many gift items. You remain in control of the prices that you offer to your customers.

Prompt order fulfilment reflects well on your business and helps to generate more repeat orders. The delivery notes and packaging sent with each order are neutral with no pricing disclosed. At the end of each month we return your profits to you directly, minus a handling charge of just 5% with a full reconciliation account of trading.

If a customer buys an image and the high resolution sources are not available from IMS, the system will alert you so that you can provide the files on demand - the order is then processed as normal.

Whether you sell ten prints or ten thousand prints, the whole process is automated, day and night.

Built-in credit card payment solution

Whether you sell licences, printed products from our partners or custom products, IMS contains a built-in invoice model to suit.

Third Light provides a credit card payment solution, saving you the expense and hassle of developing your own secure payment systems. Alternatively, users of IMS Appliances may use their own merchant account to process payments, with PCI DSS compliance throughout.

The IMS payment solution contains support for different tax zones and postage rates, as well as support for payments in US Dollars (USD) and Euro (EUR) as well as Pounds Sterling (GBP).

In-house print processing (custom products)

In addition to fulfilment of print orders automatically, we also support the sale of your own custom products - such as hand prints - through the same system, by emailing orders to you. You can therefore offer all the power of the Third Light shopping basket to your clients, but still control the production process yourself.

Custom Products can have attribute lists, such as colours, finishes or cropping preferences. Also, IMS can correctly present the print size in the basket. As a gateway to your in-house print sales, IMS is exceptionally powerful, and can offer price breaks as well as giving you the flexibility to assign different product prices to different galleries.

Canada's largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, uses Third Light's IMS system to power online galleries that sell Custom Products. Visit Torstar Now (opens in a new window).

Rights-managed licensing

IMS gives you the ability to sell your photographic image data online with licensed downloads. It offers user-defined licences, each being a legal document defining the scope of usage for an image, the duration and resolution. Licences can be grouped into plans, which allow different products to be offered to different buyers (eg. one set of licences for newspapers, another set for advertising agencies).

Using this system it is possible to vary the purchasing models to different buyers easily. This includes being able to offer royalty-free images alongside rights-managed images, or to share images freely with trusted clients with optional volume quotas (essentially, subscriptions). Where e-commerce licensing is used, the exact nature and wording of the licences is configurable and any number of licences can be defined.

Your client can pay for the licence with a credit card or on account if appropriate. Once the payment has been authorised, the order is fulfilled automatically using your stored image data.

Order status tracking and management reporting

IMS brings together financial reports and management tools for both print and licensing sales, under a single easy to use web console.

Firstly, IMS integrates dispatch tracking so that when an order is completed and posted, the customer receives a message. This also updates the order status page in IMS so you can check the details yourself at a glance.

Secondly, reports are provided that allow you to analyse the print and download sales from your IMS site, as well as view the status of any individual order. You can define multiple price plans for different events or users, and even break down income to different categories known as subvendors. A spreadsheet export feature allows financial data to be quickly exported for further analysis.

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