4x6 or 5x7 for on-site sales

[Question_Man]

Hi,

What is better for on-site sales, 4x6 or 5x7? 4x6 is by best seller on-line.

I mostly shoot youth sports.

Thanks in advance,

John

 

[emocmo]

Depends on your pricing. When I was doing tournaments (mostly basketball) I found the 5x7 the most popular. But, the 4x6 has a much better margin on line, so I would assume the same on site.

You have to be more specific with types of sales, presentation, margin, etc.

8x10-'s at $5 a pop would probably sell well--but you would lose your shirt doing it.

 

[Paul Robertson]

Hi,

What is better for on-site sales, 4x6 or 5x7? 4x6 is by best seller
on-line.

I mostly shoot youth sports.

Thanks in advance,

John

In general, customers will purchase the cheapest print you have. Therefore, the smallest size will generally sell more simply because it's cheaper. If you're going through the expense of doing business onsite, you might consider doing larger prints which still leaves the cheapskates with the online option later without screwing up your pricing structure enough to matter by trying to recoup your onsite costs/time assuming your margins are better on the larger sizes.

Paul
--
http://PaulDRobertson.imagekind.com

 

[edleg]

If you are using a DSLR that shoots in the 4x6 ratio, then posing, composing & framing in-camera (and shooting jpeg means no cropping necessary for 4x6 prints (or 6x9, 8x12, 12x18). Prints in the 5x7 & 8x10 size usually means cropping before printing, which means leaving space around your subject(s) in order to have room to crop... and more computer/pp time.

We do onsite printing for some special events & even an occasional wedding. It is a pain (I would rather take orders to deliver later) and we settled on 4x6 because there is a large choice of lots of printers available, from dye-sub to inkjet.

If you do a lot of printing onsite, then the 5x7 industrial grade dye-sub printers might be the way to go. But we just don't do the volume to justify tying up that much capital in a couple of them (my business plan requires backups for everything!).

We use a bunch of the older style Epson Picture Mate inkjets (

About 18 months ago I bought a bunch of 64-256 mb CF cards just for this purpose. Works great... not as fast as a highspeed dye-sub, but I have backup equipment that is easy to use and they use fairly commonly found supplies. The last couple of Picturemate printers (old style pigment) I bought brand new were like $40 delivered and included ink cartridges and paper. I am thinking about looking for a couple more.

 

[Ed Ingold]

You'll go broke selling 4x6 prints. Come up with a package that will give you the gross receipts you need to stay in business, and give the customer a sense of value for his money.

 

[edleg]

We sell service & creativity... not pieces of paper. We sell 4x6 prints at $6, 5x7 prints at $12 and 8x10 prints at $24. I know that those prices are not proportional to the paper size, but we sell a bunch of 4x6 prints and the capital investment is very low and the profit margin for materials and labor is very big.

 

[Ed Ingold]

Service and creativity? Yeah, well...

I don't know what a "lot" means, but I suspect it's on the order of 50 or so - less if you actually use an inkjet instead of a dye-sub. Is it worth the time to spend a day cranking out prints for $300 before costs? Rather than onesies, put four 4x6 prints on an 8x12 sheet and sell it for $25. You'd print less, gross more, and there'd be prints to send to the grandparents.

If you actually set up "trading card" type shots, I'd upsize the package and charge even more. That's being "creative" from the artsie and business side at once.

 

[Vegasluvr]

By far, 5x7s are my best sellers at Little League and AYSO events. But they also sell well at youth football, basketball, ice hockey and LaCrosse sports events too.

This past year we shot the All Star game of one league and printed some 6,000 5x7 images (5-6 per athlete). Over 90% of those images were sold. Most parents bought all 5 images. And we got a lot of re-orders too.

Typically, we sell between 2,500-4,000 images per league All Star games but even then it is still a profitable sale. If there are traveling All Stars from other states, the sales go even further.

 

[BobbyC]

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