Sell Photos at Track Days

Hi all,

A friend of mine is looking at setting up a site to sell photos of cars on track days etc. Firstly, he's starting off at one track, but he may be looking at taking pics at other tracks in future.

I'm trying to think of a way of using Zen Cart to cater for his needs, and allow people to buy photos online.

Now I know it can be used to sell digital media etc, but I'm not sure it's exactly what we need or not.

I'd appreciate your suggestions on how to go about this, and whether Zen Cart would be suitable.

Basically there's likely to be 1,000's of images, and a lot of the same car. We'd like people to be able to search for their car (by number plate...?), and see all the images that have been taken, followed by a buy button for the ones they'd like - either to download, or be printed and delivered to them. Obviously, with the amount of images to upload, we'd need to be able to import a spreadsheet of data, and upload the relevant images via FTP. We'd also want to protect the images with a watermark (I'm sure I've seen a mod to do this any way).

Any ideas on how to arrange the categories so people could drill down to exactly what they want to see, without trawling through 1,000s of other images?

Hope it makes sense - it might be easier than what I have in my mind at the moment etc.

Cheers,

Oli

If I were you, I would add a number of additional fields to your products, and make this easier for both your friend, and his customers.

Firstly, I would add a "Date photo taken" field. Then, I would add a registration plate field, which I would suggest you allow to accept more than one plate at a time, and store this in a different table, as one photo may have 5 cars in it.

Finally, I would do something similar to the Record Artists functionality in the admin, but use it for the race track locations. This way, you can not only assign an image to a specific race track, but you may be able to add a description, and future dates when you will be on the track, so that clients can submit pre-orders etc.

And then on to the fun stuff! Now you can have an advanced search functionality where your customers can choose a date the event was, where it was by selecting a dropdown, rather than having to type the race track, and not getting the spelling perfect, or entering their registration.

As for the categories, what would be the most valuable way of searching if you weren't looking for your specific car? What I mean is, if I wanted a photo of any car, for any use, I would probably want to find one of a GT racer, or Formula Ford, or even a Classic, so I would suggest you categorise the photos by car class, so that you also catch all the other clients who just want a nice photo of a car!

And finally, the watermarking - use Image Handler, available from the contributions section. Allows for use of different watermarks for each size of photo, and cleans your image quality when it resizes everything. Perfect for any store where the image is vital to the sale of a product.

Absolute

Absolute, thanks for the suggestions! Will take them on board and try getting something together for a demo!