Using direct payments your clients can pay for orders quickly and safely. theimagefile does not charge a commission on your sales. theimagefile does not charge admin fees for sending orders through to a lab. theimagefile does not hinder your sales with bandwidth charges for selling or distributing downloads.
We run a simple monthly subscription charge. No surprises. No commissions.
A direct payment is where you (the photographer) have an account with a payment provider. This is usually someone like PayPal, Stripe or any of the payment providers you can see in this list.
Payment providers can be grouped into two different categories.
- Social payments (PayPal, Stripe and Square) where you do not pay a monthly subscription to use their services but you pay a slightly higher charge per transaction.
- Commercial payments (WorldPay, SagePay and the others) where you pay a monthly charge for their service and then a smaller charge per transaction. The commercial payment providers usually offer a more in-depth service, however, this gap is narrowing all the time.
Which one should I choose?
If you are already established and are processing many transactions a month online, you will usually find it more financially advantageous to use a commercial provider. But, if you are starting out then using a social payment provider like Stripe, will give you all the tools that you need for your customers to purchase photos from your website online easily.