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A photographer needs more than a few gimmicky image tools to professionally sell and market their portfolio. PhotoShelter may seem like a great solution since it's made specifically for photographers, but a closer look reveals it as a glorified file hosting service. It only offers barebones eCommerce tools that make selling prints more challenging than it needs to be, and not just that — there are storage limits, so you may not even be able to upload your whole portfolio without upgrading. On top of its monthly cost, PhotoShelter also imposes heavy transaction fees on every sale, which further cut into your profits.
With Shift4Shop, you’ll have everything you need to easily set up, manage, and market your portfolio, including unlimited disk space and bandwidth. We never add transaction fees to any sale, so you only pay the small cut taken as normal by your payment processor. And if you use Shift4 Payments to accept credit cards, you can get a pro-level account absolutely free, with all the hundreds of features we have to offer, and no monthly fees. Shift4Shop is the best eCommerce solution for photographers to market and sell their work!
Theme selectionWhile PhotoShelter lets you design your own store with HTML and CSS, you may prefer to use a pre-made template for your website, whether you need to save time or simply don't have the coding knowledge. Unfortunately PhotoShelter only offers a few themes, which will make it difficult for your store to stand out. But Shift4Shop offers a huge (and growing) selection of themes, all of which can be customized with built-in tools. And if you still want to edit code, you can.
Transaction feesPhotoShelter charges a hefty 8%-30% transaction fee on top of every sale, which can severely harm your profits. With Shift4Shop, you’ll never be charged a transaction fee — only the normal, small processing fee that every payment gateway charges. We want you to succeed, and we’re not about to penalize you for doing so.
“As a photographer, I thought it made perfect sense to use PhotoShelter to sell my work. But the cart portion just feels tacked on. Shift4Shop is what I needed – a real online store.”
– Ex-PhotoShelter customer
Limited storageProfessional photographers need a ton of space to hold their high-quality files. If you have a massive database of images, you’ll want to think twice about PhotoShelter, who severely limits their storage space. Shift4Shop lets you upload however many files you need. Unlimited storage makes for unlimited possibilities, and with our powerful server infrastructure, responsive design, and unlimited bandwidth, your site visitors will find your site fast and fun to browse on every device.
Shift4Shop lets you take payments in minutes with a built-in Shift4 integration and also supports more payment solutions than any other eCommerce platform. See a full list of payment providers here.
PhotoShelter only supports Stripe and PayPal out of the box, and if you want to integrate your own merchant account (NETbilling or Authorize.net only), you'll need to pay a $100 setup fee, $20-$30/monthly fee, and a transaction fee that will be applied on top of PhotoShelter’s 8%-30% fee.
PhotoShelter's minimal theme selection means little creative control over the look and feel of your online store. With Shift4Shop, you'll have access to a huge, free selection of stunning responsive themes that are much more customizable than PhotoShelter's templates. This will allow you to not only show off your photography portfolio, but also to build a brand around yourself and your work. You can customize with our built-in tools or edit the CSS and HTML directly if you choose, and you can even clone a theme for the freedom to experiment with code.
Shift4Shop offers the most advanced features in SaaS eCommerce, even to merchants using our free, unlimited End-to-End eCommerce plan. Our fully scalable solution includes everything you need to run a successful online store and adapt to complex business needs, with none of the limitations imposed by PhotoShelter.
