Good shopping cart solution for wedding photography

Needs to have password protected galleries

[Cienwen]

Hello all.

I am looking for a good shopping cart solution for displaying and selling wedding pics online. Each individual wedding would need to have its own "event id" or something and password. It also should allow for mass population since I need to upload 400 images at a time. It's a wedding!

I am looking at PhotoStore from Ktools.

Has anyone used them? Feedback would be great!

I also saw Lightbox Photo Gallery Software. It looks very nice but the version that would suit my needs is $600. A little more than I was going for!

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[lorax]

IMHO $600 is cheap for something that you will likely pay off in just a month or two.

But since you asked. We see a lot of posts like this that ask for a solution that the open source carts don't quite fit. So you're either going to pay for someone to customize it to suit, do it yourself, or buy a product that does exactly (or pretty darn close to) what you want.

[bwnbwn]

Cienwen, Sorry I can post any help here but I do agree with lorax on that carts are expensive and what you need to do adds to the complexity of the cart even more so 600 seems to me a reasonable price.

Before purchase any cart sure your host will allow special permissions to use the cart as some carts require added special permission on the server that being on a shared server they won't allow.

In any event let me know what you do either here or if time has closed the thread in a sticky as my daughter is starting to get into this area as well and she will want a website within a year or so and the cart I use know won't work for this type of business.

[StoutFiles]

Have to spend money to make money.

[Cienwen]

Thanks to all who relayed. I don't mind paying for it so much. It's more of the paying for it and then it not living up to my expectations. And then not be able to fix it, and having to pay more for support because their is not an online community to go with it, etc.

[lorax]

Cienwen,
I understand you concerns. You have at least 2 choices with that in mind. 1) Hire someone you trust to choose a solution for you, 2) Spend the time to research and demo the possible carts you can find. Otherwise, you're guessing.

Since you have expectations, I'd suggest you setup a spreadsheet that identifies those expectations and then research and demo the various carts. Give yourself room for comments on each of the line items.

[MisterT]

checkout out smugmug's pro version. it rocks. you can set your own prices for photos and password individual galleries. could work great for weddings...

[Cienwen]

Thanks MisterT. I will check that out.

[CarolSLC]

Our photographer that does our commercial shoots has her galleries on smugmug and as a customer, it works great. And you enter the password to view your gallery as you describe.

[Ozark]

imagequix is worth a look also