How photographers sell prints to clients

Most print sales happen through the delivery gallery: the client is already looking at their photographs, picks a size, pays, and a professional lab prints and ships it. The photographer sets the retail price; the difference between that and the lab's price is the margin.

The pieces

A lab. Professional labs - WHCC, Bay Photo, Miller's and their peers - bill a per-photographer account rather than the platform. That matters more than it sounds, because it determines who the seller is.

A storefront, usually inside the gallery. The important detail is which sizes are offered: a 3:2 camera file and a 8x10 print are different shapes, so almost every order crops. A store that hides that is setting up a disappointment when the parcel arrives.

A payment path. Either the platform takes the money and pays you, or you take the money and the platform takes a fee.

Who is the merchant of record

This is the question most guides skip and it decides your tax position.

If you are the merchant of record, the sale is yours: the money lands in your account, your lab account is billed, and sales tax on the print is yours to collect and remit. Physical goods create tax obligations wherever they ship, and that can mean filing in states you have never visited if you sell enough into them.

If the platform is the merchant of record, it owns that obligation and pays you a margin instead. Simpler for you, less control, and usually a bigger cut.

Neither is wrong, but you should know which one you have signed up for. If a platform does not make it obvious, that is the question to ask before the first order.

Pricing that works

• Start from lab cost, not from a percentage. Work out what a size costs you delivered, then decide what it should sell for.
• Round to real numbers. A print at $28.73 reads as a spreadsheet output.
• Price the wall sizes properly. Small prints are impulse purchases; the margin lives in the large ones.
• Do not forget shipping. Postage on a single small print can cost more than the print.

The resolution problem

A print has to be sharp in the hand. Around 240 dpi on the print's short edge is a sensible floor for larger work viewed at arm's length, and 300 is comfortable for small prints held close. That means a given file can only fill so large a print - and the honest thing is to not offer the sizes it cannot fill, rather than sell them with a warning.

How Encore does it

Print sales run with the photographer as merchant of record: the charge is on your own Stripe account, your lab account is billed for the printing, and Encore takes a fee for the rail. That means sales tax is yours - which is stated in the settings screen rather than left to be discovered.

Sizes a frame cannot print sharply are not offered at all, and the store shows the exact crop each size will take before anything is ordered. Prints are made from the unmarked original even when the gallery is watermarked.