I would like to set up an online gallery to sell stock images and am wondering about opinions between either photoshelter or zenfolio? I do have stock at a couple of agencies but I really feel with the internet I should be able to house my own online store front. I envision most of my sales to be by licensing the images to corporate communications and not by selling prints. A gallery where the marketing person can download the file & pay via an online shopping cart would be ideal. Being able to set up a private gallery from recent projects to specific marketing persons would also be nice.
With photoshelter it seems that even though you market yourself as soon as a visitor gets to your storefront they can very easily search through all the photographers basically meaning you are providing leads to your competition. This does not seem ideal to me because not only are you competing against google's rank, but then against photoshelter's rank on keywords. I tested this following some photographer's photoshelter gallery doing a keyword search and having pages of other photographer's images come up before the original linking photographer's.
Down the road I would like to place my video footage for licensing as well.
Any suggestions, opinions, or insights are very appreciated. Thanks jeff
