So, the question remains, what is the advantage of the FAA over similar "infrastructure service providers," the likes of Photoshelter, SmugMug, Zenfolio, etc. They all also provide basically the same infrastructure. They all partner with print labs. They all provide social media integration. Are some clients more likely to go to FAA in search of what they need, rather than to the other sites? Is there some kind of inherent advantage of FAA? Or should FAA be seen as just another choice when it comes to choosing between Zenfolio, SmugMug, Photoshelter, etc.?
That's a good question.
I think for the most part, yes, FAA is one choice amongst all of the online gallery print-on-demand service providers. You'd evaluate it the same as the others -- price, features, quality, customer (you) support, end-customer (your customer) experience, likelihood of mid- to long-term survival, potential risk to your high res files, etc.
Most of these players are similar, but they do have some unique strengths and weaknesses that may make one or another a better fit. Start at the simplest one, price. At $30/year for the flat fee, FAA is essentially free. The flat fee for my PhotoShelter account is $30/month, or 12X the cost. That's somewhat more than essentially free.
In terms of the amount of appeal to print purchasers you get for the price you pay, since PhotoShelter is not really positioned as a print-on-demand service in the general art market, I'd say prospective purchasers are extremely unlikely to go to it on their own to look for prints to purchase. Certain other sites, like FAA, are much more actively marketing & promoting their sites as art buying destinations to the general market, as well as seeking opportunities to integrate with other art sales avenues where art purchasers gravitate. But if you presume that most of the selling work has to be done by you the artist to drive customers to the online sales gallery, then the appeal of the site to random "walk in" purchasers is probably a minor point.
Print pricing engines differ as well. I find the FAA model is simple but flexible, and prefer it over the way the PhotoShelter print pricing model works. However, PhotoShelter has a much better digital pricing, licensing and fulfillment capability that was its original primary reason to exist, and I much prefer how it works over the digital licensing model that FAA only just added quite recently. Having said that, the velocity of development at FAA is pretty fast, and it seems to be a lean, decisive model for how things happen. PhotoShelter in contrast has been criticized over the past few years, justly to some extent, as being very slow and unresponsive in their development approach.
End-user experience for print purchasers on FAA is much better, compared to PhotoShelter. FAA has a smooth, slick, well-integrated usability to it, and the financial transaction is simple and seamless. In part that's because of how the site has been designed, with a primary purpose of enabling print sales. And in part it's because FAA is not a platform for integrating multiple print providers on the back-end, they really only have a single printing & fulfillment partner as far as I know. PhotoShelter in comparison isn't nearly as simple, slick or seamless to use for the print purchaser, in part because print sales was never the dominant purpose of the service, in part because their web design was somewhat dated, and in part because they were a platform for integrating multiple printing services offering a range of capabilities, products and services. The financial transaction portion of PhotoShelter has been criticized as more confusing and troublesome for purchasers than it needs to be.
But on the flip side of that, PhotoShelter is far more integratable into other web sites than FAA. FAA is designed essentially as a stand-alone thing. Yes, they provide things like a gallery shopping cart or a Facebook gallery app, but fundamentally FAA is designed to be the core web site of the artist for print sales. PhotoShelter in contrast is built with the assumption that a lot of different integration points may be used. You can integrate one or multiple print providers on the back-end covering different geographies or products & services; you can also integrate self-fulfillment while maintaining most of the PhotoShelter online print sales workflow. Plus PhotoShelter galleries can be integrated into your own stand-alone web sites and blogs in a way that looks mostly seamless. FAA galleries can't be integrated that way. If I got rid of PhotoShelter, I'd have to either get rid of the idea of a full-featured e-commerce enabled gallery integrated into my own sites, or else implement a new one with some other platform in addition to FAA.
Those are just a few of the points of difference. From my description, you can probably see why I'm maintaining both FAA and PhotoShelter galleries. They're both good at different things, and neither one can fully replace the other for the full set of what I want. Depending on the price you want to pay, and the capabilities you need, you would look for a service (or 2 or 3...) that's a good match for you. But at the end of the day, the success or failure of selling through any of these services will be mostly determined by your own efforts. While most of the services fundamentally work for the basic cases of selling prints, it's the artist who brings the secret sauce to make sales happen because in general none of these sites will market your work for you.
