$59 x 1,100 sessions = $64,900 in sales in two days!

Just found this, pretty amazing if you can make it work:
"Breakdown of a Photographer’s Groupon Deal; $65,000 Moneymaker or Madness?

“$59 for a one-hour location photo session including a disc of low-res images and five 8×10 prints”

Photographers, or those wanting to be photographers, post offers like this everyday on every city’s Craigslist. What happens when a professional photography studio makes an offer like this and scales it up to a site with the viral selling power of Groupon.com? Is there a gold mine of sales and referrals waiting for photographers on Groupon or is it a quick path to making your photography a commodity?

Read on to find out how one local photography studio made over $65,000 in sales in two days.

If you’re not familiar with Groupon, it is a social shopping site where local businesses offer heavily discounted products or services to Groupon’s web readers in exchange for a guaranteed minimum number of clients. Say you’re a restaurant and you want to bring in a load of new customers; Groupon allows you to offer a $40 gift card for $20 but only if a certain number of people buy in. You’re guaranteed a steady stream of new faces which may or may not turn into repeat business. Groupon already has millions of unique visitors per month and their daily deals spread virally as people alert family and friends to get them to buy in so that the deal reaches “the tipping point” and becomes active. Here is the Groupon FAQ if you’d like more information on how it works.

Can social shopping like this translate into effective marketing for an artistic business like a photography studio? Could a single studio even handle the buying power of Groupon? I don’t have any inside information on the deal used as an example here, but I’m going to do my best to piece together a breakdown of how Groupon might work for a photographer based on a recent offer in my own city."

Here's the rest of it: www.shotinvancouver.com/vancouver/tech-t...neymaker-or-madness/

High volume isn't always a good thing when cheap. Might have worked if priced a bit higher.

Looks good till you look at the end results

Dealing with 1100+ cheapskate clients? Subtract Groupon's share. Subtract cost of prints. Subtract cost of running business. Subtract taxes. Not much money left for a whole lot of work (3+ sessions a day 365 days a year).

Henry Peach wrote: Dealing with 1100+ cheapskate clients? Subtract Groupon's share. Subtract cost of prints. Subtract cost of running business. Subtract taxes. Not much money left for a whole lot of work (3+ sessions a day 365 days a year).

Good point

Sounds like a lot of work for so little pay at the end.

Now if they charged $200 it might have worked out a little better, but still I wouldn't charge less than than $300 per portrait.

That's a lot of work in two days. That photographer would need market themselves to the right people at the right time and have no sleep.