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How long do purchased downloads remain available in the customer file management area or do they remain there indefinitely? .. If there’s no time limit .. is there anywhere we could tweak it to limit downloads to a 24hr time period?
There is not time limit yet…once I slow down on other things I should be able to put in a time or download limit.
Why would you want to set a time limit? I think many of the agencies started out with a time limit but some then moved to the more customer friendly notion of keeping a permanent archive of what you purchased.
I’d rate that as a much lower priority than some other things on the wish list unless there’s some really compelling reason for it to be there. And I’d like to be able to enter something to have there be no time limit – and probably have that be the default – if you did decide to implement it.
I know that DT & BSP both have 24 hr limits before links re-direct back to the purchase screen .. not sure about IS or SS but it would be crazy to lift this limit. Small independent designers might save all their purchases for future uses in the beginning simply because they’re not making much money and they don’t care if the image gets misused later down the road by their client according to the actual license agreement.
However, design agencies do not tend to work this way. They have a company account with a monthly budget. When the team works on a project they download whats needed for the client and then delete them from their local systems .. although it’s backed up in the clients folder (but its not worth digging through old client folders every time you need an image). I know the owner of a local design company .. very very small business yet they made 4 million last year. It’s way easier for them to just repurchase images as needed, not have to deal with maintaining an in-house archive and they don’t have to worry about any future problems or misuse.
Allowing them to download repeatedly from their account just makes things way too easy .. you’re basically giving every single buyer an unlimited cloud storage solution for stock photos. Eventually buyer registrations will plateau and your sales will start dropping dramatically … sales should never drop in any business as the business grows.
Also think about future growth .. what happens when you mass market your stock site and have to move up to a dedicated server .. your $8 a month godaddy account with unlimited bandwidth just turned into a $1200 a month bill for only 2 TB of bandwidth. Having a huge pool of designers re-dowloading for free will force you into bankruptcy in a matter of months. That’s why I would rate this as one of the top priorities from a business standpoint.
As far as customer service is concerned I would up mine from the standard 24 hr limit to 72 hours. That way if a designer starts a project on Friday and goofs up .. they can still re-download the image Monday when they get back to the office. Most designers would be more than happy about a 72 hr service as a convenience.
I agree with being able to limit the time someone can re-download if this is possible to do.
At present we can delete un-purchased images from carts, would it be possible to just block purchased images?
http://kerioakimaging.com - trying to reopen
http://nail-art-at.kerioak.com - Art and Nail ArtNot an issue for most us us now (yet
), I guess. But at some time in the future I’d like to have the option to limit the time span a download is available to my buyers.@365imagery wrote:
Also think about future growth .. what happens when you mass market your stock site and have to move up to a dedicated server .. your $8 a month godaddy account with unlimited bandwidth just turned into a $1200 a month bill for only 2 TB of bandwidth. Having a huge pool of designers re-dowloading for free will force you into bankruptcy in a matter of months. That’s why I would rate this as one of the top priorities from a business standpoint.
I can’t disagree, but right now that’s a theoretical problem and one I would love to have – (a) because it’s easily solved once the site has grown and (b) because I think our biggest issue is growing the network so we have this problem 🙂
The high priority things to address now would be things that would be hard to change at a later date, or things that stand in the way of us growing sales and the customer base.
I think the Symbiostock idea is really newsworthy. A great thing would be to get a really popular blogger in the design field to write us up, or to get some press in the trade pubs. Unfortunately I’m not in PR, so I have no idea how to go about doing that. But if someone knows a popular blogger, I can write something up to submit to them.
the problem with putting off an issue like this until later is .. your repeat buyers gained in the meantime expect more. In marketing you want to set specific expectations .. with the intention to exceed those expectations. This creates happy customers and amazing word-of-mouth growth for the business model.
When you give an unlimited storage service for free like this you are only left with 2 options .. discontinuing the service completely or discontinue it as a free service. Either way your established customer base will see this as a downgrade in your service and this typically generates bad word-of mouth across public forums and so on.
@shelma1 wrote:
I think the Symbiostock idea is really newsworthy. A great thing would be to get a really popular blogger in the design field to write us up, or to get some press in the trade pubs. Unfortunately I’m not in PR, so I have no idea how to go about doing that. But if someone knows a popular blogger, I can write something up to submit to them.
I don’t, but your post did make me think about how Symbiostock is a follow on to crowdsourcing in a way. So I reached out to the guy who wrote articles about Bruce Livingstone (iStock) for Wired to see if he’s interested or knows someone who is.
I’ll try and see if I can find out what the top designer blogs are…
some sort of a limit would be great.. I have been advocating this since the beginning.. so it will a welcome improvement whenever it is implemented..
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