I was wondering if anyone is using Photoshelter to sell stock photos, particularly Rights-Managed, and what is your experience?
Thanks in advance!
Elena.

We've closed our Photoshelter sites. Their Google presence is poor, and the internal search is overloaded with news and event photography. It's not a good place for general stock.

For RM, the Photoquote engine is just too optimistic about prices. We've put our efforts into our Symbiostock site and linked the RM out to Alamy for now. The returns are certainly better for RF.

Thank you Travelling-light for thorough and helpful response! By the way, your Symbiostock site is very nice, and your New Zealand images just make me want to jump on the plane and go there tomorrow:)

I've been with them a few years. I use them mostly for prints at the moment because I'm GI/IS exclusive so I don't have much to say about the stock functionality.

They can do RF, RM and personal licensing. RM is a calculator much like Alamy and other RM sites. The standard RM pricing seems a bit high but you can adjust it.

Photoshelter's SEO isn't highly optimized but you can get good results. Photoshelter doesn't do marketing to buyers so it's up to you to drive traffic.

The backend is pretty mature and the front end is highly customizable if you get the right plan.

Some of the stuff I don't like...

I think the new Beam isn't all that great. Not user friendly, confusing and too many clicks.

They are very slow to fix problems and add new features.

They take a percentage of sales in addition to the monthly fee.

I would strongly suggest evaluating Photodeck. They recently completely redesigned their system and the results are pretty impressive. 

Wow I didn't realize they take percentage of sales on top of the hosting fee! This seems like a reap-off considering they don't do any advertising to drive traffic to the images. I think I'll pass for now. Might as well host my RM collection on my own site.

I'll chime in here as I had a photoshelter account for about three years for both my wedding and portrait business and stock business.  Worked ok for selling prints, and it was a great easily indexed backup tool.

But (and a big but) you really really have to push your own site on to buyers.  For some reason their google indexing is an absolute shambles and your images didn't show up in google images, and your galleries wouldn't show up in google searches.  Surely that's one of the benefits of having your own site?

There were numerous posts about it on their forums with zero resolution.  They recently released newer versions of their templates, and I really did take the time to look into their and try and create a new site.  They certainly look the part, but the functionality just wasn't there for me.  Poorly thought out navigation, that wasn't customisable enough to bend it to your will, yet "template" enough that your site would look like every other photoshelter site (bar the images).

It may work for a dedicated stock sales site, but you'll get no traction whatsoever in google, without marketing yourself heavily, all the while paying for the privilege.  I didn't get anywhere near making back my membership fee investment over the last three years in print (from wedding and portrait) or stock sales.

If you're going to be paying a fee for a site, be sure that you've got the audience waiting to buy your images.  It's not an easy "flick a switch" and all your images will be front and centre.

I will give them credit for the FTP system though (slightly off topic)  I could use that to upload stock images to Photoshelter in the first instance, keyword, meta tag etc there, then farm out all my images to the micros.  That did work well, but wasn't really worth the entrance fee.  Especially when picworkflow does pretty much the same job, and only charges you a cent per upload, you're not tied into that at all.

Yeah, I'd agree actually Paulie.

I had a Wordpress Graph Paper press site that was indeed indexed really well (mainly because it was wordpress!

However, the actual Photoshelter site was the part that was poorly indexed in my experience, and I read up on the sitemaps etc, but they seemed unwilling to look into or fix the issues.  I found it especially frustrating that they seemed to value new custom over current custom, with the launch of their new template sites etc, and wouldn't address outstanding issues dating back at least two years.  I'll admit I didn't look too carefully into the Sitemaps.  But naming images very very specifically still didn't result in image buying pages coming up at the top of google.

I took the time to go up to a monument near where I live (not widely photographed) and take some nice images of it at sunrise.  I keyworded, titles, meta descripted . out of them, but when they went up on my photoshelter site they were nowhere to be seen on google (even months afterwards).  If someone was searching for images of "said monument" I should've been fairly near the top of google due to lack of coverage.  Even in google images there was nothing.

I blogged about it and that shot to the top almost instantly.  So I certainly think you couldn't just put all your images onto Photoshelter and hope they're found instantly like Paulie says.  But definitely using blogging to direct google to your site will help.  In the end, it wasn't worth the hassle for me.

When I was paying the best part of �240 a year it didn't really make financial sense to me personally.  Even though I actively blogged about the images for sale, I didn't do much outside of that if I'm honest.  I had one stock sale (personal license) for �5 over 3 years, which photoshelter took a fee, and paypal took a fee.  Print sales were slow too (my own fault) for weddings and portraits, and it didn't make financial sense.  I can see that it might to some though.