Hi all,

First time poster.

I have been considering getting into selling stock direct. I have a decently large portfolio of food photos that are on many of the microstock sites.

I was looking into different platforms to sell with and I was curious about other peoples opinions on them. I've looked through the forums here, but some of the threads are rather old.

I was interested in possibly using

symbiostock
ktools
photoshelter
photodeck

I was originally planning on building a symbiostock website, but I've been a bit turned off with the starting and stopping of the project. Photodeck seems like the slickest platform overall, but I wish it had some of the "community"  surrounding it that some of the other platforms did.

Any suggestions or comments would be much appreciated.

How about Shopify? Might be a little more expensive thought.

I think selling direct is a very tough area to conquer. Driving high converting traffic to your website is more than hard. In my opinion it's waste of time and money for most of us. All the buyers are already getting good and loyal service with micro/macro agencies. It's pretty hard to build a website that customers trust and buy from.

Something like Symbiostock could work, but it should drive it's traffic from Symbiostock search engine to really work.

If you want to get a lots of traffic to your website then you should give images for free. Only problem is that free traffic is so hard to monetize. Unsplash is a good example of high quality free stuff.

I have my own website with 3,000 monthly visitors and one sale for few dollars I've let it be just a hobby as I can make so much more just by uploading to microstock.