A Long tail Application
We are developing a photography and picture sales network based on a long tail approach to the business. We think it is an area ripe for the picking and will be detailing our system here. However, this is our first venture in the actual E-commerce world. Unitl now we have just done content sites with advertising. We are finding that setting up to actually sell products, even if they are only digital downloads is a more ambitious undertaking. It's great to say you are going to sell things, it's harder to actually assign a number to each one and have a system set up to collect the money and deliver the product.
The long tail articles like to talk about the fact that inventory doesn't cost anything, but the fact is time is required to get systems in place. You need shopping cart software, a merchant account, and must be prepared to stay on top of orders. If you are going to offer physical products it is even more difficult.
We have accumulated thousands of photographs which we plan to offer for sale. We are finding the most difficult challange to be attaching meta data to each picture so customers can find what they are looking for. We aren't the only people with this problem. All the stock photo places have built elaborate keyword and taxonomic systems to try to do this. I my opinion, none of these work very well.
From the standpoint of setting up a new system, they also take to much time. If I have to place keywords by hand on each photo I will never get anything published to sell. I have a couple ideas for a better way. I'll see if it works out.