GotPhoto, New York NY

Where to start!? I have been in the volume photography industry for 14 years, as a studio owner, Franchise Owner (with over 30 Franchise Studios), and an educator in the field. I’ve seen it all. Evolving our studios through the bleeding edge of digital photography, we evolved from a simple e-commerce cart to another industry platform supporting increased product and ordering offerings. Through it all, we continued to have frustrated customers and fair to poor customer service. So, in 2018 we migrated our studios to GotPhoto, and it was truly a game-changer for us and our end consumers.
While migrating from paper forms in-person to online proofing requires an education process for your customers, once you’ve made the switch and are solid in your execution, the capabilities of GotPhoto as a business partner are the best in the business. Our recent events (schools/leagues) have average tickets two to three times what they were on the old system and our engagement with their WYSIWYG communication system is through the roof. We can send exactly what we want …to whom we want. Pictures, colorful text, direct access links, customer-specific data fill (like names) it’s all there and it helps us really engage with our parents – and it’s automated!
Any of the online systems will periodically experience minor hiccups (Some of my studio students are on other platforms) but the continual success and support by GotPhoto keeps them at the top of the field if you’re looking for ways to explode your volume photography business. Even if you’re only photographing a few students or players a year – that’s fine. You can maximize your engagement and profit from them just as well as if you had tens of thousands of them like some of our studios do.
We also love the fact that GotPhoto links to the subject data through QRs or a digital linkage (Entag) rather than facial recognition. The prospect of chasing everyone around with a cellphone to take a cringy photo of them (again, on my cellphone) so the facial recognition works would make me never consider the only other big player in the volume photography e-commerce market. I know that process freaks parents out (they’ve said so). With GotPhoto we don’t have to worry about that at all. And, we can have players in and out of the building in 3 minutes or less.
So, if you are wanting to add a little volume photography to your portrait business…or you’ve already been voluntold to do some…or you photograph thousands of students/players a year, you owe it to yourself to talk to a) GotPhoto and b) real power-users of the platform. You’ll be glad you did.
M

Never use GotPhoto USA for volume photography work.

I contracted GotPhoto to host my e-commerce/photos for a little league I photograph (over 500 players). I did a trial run in January that went great!

I decided to utilize GotPhoto's photo editing services, which claimed they would extract the player from the white background, at a cost of $0.30 per image. This prompted me to add an additional pose for the players' families to choose from. More work day of, but I hoped at the rate the extractions would cost me, that this would be beneficial.

I uploaded the player images on 5/16 and ordered the "knockout" service. Their website stated there were delays, so I waited to hear about my order every day.

7 days passed, and I sent in a help ticket requesting the status of my order. I received this phone call (posted in comments) the next day, informing me that they could not provide the knockout services, and that they knew since the day of upload (8 days prior at this point) that they would not be able to perform the work. They claimed it was because I used a Hi-Liter to photograph the players, instead of a plain white backdrop. Their website simply states they can extract off of white, which is exactly the color of the hi-liter.

"Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and own that one" John says.

I hurriedly found another vendor to do the work, at a rate of $1.00 per image. This cost me an additional $1,150 over the original anticipated costs.

At the point that I received the photos back from the other vendor (NextGen), I was 10 days past when parents were promised to see their proofing galleries.

I had a due date of 6/10 to distribute the photographs to parents. Since there was a massive delay in receiving the extracted images, I was unable to polish them completely, and cover all of the players' feet (they weren't allowed to wear cleats into the clubhouse for picture day) with the league logo. I uploaded all of the images so that the parents could see and make any final orders/confirm their prepay selections.

I had a total of 199 prepay orders. My print lab received the batch of prepay and proofing orders that had been placed up until 5/30. Every single one of the prepay orders' images were transferred by GotPhoto incorrectly, and were printed cropped top-left instead of centered. This caused players images to be cut off and all of the backgrounds to show off-center for every-single-order.

When I asked GotPhoto why the images transferred the way they did, they said I should have manually opened every order, selected every image for every item that was ordered, crop them, and save them.

If I had multiple leagues, this would be a full-time job for several people. Seeing that all of the PROOFING orders were transferred correctly, there is no way that the standard operating procedure for PREPAY is any different.

I am still hearing about errors from my clients - backgrounds that printed blurry (for some, but not for others?), missing items from their orders (that when I investigate turns out to be the image not being transferred from GotPhoto to the print vendor)

When I drafted a complaint & request for a refund to GotPhoto, they took quite some time to come to the conclusion that their mistake was only worth $750.

Due to the reprints, refunds, and disputes my customers have needed, the stress that has caused my chronic health conditions to flare awfully, a hospitalization, and my inability to feel okay working on anything other than resolving this issue for my clients. I am broke.

I lost all of my savings fixing this issue, and also needing to purchase a laptop in the middle of all of it.

GotPhoto's pitiful customer service response to these issues, and the negligence they caused has cost me this league, and probably the potential to do this type of work in the future.

Think twice about using GotPhoto for your volume photography work. This company has cost me thousands of dollars, my reputation, and the reputation of my predecessor who recommended me to this league.

Worst customer service I've ever dealt with in this industry-or possibly ever in my entire life to be honest.

How is it that I had tons of calls and correspondence with the sales guy from gotphoto before I signed up, so much so that I was annoyed with his communication and how often he would reach out to me-and then when I finally agreed to trying out their system, it's like they literally dumped me in the middle of the ocean without a life raft and expect me to swim back to shore on my own.

I cannot say how disappointed I am with the three jobs we've used them for. Somehow one of my jobs was sent to production without me being able to swap the green screen images out to the actual orders, and so now they want me to pay to ship each order to the clients who ordered. AND it took 2 days for them to respond and tell me that I would have to pay in MORE money than I'm already shelling out to them-I just feel like I'm being robbed and nobody will help me figure out a resolution to my problem without me having to pay in hundreds of dollars for shipping costs.