Why do some photo albums companies only allow “Professional Photographers” to buy them?

Question

I want to get a really nice photo album for myself, without going through some middleman. Why do so many companies require that I be a "professional photographer" before they'll talk to me?

Example of several I've found while searching:

• http://asukabook.com/prices.html
• https://www.pictobooks.com/html/sign.php?menu=signup
• http://www.lifetimealbums.com/contacts

Is this sort of a buddy thing, where they want to make sure the middlemen don't get undercut? Like maybe why would I pay my photographer $500 for an album, when I could buy it direct for $100?

Answer 1

Two reasons:

1. They don't have the time/patience to deal with amateurs/brides.

2. They don't want to get in the middle of any copyright issues by dealing with images from someone who may not actually own the rights to have the assembled into a book.

I honestly suspect #1 is the prime reason. They price their services with the assumption that they have a very minimal amount of back and forth so they can get the images and design choices in a bundle, do the work and hand it back. They don't have the time budgeted to go back and forth with every random consumer that wants their one album. They'll happily invest the single time effort to train a pro how to submit work to them, knowing that once they've done it they'll be able to get album after album in from the pro in a consistent format and be able to turn it around in a set amount of effort that they built their pricing around. Pros that prove to not meet that expectation will get dropped. Either explicitly and directly, or just by having their work de-prioritized to the point they get the hint and go somewhere else.

(disclaimer, I'm talking from a general feeling in the industry, not about those three in particular.)

Answer 2

There is a separate issue that cabbey didn't touch on, and it is a common one in services to business -- hiding prices from consumers helps their business customers in a big way.

If Company X will create an album for me at price Y, then why are you charging me so damned many Ws for the album?

All your customer can see is the cost to have the album produced. You might be able to get away with shipping and sales tax, but forget about cropping, resizing, retouching, colour correction, business administration time associated with the album or any of the other expenses you may have -- never mind the markup. With weddings in particular, the photographer's customer sees him/her snapping pictures for a couple of hours (even if you're there all day and well into the evening, it only registers as "a couple of hours") -- nobody sees the week of work that goes into creating the package that's delivered at the end of it all.

Answer 3

I go through this question quite a bit at work (I am not a pro photographer), where we sell business to business not to end consumer. There are additional challenges as Cabbey outlined with doing work directly with the end consumer. The main one being the amount of training in the process that is needed.

Having said that I can say that you can find some solutions that are still cost effective with a little looking around. Going to your local camera store, not a box store but a real camera store with accessories and tools for photographers, they can often provide some of these services. There are also online solutions that have some good resources for printing albums. My personal favorite is SmugMug as they have the tools to assist with the process as well as having options for what provider you want to use. You can check it out at http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/AB#More

Disclaimer - I am not a SmugMug employee just a very satisfied customer that knows a few of the employees. If you would like a referral code, just let me know I will share mine.