MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => GLStock => Topic started by: GLStock on March 15, 2017, 11:56
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Hello All,
We are pleased to announce the integration of Payoneer into GL. Many of our members have expressed interest in Payoneer, as they have had issues with Moneybookers or PayPal in certain countries. Payoneer is one of the best payment options available, so this new integration will surely be a positive for many of our members.
For current members, getting Payoneer payments set up is quick and easy:
Step 1: Navigate to your Account -- Profile Page. Scroll to bottom of page and select Payoneer for "Payment Method". Press Update.
Step 2: A GL representative will manually approve your payment method change request.
Step 3: Check back later. When you see Payoneer as your payment method, select "Sign up with Payoneer". If you do not have an account already, please sign up. If you do, you will be prompted to login to your existing account. Once you sign up or log in, you are fully set up to receive Payoneer payments!
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If you have any questions regarding our integration with Payoneer, please do not hesitate!
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lol, selling images would be a prerequisite to get paid in the first place
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Yes...sales are a prerequisite to receiving funds. individuals with sales on GL will be able to get paid with a new payment method if they choose. For those who have no sales or low sales, they can still select this payment method for when they do cross the $50 payment threshold.
It's clear that some of our members will not have incredibly high sales counts. In this forum, we are classified as a "low earner" at the moment. We understand this, and in relation to the top earners, we are a low earner. But there are still thousands of members who choose to work with us, who are getting sales, and who are pleased with our customer support.
Each week we payout plenty of money to our contributors, some more than others based on the desire for their work. By giving 40-52%, and allowing for a wide range of pricing, some sellers are getting paid very frequently.
This post was regarding a payment method option that we are providing our sellers with, not about the sales count of any of our members. Having said that, we are still working diligently on the site behind the scenes. Other agencies certainly have higher sales counts right now, but they are paying pennies per license sold, and are constantly making changes to their businesses that adversely affect contributors, while padding the agency’s margins. This is a constant slap in the face to contributors. While it is taking us time to make significant change to GL, our intentions are to increase sales for our contributors, maintaining our slim margins, all while providing our contributors more control of how much they make per license sold. When our ultimate plan comes to fruition and sales do increase, GL members will reap the benefits significantly more than they would at any other agency.
In these forums, every other post is titled "XYZ Agency Screwed me", "Disappointed with XYZ", "Down the Toilet", etc., so there is dissatisfaction with companies both large and small in the industry. We are doing our best with the business we purchased. All we can do is continue with our internal plans and continue working hard on GL. Adding a new payment method is one minor benefit for our current and future contributors.
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GL had always been fair to contributors. Good to hear you will be continuing the trend and all the best for more sales!
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After upload i am forced to click on each image title.
I have to click the title and i have to click "submit".
Takes about 10 seconds for 1 image.
click "submit" "submit" "submit" "submit" "submit"
No way ::)
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Will you consider lowering the payout treshold?
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No, $50 will remain the threshold. We actually wanted to increase that when we took the site over, but upon feedback from members here, we decided to leave it at $50.
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My sales with GL have dried up and that's worse than some of the really small sites. Hope that changes soon or there will be no need to think about payouts.
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I have around 5000 image to upload.
After upload i am forced to click on each image title.
I have to click the title and i have to click "submit".
Takes about 10 seconds for 1 image.
Total 13 hours only click "submit" "submit" "submit" "submit" "submit"
No way ::)
yes, they have a upload limit and it is really pain for people with good quantity portfolio, they should remove it.
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I have stopped to upload on GL for the 20 a day limit… It is unmanageable!
At least could they make 600/month…
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20 Uploads per day is the starting upload limit. Send us a private message with your account information and we will increase the limit if we can. Not every request is approved for internal purposes. We are a small team that manually approves each image, ensure titles, descriptions, and tags are correct, as well as ensuring image quality. So to allow each member to upload 5,000 images in a given day would cause a major backup and slowdown in approval times.
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20 Uploads per day is the starting upload limit. Send us a private message with your account information and we will increase the limit if we can. Not every request is approved for internal purposes. We are a small team that manually approves each image, ensure titles, descriptions, and tags are correct, as well as ensuring image quality. So to allow each member to upload 5,000 images in a given day would cause a major backup and slowdown in approval times.
Read better my post.
I never told about 5000 a day. I told about 600 a month, so not a daily limit but a monthly limit for the same number of images every month
20 a day are 600 a month, but uploaded in 30 times…
Giving us, as default, the possibility to upload up to 600 a month (in one or more times), and then taking the time you need to review it, will not change a lot for you (on the contrary you will have the possibility to better plan and organize your work over a longer period), but it will make things very simpler for most of us.
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We can't ask a new or small agency to take in more than they can properly review. Hasn't blind crowdsourcing been tried enough by now? It's a dead end.
The problem isn't the time it takes to review, it's the time it takes to upload. Photographers trying to sell online (stock, or art) are being driven mad by tedious upload processes. I could name a couple of 'art' sites where I signed up, then simply gave up after seeing the process to submit a single photo and make it available and discoverable.
How about a way to submit an entire portfolio at once, to be reviewed and accepted when and if time permits? The agency could sample the work and decide if it was worth going in and reviewing the whole thing. It could be submitted on media, or via a cloud share. I don't mind waiting a few months for review. I do mind spending hours mindlessly checking the same boxes, over and over, on web pages.
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Thank you all for your opinions and ideas. Some very strong points have been made, and we will internally discuss the uploading process/limits in more detail. I think we should be able to come up with a solution that works for us internally, and for our contributors to make for a more seamless process.
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Thank you all for your opinions and ideas. Some very strong points have been made, and we will internally discuss the uploading process/limits in more detail. I think we should be able to come up with a solution that works for us internally, and for our contributors to make for a more seamless process.
Great to know, I hope you will improve the email system too, I have sent emails regarding limits few times but never heard back.
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Just wish I could see some sale here. Haven't had a sale in over a year with over 400 images on line.
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Sorry but when the new people took over sales stopped immediately I haven't had a sale in 12 months! With over 1500 images
I'll never reach payout and if I delete the account GL keep the cash.
It's a no win situation
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Just wish I could see some sale here. Haven't had a sale in over a year with over 400 images on line.
Ditto. What's going on?
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[crickets chirping]
There's always hope.
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[crickets chirping]
There's always hope.
Hope is a small town in New Jersey and there's more going on there than in GL
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emailed them several times, never got a reply, so much for improved contributor support. it was all blah blah and in the end nothing changes
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how true, 500 images to be reviewed since Nov. 2016, no reply, a dozent of emails sent, dead end
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When a business venture like this isn't making it, it's probably pretty hard to wind it down gracefully. You can't just send out an email saying "I'm thinking about ending it, not sure yet, hope you stick around anyway" because that just worsens your situation.
My biggest fear throughout the whole microstock thing (which is mostly past history for me now) is that some shady site operator suddenly disappears, taking all my work with him - or quietly sells a few terabytes of imagery out the back door to raise some quick cash. I doubt that will happen here because the new owner seemed reasonable enough.
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GL had always been fair to contributors. Good to hear you will be continuing the trend and all the best for more sales!
I agree. Your customer service and ethics are top notch. However I am becoming very alarmed at the total lack of sales. I have a portfolio of over 6k high commercial value, professionally produced images. I used to get a payout nearly every month on GL. Lately I have not had a single sale there in months. Even tho I am on other low earners, yours is the ONLY site where I have ever, in 8 years, gone a month without a single sale. I am a patient person. I can hang in there on a site with slow sales but it is getting pretty dire to go months with NO sales.
Do you have any plans to invest in marketing to attract customers? If so, what sort of time frame are we looking at before sales resume/improve?
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We are working on a total revamp of our site, both in design and additional functionality and revenue sources.
We are looking at < 2 months for the new site to be live. It's been a long process for us as the new owners, and it's tough that sales have dropped for many members, but I do find it important to stress that there are many members who have seen their sales grow significantly with us.
Behind the scenes, we have been building the foundation for future growth. We have invested a lot of money in our proprietary technology, and we will continue working on growing the business. I'm sure it's difficult to be patient, but we are a very small team of dedicated individuals trying to do some big things. When comparing to companies with billions of dollars in cash reserves and teams of developers, we are admittedly going to be slower to make major releases like the one we are working on, but we do have high expectations for the results.
What you should expect is a much better user experience, additional features for buyers to work efficiently in GL, and some new opportunities for additional revenue for sellers.
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waffle
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Really, at this point, I have no problem being patient. I've gotten out of microstock except for GL and Alamy, because those are the only ones not madly slashing prices and giving things away. I won't be shooting stock again unless a better opportunity comes along. So as long as there's a plan, and an announcement now and then, I'm not worried about leaving my work on GL's servers.
As a former software developer I know all too well how long these things take.
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@Stockastic, we certainly appreciate your understanding and your feedback. To give some insight, we are about 90% finished with all of the new designs, we are just putting some finishing touches there. However, the development is where movement has been very slow. Neither myself or my partner are developers, so being able to pull off a major redesign while adding new functionality and improving the user experience has been and continues to be a challenge for us, but one that we are making great progress on.
We have completely upgraded the site with tracking technology, allowing us to better optimize our paid marketing efforts, as well as make informed decisions by collecting data the previous owners did not have the ability to collect. We have added various ways of "suggesting" a user sign up for a Buyers account. We are adding lightboxes for a more efficient working process for our buyers.
We are also building the foundation to be able to accept new media types (ie: video, audio, etc.). Currently, our foundation is only able to handle images.
We are trying to make it so that when we launch the site, the Buyers will have many more reasons to use GL, rather than simply having a new look and feel. We are also ensuring that we do not launch prematurely, to the extent that the changes we are making will not be as effective as we anticipate. We are waiting until we are pleased with the product, and it will be released in a version that we are most proud of.
I have only mentioned a few things that will be coming out in the upcoming release(s), but as a software developer, I'm sure you can appreciate that this requires hundreds of hours of design and development work.
We actually did send an email out to our buyers about some upcoming changes, here are a few things we touched up on:
"Here is a brief rundown of what we're working on:
- Complete Redesign of Buyer & Contributor Interface
- Making significant improvements to search results pages.
- Addition of Lightbox Functionality, giving you the ability to work and search more efficiently.
- Offering a quicker, more seamless purchase and download experience.
- Change to Credit system: Rather than receiving deposit bonuses for deposits of $100+, you will receive discounts on many credit packages. This will enable you to spend less on each image you purchase! IE: If an image costs $10.00 (or 10 Credits), you will pay significantly less than $10.00 for that image by purchasing a discounted credit package.
- We will be experimenting with Bundle Packages, offering a collection of photos to be purchased together (ie: 25 Image Vector Set, 25 Seamless Pattern Vectors, etc.)"
We anticipate an increase in credit purchases, and thus an increase in image sales by making the switch from "deposits" to "credits". Based on the technology our site was built on, we are not able to offer tiered discounts, we are only able to offer "bonuses". As a buyer, a bonus is nice because it allows you to get some free images. However, most buyers are more interested in paying less per image, and our new credit plans will incentivize buyers to pay less per image by buying more credits.
Unlike other agencies, if a buyer purchases a discounted credit plan, you will not receive less commissions.
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This is a big process for us, and I can assure you all that we are doing the best we can to make it happen as quickly as possible, but we are not willing to sacrifice the overall quality of the project we've been working on for quite some time, solely to launch something prematurely.
I know some of you believe that we are "waffling", and that's okay. You're entitled to your opinion, but the reality is, we are taking a neglected site/business and giving it the TLC it deeply needs.