Amazon has decided to join the photo printing business!
Amazon is moving into another sector: photo printing.
The e-commerce giant this week debuted a new service called Amazon Prints that allows customers to print their digital photos and order souvenirs like photo books, stationery and calendars.
The new Amazon Prints.
IMAGE: SCREENSHOT/AMAZON
So far, that market has been dominated by companies like Shutterfly, which has offered similar options since its founding in 1999. Shutterfly’s stock plunged 12 percent in one day after news broke of Amazon’s entry into the market, Bloomberg reported.
Amazon Prints is only available to customers who use Amazon Drive, the company’s cloud storage service. Photos must be stored on the platform to be printed through Amazon Prints.
There’s a small caveat of course… you need to use Amazon Drive before you can use their print service. (So Shutterfly, calm down, Amazon isn’t going to steal your lunch… yet)
Other than that, it sounds and looks pretty standard. They don’t seem to offer much in the way of high quality papers or printing… just your basic old-fashioned photo prints. (So Imagekind calm down… Amazon isn’t stealing your lunch just yet either)
Personally, I’m one of those people who feels that if you’re going to bring a digital picture into the physical world you should put it on high quality paper with high quality ink. I think it should feel as beautiful as it looks.
But I’ll tell you what, I’m not everybody, and I’m glad that Amazon is offering people a way to get photos of things that matter to them for even less than they could before.
As a Business – Amazon Prints
Did you know, Shutterfly alone had $1 billion USD in revenue for 2015… If Amazon were to take just 10% of that away from Shutterfly, that’s $100 million in revenue for Amazon.
That is a whole lot of hard drives that they can now go out and buy to support Amazon Drive. Frankly, I’m sure some Amazon employees came up with Amazon Prints in some brainstorming meeting as a ‘bolt-on’ revenue generating business for its consumer storage (the equivalent of a twitch.tv streamer selling t-shirts).
The capital costs (what they have to pay to get the equipment and such) were probably negligible for a company the size of Amazon… and that’s if they even are the ones who do the printing and shipping. They may very well use an outside printer and shipper… for all we know it’s Shutterfly.
Honestly the entire things seems to revolve around convenience rather than passion or a pursuit for quality printing. People have always wanted to get their photos in a convenient manner and Amazon saw the opportunity to give people that convenience and make a little cash while doing it.
The FYI Photography / Art Printing Section of this article…
DID YOU KNOW… There are actually oodles of companies that offer printing services online similar to what Amazon is doing…
Now Imagekind is a little different. Imagekind offers art prints, not your standard photo prints you’ll find at Shutterfly and Amazon. Whether it’s your art or somebody else’s… Imagekind, in my opinion, offers the best art quality prints available (Hahnemule paper is just fantastic).
Fine Art America is similar to Imagekind in that they offer art prints. I feel their prints are not as high quality as Imagekinds and are more expensive… but whatever floats your boat.
You’ll know CafePress from their decision to shutdown a page selling t-shirts of Donald Trump that referred to him as a cheeto faced shitgibbon. CafePress sells user made printed products like t-shirts and mugs and such.
Nearly identical to CafePress in that they both sell user designed prints on all kinds of nonsense. If you want your face on a mousepad this is where to go.
