Payments firm to take product photos
Square branches out with a robot service that snaps images for online retailers.
Carolyn Bessette is good at making soap. So good that people pay $8 for a bar of Farm to Shower Peppermint Watermelon or Hopi Blue Corn handmade soap through her website.
What she’s not good at is photographing soap. “I tried doing it myself, and it was just awful,” she said.
The 52-year-old entrepreneur and her husband run Dr. Bessette Naturals. In addition to their online store, they have a location at a farmer’s market in Boston, where customers can browse all-natural skincare products. In March, the company that makes their cash register, Square Inc., asked the couple if they’d like to try a new productphotography service the company was testing. The cameraman, they learned, was a robot.
Before the rise of online shopping, photographing inanimate objects wouldn’t have been a logical growth opportunity for a global payments business with a market value of $33 billion. But Square thinks there are enough store owners with a bad eye for photography that it spent more than $20,000 on a robot and devoted 1,000 square feet to the project in a New York warehouse in Industry City, Brooklyn.
Square announced Monday that it’s beginning to take orders from anyone in the U.S. for mechanically snapped photos. It will charge about $10 plus shipping for customers to send a product weighing less than 20 pounds to the Brooklyn studio and, within two weeks, receive three digital photos from different angles. (Staff will select the best ones for customers.) Square also offers a 360-degree photo service for about $30 apiece.
Square said the service is cheaper than many professional photographers, but it’s also competing with the phone in people’s pockets.
David Rusenko, the general manager of e-commerce at Square, said he tells shopkeepers that enchanting photos are crucial to selling on the web, where shoppers can’t pick up or try things on.
“When you buy something online, all you have are product photos,” he said.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter Inc. co-founder, started Square a decade ago with a Chicletsize device that can process a credit card swipe through an iPhone. The company now sells touchscreen cash registers, small-business loans, payroll software and website-building tools. The stock is up 40% this year as the company looks to break into more aspects of the retail business.
Catering to the needs of online sellers is a booming business. More than half of sales on Amazon.com Inc.’s website go to independent sellers on the marketplace.
Amazon sells them advertising services, cloud hosting and a $100 AmazonBasics Portable Photo Studio, which can fold up like a massage table.
Shopify Inc. sells software to create and manage online stores, as well as stock photography to make them pretty. The Canadian company’s stock has doubled over the last six months.
Square is optimistic that the photography project can recoup development costs and justify more studios, product manager John O’Brien-Carelli said. If the one in Brooklyn takes off, the company would open more studios, each with a specialization to reduce the time needed to reset the robot’s instructions.