I was glad to receive an email from long time TechNation Australia supporter, Kain Tietzel, the other day, explaining that the startup he’s been working on, PhotoMerchant, has finally launched.

PhotoMerchant is  “a complete online solution for managing your photography business”

The idea for PhotoMerchant was conceived 2 years ago when Derek Clapham (co-founder and CTO) was swamped by the process minutia of running his own photography business. Having spent many, many hours managing the print orders from 300+ high school students he realised there had to be a better way. He searched for an online solution but only found a disparate array of online photography services that were either expensive, had limited functionality or required a lot of technical knowledge. And so he set about building a solution with the idea of offering it available to other amateur, semi and professional photographers.

Two years (and 2.5 Million lines of code) later, and after being joined by Elmar Platzer as Director and co-founder and Tietzel as Creative & Marketing Director, the startup from the Sutherland Shire officially soft-launched last Monday.

Initially targeting the Australian photography market, PhotoMerchant is due to launch in the United States in mid October, with grander plans to roll the service out to UK, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa by the middle of 2010, and then on to the rest of the world.

PhotoMerchant allows a photographer to build a dedicated portfolio website to showcase their craft and enables them to then sell their photos through the build in e-commerce engine. Transactions are conducted in local currencies and cater for all local taxation requirements. Order management tools allow the photographer to automatically generate invoices and emails to keep their clientele informed of the process.

The PhotoMerchant service also offers financial management and reporting tools to enable the photographer to manage their entire business online.

PhotoMerchant currently services “self-fulfilment” meaning the photographer is responsible for managing the ordering process with their print lab. But in the near future, PhotoMerchant will enable “direct-fulfilment” via their print lab partners Nulab in Australia and Burrell Colour Imaging in the United States, meaning orders will go directly to the print lab and be drop shipped directly to the customer.

For AU$19.95 per month, plus a 10% transaction fee, photographers get unlimited hosting, unlimited galleries, unlimited transactions and a comprehensive (and growing) set of business and marketing tools.

That pricing model, and the functionality made available, tells me that while they claim to focus on everything from amateur to professional photographers, their user-base will come more from the professional end.

PhotoMerchant see their main competitors as being SmugMug and Zenfolio. There are local sites that cater to photographers like Photo Art Gallery and RedBubble, but Tietzel tells me they don’t see them as direct competitors.

There’s currently a 14 day trial on, so if photography is your thing, PhotoMerchant might be worth checking out.