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Managing expectations

As the only person working on Pixaria it can be a difficult job to manage the expectations of people used to working with products created by software companies with big development budgets and large teams. With an ever growing installed base of users, the number of requests I receive for changes and new features is also increasing and it can be hard to manage people's expectations in relation to Pixaria's ongoing development.

Since Pixaria was created the stock photography market has changed quite significantly. Sites like iStockPhoto and Getty Images have continued to grab market share and a wealth of new micro-stock sites have increased competition still more. With all of this activity, there is an increasing amount of pressure on me to improve Pixaria to make it easier for independent photographers to operate independently and still make some money. The key to this is Pixaria's e-commerce capabilities and this area is the one where I get the most requests (and even demands) for progression of features and capabilities.

For the lay person, the practicalities of selling images and other products may appear to be quite simple but the reality is far removed from this because of the sheer variety of ways in which online transactions can take place. To illustrate the point, let's consider payment gateways.

In the last 12 months, I've had a large number of requests for the addition of new payment gateways to Pixaria to expand on the 2Checkout and PayPal support which is already included. Adding payment gateways would be an obvious way to increase the number of potential users of Pixaria but there are many technical issues which make this less simple than it would appear at face value.

The first big hurdle is that majority of payment gateways operate only in one or two countries such as iDEAL which is based in the Netherlands or Authorize.net which is US only. In some cases, gateways cannot easily be tested by users outside their country of origin and in others, the language barrier and lack of available documentation makes implementation impractical. In the case of Google Checkout, a popular request, the Pixaria website must have an SSL security certificate for 'https' transactions which means increased complexity in the set up process for the site administrator and more things to go wrong once it's up and running.

At the same time as requests are coming in for additional payment gateways, I also get frequent requests for other e-commerce features all of which have their own issues and questions to be resolved. These include features such as coupons, vouchers, payment credits, multiple tax rates, physical products, per gallery pricing, per user pricing, multiple image download sizes and region based taxes among many others.

Some of these which appear quite simple such as coupons are in fact quite complex. In implementing coupons, it's necessary to consider such factors as how many times a coupon can be used, whether or not coupons have an expiry date, when should the discount be applied (at checkout or while still in the cart), what happens if a user applies the coupon code but never completes the purchase, what happens in the event of a refund and many other minor implementation details. The simple solution to this would be not to try and implement all of the details and advanced features at once but this can backfire when I implement a basic version of something prompting complaints that it's too simple and doesn't include the level of fine control they require.

All of this brings be back to the beginning which is my ongoing goal to manage everyone's expectations. The reality continues to be that Pixaria Gallery is something I work on on my own and in my spare time. As much as I'd love to devote more time to working on it, I simply cannot while I have a day job to look after as well. Because of this, I think it's important to reiterate my commitment to ongoing development and improvement of Pixaria Gallery but also that I can't do everything at once.

The development pipeline for the next three 'point' releases of Pixaria has been devised with this in mind. Versions 2.8 and 2.9 will focus exclusively on the store and e-commerce features and I'm aiming to implement as many of the most requested features as possible. Version 3.0 is going to deal only with the front end look and feel and customisation capabilities hopefully making it easier to modify the look of Pixaria and provide more themes.

By building on the recent improvements in the admin area's image management tools and taking a more conservative approach to releases, I fully expect that Pixaria will become a better product for everyone and that it will do so without giving me a nervous breakdown! As always, I enjoy getting feedback so if you want to share your thoughts on any of the issues raised here, let me know.

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