Kicksend partners with Walgreens for 1hr photo printing from your iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Kicksend partners with Walgreens for 1hr photo printing from your iPhone

blog.kicksend.com

70 pointsskyfallsin20 comments

Do people want to print photos? Wasn't there an article a couple years ago about how Flickr was making less than $1k per year on people clicking the "Order prints" button?

I think it really depends on the user experience. Once you have that dialed in it changes everything.

I think people would be far more interested in being able to get a print of their photos in an hour (although there's no reason for it to take remotely that long), than in being able to get them after several days.

Do people want to print photos?

Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: yes. Many of my (female, older) relatives use synthetic pigment attached to plant matter with animal proteins as both their primary transfer mechanism and storage media for photos. Ruriko's mother and my mother got virtually instant Dropboxed/Facebooked photos from the wedding, cooed a bit, and then went head over heels when they got the "real" photos. (Not the professional photos, which will be delivered in data and print -- just the same friends' cameraphone/point-n-click candid shots printed out at Walgreen's for $6.23.)

If true (and I'll assume it is) this is just a basic conversion-funnel problem. If your funnel looks like this:

  - user takes photo on their iPhone
  - user successfully learns of Flickr's existence
  - user successfully opens Flickr account
  - user successfully uploads photo to Flickr
  - user successfully navigates to Flickr, sees photo
  - user decides to order prints
  - user finds and navigates "order prints" workflow
  - user gets prints in the mail three days later

...your conversion rate is one number. If your funnel looks like this:

  - user takes photo on their iPhone
  - user decides they like photo and want a print
  - user goes to local store which has sold photo prints for 30 years
  - user hands camera and $5 to store employee
  - user receives prints ten minutes later

your conversion rate is a completely different number, and it would not be surprising to learn that number B is orders of magnitude different from number A.

Wondering why Walgreen's (or CVS, or fill in your favorite store here) didn't do this already on their own. An app that allows you to scan the camera roll, select pics, then upload to their machines for printing... seems obvious.

Is this more feasible because the pics are already mirrored on kicksend's servers, saving upload time?

I believe this has almost nothing to do with servers and upload time etc.

People, naturally, don't tend to download some app to print their photos. In fact, people are not inclined to print photos. So there's an app which people actually use every day, it partners with a service provider to sell a service and get commission out of it.

There are examples like Song Pop game gives you to opportunity buy the music you guessed from iTunes. There's an affiliate problem of iTunes for that. Because Apple (iTunes) itself won't be implementing a game to increase sales.

Here, the point is, people won't print their photos every day. But people will take photos every day. So if I would download Walgreen app and can't find anything to print at a moment, I'll forget to use and print it when I take a picture with Instagram. So if I would see a print button integrated in Instagram, it will dramatically increase sales.

And if the payments come straight out of your apple ID account that would be fantastic.

They would also cost 30% more.

that's not how percentages work. If Apple takes a 30% cut of your price, then you have to raise your price by 42.8% to still make the same amount of money.

Ah, but if you offered the same service to Android users you couldn't do that, because you aren't allowed to price things differently between iOS and other purchasing options. Unless that has changed.

I believe there's no restriction on pricing on different platforms. If mostly wealthy people have iOS devices, then I might set app price to a higher value than Android just to encourage purchases on Android. I think no one will ever care.

This is actually based on an iOS and Android SDK that Walgreens created, allowing any photo app to integrate with photo printing.

http://news.walgreens.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=561...

Because doing an app well is hard. It's much much easier to wait until someone like Kicksend establish themselves, then give them some money and have them integrate.

And then there's the marketing: Walgreens would peddle the app to people who are in the store and thinking about printing digital photos. A Kicksend user might never set foot in Walgreens, but if he knows about the feature in the app (it's pretty discoverable), he might decide to print a few photos to stick on the empty wall next to his desk.

I thought a Dropbox to (Walgreens/Sam's/Walmart/Target/etc.) app would have popped up by now. Right click on a pic, select send to your store, pick up an hour later. Maybe not.

After 2 (maybe 3) print jobs from different Walgreens, I will never use them again. Get are among the worst in printing, colors were so bad that my own inkject seem better.

This is a result of Aviary's API - http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/10/app-developers-can-now-prin...

Great idea - hopefully you can partner with Target Stores as well as they have a great picture printing kiosk in most stores.

What you really need is a version of Redbox that takes your phone, scours it for photos, and prints them for you. It remembers which photos it's printed, so you don't get duplicates between visits. Heck, might as well have it pull credit card info, too.

Walgreens (and others) already have kiosks like this. Haven't used them, so not sure if it's only for raw USB storage or they speak PTP (which most phones seem to have).

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