dScope for Retail Minilabs

The retail minilab has suffered most from the move to digital photography as the general public no longer need to print in order to view their images. At the same time the large providers have systematically driven down the value of the core product by supporting large scale, cut price providers.

Many minilabs have been unable to diversify their business away from the standard development and printing services and have been forced to close. This trend is set to continue as more of the traditional minilab services become available in the home, and new products allow the customer to display their images in more creative ways without printing. To remain profitable, minilabs must find different customer groups and provide new services that are not within the capability of the home computer user.

The first area that has proven to be lucrative for the smarter minilab operator has been to target the professional photography market traditionally serviced by the prolabs. The minilab can provide more personalised and interactive services to the smaller professional operators and hobbyist photographers. dScope allows the minilab operator to create highly personalised presentations of images and save these as reusable templates. Templates may include the customer's logo, their name, contact details, borders, masks and other effects. Once a template is created, often interactively with the customer, it can be applied to hundreds or thousands of images in a single step. The presentation becomes a differentiation point for the photographer and they can only get that presentation by returning to the minilab. Using these tools, the minilab can target photographers who produce large numbers of images, but do not have their own printing capabilities. This includes wedding photographers, sports photographers, events photographers and the smaller scale school and kindergarten photographers.

A second area of opportunity has arisen by offering customers an opportunity to become creative with their images rather than simply viewing the captured image. The dScope Album Page builder and the dScope Kiosk have proven very successful in getting customers to build much more interesting and creative prints using their own images and a number of standard resources.

These capabilities are also important in pushing customers away from the standard 6X4 print. While the "supermarket" printers have driven the price of a 6X4 down to the point that there is no longer profit to be made, other sizes still command a premium price with a good profit margin. Given the chance to become creative with their images, customers move to printing these larger sizes, which in turn drive sales of frames and other services.

The dScope Kiosk solution also includes the Home Kiosk, a fully functional kiosk program that operators can give to their customers for installation on home PC's. The Home Kiosk has exactly the same interface and most of the same functionality as the Retail Kiosk, and no extra training is required for them to submit their orders from home. The Home Kiosk transfers the orders via the internet. The operator then prints the orders and delivers them via the selected delivery method.

The dScope Online facility is being used by minilabs to also offer professional photographers a bureau service for placing their images on the web, accepting orders, then printing and distributing the product. The minilab is able to offer the photographers a full turnkey solution.

To see further information about the modules used and their functions, select any of the links below.

There are many other things that dScope can do to improve your business, please feel free to contact us for more information.

To get more information about the dScope Kiosk, click below to go to the dScope Kiosk web page.