This is great news. Stocksy United has unveiled an innovation that makes life easier for buyers who license RF images, but end up with changing needs. It’s the new “Upgrade Image” feature, and as far as I know, it’s exclusive to Stocksy.
For years while I was at iStockphoto, and I literally mean years, I and others asked for this feature. Look, here’s a thread from 2006 where a buyer says:
It would be great if you had the option to buy a larger format of an image you already purchased, but at an upgrade cost rather than buying the image again at full price. So, if you purchased the medium at $3 and a few months later needed the large you could upgrade for an additional $2. Maybe this already exists and I just don’t know, being new and all.
The only option, there, and at other pay-as-you-go sites, is to take the time to send an email to support and request a refund for the original size, and then go back and purchase the larger size. If you were in a hurry, you might be forced to buy the larger, and worry about the refund later (or forget about it altogether). You might not even be eligible to get a refund to upgrade the size:
… I assumed I would be able to purchase the larger version for my client and get a refund for the standard version. Now i have to tell him I was wrong. My suggestion is that you make it permanently possible to upgrade resolution, not just 14 days. Projects can run over months, not 2 weeks.
As I contributor, I want a user interface that makes it easy for a buyer to get what they need, and this new upgrade option makes it super simple for a buyer to get a larger size of the image they have already licensed. Why would someone need this? Perhaps a small image was licensed for use in a blog, but now it is needed for a paper brochure version of the blog. Perhaps the client used it as a header on a web page, but now wants it for an advertisement at a billboard.
So check out how this works. A buyer goes to their purchase history page: https://www.stocksy.com/cart/history. Now in addition to the “Download” button (you can re-download your images with no limit, remember?), there is a new “Upgrade” button.
A quick click on the “Upgrade” button brings up this dialog:
How cool is that? It tells you what you’ve already licensed, and the prices for the other sizes now reflect the differences between those and the original purchase. Here, a small image is $10, so you’re seeing the $10 credit on the other sizes. Add it to your cart, and head through the regular check-out, and you’re done.
So, this feature is really great. It frees the buyer from the time required to request a refund and go through the whole process again. It frees up customer service from manually having to process refunds. This is a win-win for everyone. Thanks IT department for getting it right in less than 8 years 🙂 .
PS. As a bonus (to me) my recent upload was featured in the mail out about the new interface (the guy with the cake):
sorry to dissapoint you, but Stocksy isn’t the first one with this feature, Veer and PIXTA already have it. Cool and very useful feature though 🙂
Well, I’m slightly disappointed 🙂 but not being on Veer or PIXTA, had no idea. Glad I qualified my statement!