20 Things You Didn’t Know About Snapfish

Snapfish is an American company that specializes in web-based photo printing and photo sharing services. The company not only has an interesting history, it has had a bit of a turbulent existence despite the fact that it’s a huge success. It’s a fairly well-known photo service but if you haven’t yet used their online products or you’re not a member, here are 20 things about Snapfish that you probably don’t know, but might be happy to find out.

1. Snapfish has been around since 1999

Snapfish is set to celebrate its 20th year in business. The company was first launched in 1999 by its four co-founders Bala Parthasarathy, Rajil Kappor, Suneet Wadhwa and Shripati Acharya. The company has its base in San Francisco, California. The four partners also brought Ben Nelson on board as their CFO initially and he then became the president of the company. The current CEO and president of Snapfish is Jasbir Patel

2. Hewlett-Packard purchased Snapfish

Here’s a bit of trivia that most people who use the site are not aware of. Hewlett-Packard owned Snapfish for a period of time. They made the purchase in 2005. The new owner spent $300 million to make the acquisition of Snapfish. They initially did not disclose the amount of money that they paid for it, but one of the co-founders, Raj Kapoor, finally confirmed the selling price in 2011. At the time that they made the purchase, Snapfish was bringing in less than $100 million per year, but they saw the potential for it to be a huge success. Hewlett-Packard is known for its printing equipment and supplies as well as for digital photography services collaborations, so it made sense at the time for them to purchase Snapfish.

3. Snapfish is a membership site with excellent benefits for some but not others

Snapfish is one of those websites that has the greatest appeal to people who do a lot of work with photographs. People who don’t do much may not benefit that much from membership. Those do do enjoy a large variety of services that make membership a worthwhile thing. Snapfish provides photo sharing as well as photo printing. The members have access to unlimited photo storage and they can also upload files for free, you it’s easy to see why the service would be so useful for professional photographers as well as shutterbugs and photography enthusiasts.

4. Snapfish had an early failure in brick and mortar

The online giant had achieved some remarkable success early in its development. It was a web-based retailer and this platform was working very well for Snapfish. They decided to open a brick and mortar store which they called their retail concept store, in 2004. The location of the retail store was Alexandria, Virginia. It didn’t achieve the success that they had hoped for and they ended up closing the physical retail location.

5. Snapfish reached an important milestone in 2007

Even through the physical store didn’t turn out to be successful, the online portion of Snapfish achieved remarkable success. It appeared that the public was more interested in the convenience of online services versus driving to a physical location for service. By 2005, their membership numbers had grown to an amazing 40 million. They also hit the remarkable milestone of hosting 1 billion digital pictures. This was a huge milestone for the company and a mark of their success within just 8 years after first launching the Snapfish website.

6. Snapfish closed several international sites

Snapfish had established websites which were available to provide services to members in countries other than the United States. In August of 2013, the company made the announcement that they were going to close down the services that they had been providing to customers in Spain, the Netherlands, India and in Belgium. They used both mailing and announcements on the websites that were serving those customers at the time. They even directed those members who were going to lose their service to tow other replacement services which were Photojaanic and Pixum.

7. The original company bought Snapfish back

After HP had owned Snapfish for a full decade, its original owner District Photo was interested in buying the company back. They negotiated a price and in April of 2015, HP consented to make the sale. District Photo negotiated to retain the printing services that HP had been providing for its members, so there was no change or disruption in the printing services that members of Snapfish enjoyed.

8. Snapfish had a major setback in 2016

Members were not pleased about the major issue that Snapfish encountered in 2016. While converting to a new web system, the company experienced a catastrophic data loss. All of the photos which had been stored before January of 2014 would not migrate to the new website system. Some of the albums were recovered but many were not and the albums remained empty of the photos that they had once contained. This was one of the worst issues that Snapfish had encountered in its successful provision of web based photo services for their members.

9. Snapfish is sincere about providing the best possible service for members

Snapfish has explained to their members that they are doing everything that they can by working behind the scenes to make customer experiences, better, fresher and more enjoyable. They’re consistently adding to the services that they provide. The events of 2016 were unfortunate, but it wasn’t enough to take the company down and they’ve since recovered and are taking actions to ensure that members received dependable and high-quality services through their site.

10. Snapfish lets you be creative

Snapfish provides its members with a lot of really cool services and special tools to make their own unique creations. If you haven’t yet become a member of the site than you probably don’t know that you can use your photos to make a variety of different items. You an make cards, books, prints, and make amazing gifts or items for resale. The tools and services that they offer allow you to be creative.

11. Snapfish has an educational component

If you’re not skilled in photography or working with photos but you have an interest in the hobby, then Snapfish may be an ideal site for you to join. They offer help tutorials that actually teach and instruct you in how to work with photos. They also provide you with a variety of tools that are easy to use, even if you’re a complete novice. It’s a great place to learn.

12. Their new site is responsive

In this day and age, the most popular and successful companies provide their customers with innovative and easy to access services. With the new trend in mobile device use, more people are accessing Snapfish and similar sites via their smartphones, tablets or desktops. Not all companies take the time or make the effort to ensure that their websites are fully responsive across all types of devices. Snapfish realizes the importance of staying up with the times and giving their members exactly what they want. With this in mind, their new site is responsive and accessible from all different platforms.

13. Snapfish works with social media

Another important feature that consumers demand is the ability for websites to be integrated with their social media sites. Snapfish has made it possible for members to import photos from their Instagram feeds and store them in their accounts on the member site storage at Snapfish. This is just one more really great feature about Snapfish that contributes to making it so popular.

14. You can also make calendars

Another really cool thing that you can do with Snapfish is to make calendars. They allow you to import whichever photos that you want to use to create your own customized calendars. These items are great for fundraisers or for making calendars to distribute to your family as gifts or even for your business. The tools that they offer give you to ability to make them look however you want. Just imagine the possibilities that exist when using Snapfish.

15. You can jump from one device to another

Snapfish has created the means for its members to start on a project with any type of connective device and either finish that project with the same device or jump to another one. This is an incredibly versatile feature. If you get an inspiration when you’re away from your desktop, it’s not a problem as long as you have a smartphone with you. You can start a project and then come back and finish it later, and you can do so from practically any device that allows you to connect to the website and navigate through its options.

16. You can transfer old projects from the classic site to the new platform

Here is yet another amazing feature that Snapfish provides. They have built a new site that offers tons of new features and capabilities. If you have old projects that you’ve saved on thir classic site, all you need to do to use credits from the classic site is to visit the credits page and navigate to your My projects page. The older projects that you’ve saved are stored in this area and you can copy them and upload them.

17. Employees give Snapfish a big thumbs up work work/life balance

People who work for Snapfish have given it a high rating for offering workers an excellent work-life balance. They have a good work from home policy that most employees are highly pleased with. This is an important value for companies to embrace and Snapfish does a good job of being flexible with their employees. This is one of the pros that is widely associated with working as a member of the Snapfish team.

18. There are also drawbacks associated with the company

We looked at a lot of employee based reviews of Snapfish as a company. We wanted to find out more about the inner workings of the company along with employee satisfaction rates. While the company is rated very highly on their flexibility for workers and working from home options, we discovered one consistent complaint about Snapfish overall. At least from the employee perspective, there is a lack of strength in the senior leadership of the company and workers give them a poor rating for this aspect. They go further to suggest that there is a lack of business strategy at the upper echelons of Snapfish.

19. There is a mixed bag of reviews for Snapfish as a company

We’re still referring to the employee perspectives on the company when we say that there are some employees that do not recommend the company as an employer because although there are many workers who really do care about the customers and the brand, and who also care about making the experience for the users as positive as possible, there is very little cohesion or camaraderie within the engineering of the organization. We found this to be encouraging on one hand, because the bottom line is that the customers should be the top priority and it’s nice to know that the majority of the employees have this focus in mind. It’s just too bad to find out that they’re not really able to work together and collaborate as team to make the working environment more fun. Still, it appears that the company values are customer-centric.

20. The majority of the engineering is outsourced

We were surprised to discover that Snapfish is an organization that outsources up to 95% of their engineering staff through a contracting company. This would explain the lack of cohesion within the engineering workforce. Workers also shared that this helps to contribute to a chaotic and disorganized environment. It’s not difficult to understand how a largely outsourced division would create these kinds of problems. This tends to leave some of the employees into the dark with regard to where certain projects are going and it accounts for the high levels of employee dissatisfaction with some aspects of the work environment at Snapfish. This is one element that they could certainly improve upon, but the customers are not affected by these issues and it’s still a great membership site for the end users.

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