I have done a number of on-line sales in the past with varying degrees of success since about 2002, and, although I am not active on that front these days, I think they are a great way of getting your work out there, and to build an audience for your work.
Commenting on why which ones worked better than others may be less helpful to Ed than simply to say that the same fundamentals of business apply to selling photographic prints as do to anything else, and having a sense of them is crucial.
I remember telling a friend in the garment industry how happy I was after my first one, given how surprisingly successful it had been. When he asked me how I structured the pricing, I explained that I had sold the prints at wholesale for x amount in y size, and had sold so many (he asked me all these things specifically). He told me, "Congrats, you probably found the right price point for your pictures." Initially I cringed at the image conjured of my work swinging around on clothing racks with price tags and sensormatics punched through them, but in a blunt way he was right on.
It goes without saying that it is hard to be nuts and bolts about selling our work because it is something very personal to us, and a sense of the work's relative mystique, if you will, blinds us as to how best to sell it. One constantly feels as if one risks profaning the work. Plus, the traditional sales model, the gallery, is often a bit of a joke (I realize that is a bit incendiary, but so be it.)
In the end, though, calculating what it should be in fairly mathematical terms is the way to do it. I am not a business expert, but your line of questions should be something along the lines of:
How much money do you want to make by having this sale, even roughly?
What are your costs going to be in terms of print production, marketing, shipping? Start with the fixed costs, and then add the variable costs, such as the print expenses, on a sample basis, ie if you sold 25, 50, or 100 prints, to get a sense of the range of costs.
This should give you a price/number ratio of how many prints you need to sell at how much in order to reach your goal, ie a range of what your profit margin should be per print, on a unit basis.
Now that you have a sales target, ask yourself, can I get there?
Is my print price comparable to the market (and the overall state of the economy, which is a factor these days), and within the realm of reasonable expectations of my community/audience/public? This is where you decide on your price: for example, shall I sell 100 prints for y higher price, or 200 prints for z lower price?
Is my audience big enough? (This question applies whether you are selling at high dollar, or at bargain prices.) If not, how do I increase it? (Audiences are never big enough, unless you're U2.)
Then, ask yourself how attractive the product looks to the individual buyer. This is where photographers spend a lot of their time, but it may be the last step. This is where you factor in how to package the work (kind and size of print, editioned or not, and so on), reputation or brand identity (does the pricing make me look too expensive or cheap), pleasure of sale experience for the buyer (assurances given, smoothness of transaction, etc.), basically all the stuff that makes a buyer want to have a piece of your work above and beyond it being beautiful.
All I can say is, in retrospect, my more successful sales were ones in which I instinctively gauged these parameters correctly, and in others that yielded less, I overlooked or misread them.
Good luck, Ed!!
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