Every retailer knows that Price is King. People will always choose the cheapest option, and that’s perfectly understandable when it’s the same product.

If I see a litre of Famous Grouse for £20 in the Coöp, Sainsbury’s or Waitrose and there’s a litre of the Grouse for £15 in my local Londis, I’ll buy it there, thank you very much.

Of course there are exceptions. Louis Vuitton brand their luggage with a particularly plebeian design which is enthusiastically copied around the world. I imagine that less than 1% of the Louis Vuitton luggage you see is the real deal, unsurprisingly when the real bags are north of £5,000 and you can get a serviceable replica for £50. As my friend Jennifer says, Why pay less?

I have a friend who is so embarrassed by the big fat gold Rolex his wife bought him that he carries around the Watches of Switzerland receipt to prove to disbelieving friends that it’s real. We now have fun casting doubts on the authenticity of his receipt.

But images are different. You rarely see an image on fotoLibra which you can also see on Getty, Magnum, Corbis, Alamy etc., so comparing prices is much harder.

We’ll match or beat any price from any of the big picture libraries for the same usage and a similar deal. If you’re buying a photo from Getty Images for £10 it’s because you’ve agreed to buy 999 other images from them at the same price. We’ll happily match that. And you only need to commit to 99 images.

2017 has started well for fotoLibra. We’ve made a few big sales. But trickling on and on are the small purchases, people buying here and there for the same — always the same — reason: Editorial> Personal Use> One-Off.

The reason is that this is the cheapest easily discoverable price on fotoLibra. If you’re going to advertise your fizzy drink around the world, then you’d expect to pay big bucks to use one of our photographs. If you just want to print it off and stick it on your wall, then we’ve created a price just for you: Editorial> Personal Use> One-Off.

The snag is that some people will always choose the cheapest option they can find, even if it means not exactly telling the whole truth. So when they come across this bargain basement price they jump at it.

A year or so ago we saw a nice little earner. A lady had fallen in love with some of our photographs of English rivers. So much so that she bought 86 of them for herself; Editorial> Personal Use> One-Off. She put her address down as Interior Decorations Manager, Grande Hotel Splendide, Salford and paid with a corporate credit card. The Grande Hotel Splendide was just about to open an 86 bed hotel in Salford and we were struck by the coincidence.

We got in touch, and gently explained the situation, and to their credit the Grande Hotel Splendide forked out the correct price (which on a quantity deal wasn’t such a big difference).

The problem is that if we’re selling images online, we have to trust the buyer. Regular customers are no problem — they can download whatever they like and they account to us at the end of the month. But anyone can come along, register as a buyer, search the site for the cheapest price then buy a picture and walk away. It’s human nature, after all.

This doesn’t happen often enough to become a worry. But we’re aware of it, and we haven’t a clue how to police it. When it’s blatantly obvious then of course we’ll do some heavy chasing, but when M Zuckerberg of Dullsville, NE buys an image for $35 how do we know it’s NOT going to appear as a promotion for Facebook?

Any suggestions?

Oh — and a Happy New Year to you all!