Why do you have a minimum charge for an order?

We have a minimum charge for all orders -- with the provision that you can use up the excess between the minimum charge and the actual amount of your order on one additional order.  

We have this minimum because it takes us a certain amount of time to start and finish each order. These are the tasks for a typical order:

1. Interactions with customers before an order comes in
2. Order intake where we discuss with the customer the details of his/her order
3. Setting up to start scanning an order
4. The actual scanning of the photos
5. Processing scans to adjust exposure, white balance and cropping
6. Producing the final scans and writing them to a USB memory stick
7. Producing the invoice for the order
8. Sending the customer an email announcing that the order is finished.
9. Time taken to deliver and interact with a customer picking up and paying for their order.

As you can guess, steps other than 4&5 eat up a lot of time that we do not get paid for.  And, small orders take up the same amount of time in steps 1-3 & 5-9 as do large orders.  For this reason, we have a set minimum for all orders.