Sell Art Online
It is very easy to sell art and photography online as a freelance artist. There are many websites which allow freelance artists to set up a store within a large Art Market or Artist Community. These online art stores basically do what a curator does in a gallery. They take care of everything from promotion to sales to shipping.
Advantages:
- They will take care of all the payment processing.
- They have established websites with millions of visitors a year.
- There are little to no costs to the artist (commission based sales are the norm).
- They often allow you to sell your artwork on many mediums (canvas, posters, greeting cards, t-shirts, etc.).
- They can provide recurring/passive income to an artist for years to come with a single upload.
- They are a great way to expose your art to more people even if you already have a website running.
General Advice:
- Some of these Art Markets are Free Subscriptions while other are Paid Subscriptions. In general the paid sites are more suited for the professionals, providing more control over the product and their customers. In addition you are better able to brand your store with less (or no) advertising clutter from the host. Often paid accounts will take smaller commissions from your sales. Unless you just want to set up a store for fun, I would recommend starting with a paid subscription account (the monthly fees are very small).
- While paid accounts are better, do not limit yourself to just one account! There is no reason to have only one store (paid or unpaid). Each of these art markets have a different strategy for selling your work. While some of your work may sell well in one store, other works may sell better elsewhere.
- Each art market has a different look, navigation and structure which will appeal to different audiences.
- Each art market has different search engine rankings and bring in different types of visitors.
- Each art market focuses on different styles of art and hence keep different types of return customers.
- Each art market provides different mediums for your art (posters, canvas, t-shirts, mugs, etc) and the quality of those products will also vary.
- Each art market has a different pricing structure.
Recommended Freelance Art Markets:
ImageKind.com (best choice!)
- The Good
- Commision is based on the percentage you mark up over their production price. So you can make as much as you like off your work.
- Your dedicated art store url is sub-domain based which is better than folder based(http://johndoe.imagekind.com)
- ImageKind will deal with all the purchasing, production and shipping.
- Earn an additional 15% commission on frames, mats and glazing.
- A wider variety of image upload are available then some other sites (TIF, JPG, or PNG).
- Display your art in public, private or locked galleries.
- Marketing tools are provided to help you get traffic to your new site.
- Network and build artist contacts through your community
- The Bad
- At this point I haven’t found a lot wrong with it. Though admittedly my experience with this site has been short term. As I find issues I will make sure to post them.
- The Good
- This art market provides a free store to anyone who wants it.
- Interface is easy and intuitive to use.
- Allows seller to choose the percentage of commission they wish to receive. The price of your product will raise the more commission you want.
- Zazzle is well established and has a very large community and heavy traffic (Alexa ranking 2,467 at time of this post).
- Product selection is huge, (framed art, posters, mugs, t-shirts, stickers, greeting cards, and much more)
- Extensive “social network” system to help promote your work.
- The Bad
- Very little control over your site’s HTML. This forces you into cookie cutter websites.
- You are forced to be a part of the “whole community” which is a double edge sword. Yes it can bring unsolicited traffic to your site, but can just as easily let your customers move on to someone else’s to buy there.
- Very poor affiliate program (the worst I’ve ever seen). Provides very small payouts for sales to other artists, only gives credit for a single browser session, no payout for recruitment of other artists and does not credit you for any sales made should your visitor stray from the page you sent them to.
Recommended Stock Photography Websites:
If your Photography work is not really in the “fine art” vein, but is very viable commercially then you should consider submitting your work to some of the many Stock Photography Sites on the web. Unlike the “freelance artist markets”, stock photo sites generally will review every submitted image for commercial value. They will take into consideration things like grainy film, proper lighting, composition, subject matter, noise, over-sharpening and much more. The image must hold up under very close magnification.
Some of these stock sites will also accept videos.
Below is a list of some of the best stock photography sites to submit your images to. I have personally worked with each other these organizations and found them to be leaders in the field.
Semi-Recommended Freelance Art Markets:
- The Good
- The best part about this website is that you control everything! You sell your work directly to your customer, you set your own prices, and the transaction actually occurs between you and the customer directly. Unlike some others like Zazzle or ImageKind Artbreak is not acting as a middle man between you and your client, they are simply providing a web space for you to use and a built in community of traffic.
- Commission taken by the site is only 7.5%. That’s really good. A whopping 92.5% is all yours; however, keep in mind you are taking on the additional costs of payment processing, charge backs, delivery, etc.
- The Bad
- Every seller is responsible for their own shipping options, return policy and payment terms. This definitely means a lot more work on your part as you have to do the printing, framing, shipping, etc on your own. (some people will claim that this should be listed under “the good”) I’m too lazy for that.
- There seems to be little to no customization options for your personal store. Every single store I looked at on the site was identical but for the artwork.
- I also found the navigation for your customers to be pretty weak. There was very little ability to drill down by category and sub-category to find the right bunch of images. Essentially you only get to choose a broad genre of art (photography, sculpture, painting, etc) and then you have to click from page to page to page blindly.
For the person who wants that personal touch, with direct interaction with your customers, this site is your best option other than having a custom website/store built for you.
- The Good
- This site has a very clean easy to use navigation system for your customers. This I think is a huge plus.
- The preview for artwork and framing is particularly good on this site. The frames are shown in great detail and in an attractive fashion. In addition you get a clear view of the full artwork in the chosen frame, with mattes and even different wall backgrounds. This makes it very easy for your customer to make an informed decision about the options they wish to add to their purchase.
- The interface for customers and the layout of artist’s stores are the cleanest and most user friendly out of all the sites I’ve reviewed.
- The sales of originals from your Artist Rising gallery are handled directly between you and your buyer. If a buyer comes to your gallery and indicates an interest in purchasing the original of a particular work, ArtRising will send you a notice of interest and you deal directly with the buyer.
- You can sell much more than simply imagery on this site. Sculptures, paintings, etc. since “originals” sell between you and the customer.
- For a fee you can get “proofs” of you work that is going to be sold as prints. I don’t know if this is exactly great since you could always just order a poster of it anyway.
- The Bad
- By far the biggest negative of this site is it’s greedy commission policy on prints. Artists only get a small 15% of their own sales. Now yes, that includes all the printing, shipping, processing costs, but nevertheless, that is simply to small a commission. On many other sites like ImageKind.com you can choose your own royalty percentage, thus making as much as you wish on any given image. The price of your product simply goes up as you ask for more royalty.
- Customer prices for prints are fixed and determined by the website. You can not choose your own price. This means that the art work you created in an afternoon (that you would like to unload cheap) will cost the same as that art work which you slaved over for a month (the one you wanted to sell for an extra high price).
- There are “one time fees” for artwork prints which you want posted as “fine art” (in other words quality paper and framing).
- There are many limitations on their “free” account. To use the site to its full potential you need to sign up for their premium paid membership.
In summary, this art market site is probably the best option of all for the “Professional” artist who wants to sell art online. Especially those who deal in mediums like sculpture and paintings. For the ‘part-time’ artist or someone who deals mostly with digital mediums (photography, digital art, or reproductions of their actual paintings) this is not the best options and I would recommend ImageKind.com as the preferred option.
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Webmasters: If you are a webmaster of your own website you may also want to look into making money promoting the artwork of others. Learn about affiliate marketing here.
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