Where Should I Sell My Art Online?

Business Strategy

May 4

As an artist or creative professional, you have several options for where to sell your art and other products. As with most product and business strategy decisions, you’ll want to keep your ideal customer in mind—where do they shop? Where do they turn to when looking for the solution you offer?

The answers to these questions should guide your decisions on where to offer your products, to ensure you’re getting in front of the right people.

In my hand lettering business, I’ve sold my art on several different online platforms and through different in-person methods as well. Below are my thoughts on online selling platforms, based on my experience with each.

You can also see my take on in-person selling methods in this post.

Selling Products Online as an Artist

Etsy

WHO IT’S GOOD FOR: Artists with unique crafts and physical products

FEES: 6.5% of your product price per sale + $0.20 listing fee (charged annually)

What can I sell on Etsy as an artist?

Etsy is a well known marketplace for unique, hand-crafted goods. It’s a place people turn to for one of a kind or customized gifts, especially in the realm of home decor, furniture, and apparel. If this sounds like your ideal customer, Etsy might be a great platform for you to sell your art on!

You can also sell digital products on Etsy, such as printable cards or art, or resources for other artists like downloadable worksheets, guides, and templates.

What are the advantages of selling art on Etsy?

One of the biggest advantages of Etsy is its built-in audience.

You don’t necessarily have to do a ton of promotion on your own social media channels, for example—as long as you’re adding keywords to your listings, you can get sales from people already coming to Etsy and searching those keywords.

Etsy also makes shipping much easier for physical products. You can add shipping charges to each product, as well tell the platform which types of shipping options you want to offer, and it takes care of figuring out the rates.

Then, you can buy and print the shipping labels directly from Etsy, without leaving the platform.

What are the challenges of selling art on Etsy?

As Etsy has grown over the past several years, there are thousands of sellers in the marketplace—so it can be hard to stand out.

You’ll need to have clarity on what makes your products unique, as well as the skills to communicate those differentiators visually (through your product listings) and through your item descriptions.

Creative Market

WHO IT’S GOOD FOR: Artists with digital products; artists whose ideal customers are other artists/creatives

FEES: 50% of product price per sale

What can I sell on Creative Market as an artist?

Creative Market is an online marketplace for digital creative products. This includes templates, such as for social media or presentations, vector graphics, fonts, stock photography, or digital assets for other creatives to work with like Procreate brushes, Lightroom presets, After Effects plug-ins, and more.

What are the advantages of selling art products on Creative Market?

Like other online marketplaces, on Creative Market you have the benefit of leveraging their built-in audience.

People are already heading to Creative Market to find these types of digital assets, so as long as you’re clear in your description and hitting on things people are searching for, you can generate some passive income regardless of your own audience size.

Creative Market also has license options built in to their checkout system. This means, for example, you can list different prices for someone to get one license for your font vs. several, or to use it on a website vs. another type of project.

This makes it easy to charge appropriately for the different ways people will be using your products.

What are the challenges of selling art products on Creative Market?

Their seller experience is a little clunky—they only very recently added a system to automatically pay out your sales to your bank account at the end of the month.

There’s also a lot of manual effort involved if you want to participate in their promotions. For instance, to be a part of their Black Friday sale, I had to upload new product pictures with a specific banner image added to it, then adjust the prices of my products, then remember to set everything back to the way it was after the sale had ended.

From my personal experience, I haven’t seen as much success on Creative Market as I have through other online marketplaces, selling the exact same products.

Design Cuts

WHO IT’S GOOD FOR: Artists with digital products; artists whose ideal customers are other artists/creatives

FEES: 50% of product price per sale

What can I sell on Design Cuts as an artist?

Similar to Creative Market, Design Cuts is an online marketplace for selling creative assets like templates, photography, graphics, fonts, and other creative assets for apps and software like Procreate or Adobe Creative Cloud.

What are the advantages of selling art on Design Cuts?

As with other online marketplaces, with Design Cuts you can leverage their built-in audience to generate some passive income even if you have a small following on your own channels.

Design Cuts also does several promotions on their platform, which help boost your sales.

For instance, they offer discounts to shoppers who buy a certain number of products at once. They also do promotional bundles where shoppers get a large combo of items (i.e. several different mockup photo files, or a slew of Christmas-themed creative assets) for much cheaper than if they bought each item separately.

While these promotions may cut into your profits slightly, it can be really beneficial to getting more sales and getting your products in front of more people who may become followers and repeat customers down the line.

From my personal experience, the people who run Design Cuts are just awesome too. They have the best support team out of any platform I’ve worked on, and they do cool things for the creative community like free live events with trainings from other skilled artists.

What are the challenges of selling art products on Design Cuts?

As with other marketplaces, it can simply be a challenge to stand out when customers are on a site where they can compare your listings to hundreds of your competitors.

This is where it’s important to ensure you’re positioning your products to speak to your ideal customers’ key pains and benefits.

Your Own Website

WHO IT’S GOOD FOR: Artists with a decent following/audience on social media or through an email list

FEES: Typically ~3% for transaction fees, but the specific amount depends on the e-commerce platform you’re using. For example:

Squarespace: Business plan, 3% transaction fee; Commerce plans, no transaction fees
Shopify: 2.4-2.9% + $0.30 transaction fees (depends on the plan you choose)
WooCommerce Payments (for Wordpress sites): 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction

What can I sell on my own website as an artist?

You can sell both physical and digital products on your own website, as long as it has e-commerce functionality.

What are the advantages of selling art products on my own website?

The biggest advantage of selling art products on your own website is that you typically pay less in fees on each sale.

Selling on your own website also gives you the freedom and flexibility to sell any type of product, digital or physical. Depending on the e-commerce solution you’re using, you may also have additional flexibility in how you customize your product listings and webpages to better match your brand.

What are the challenges of selling art products on my own website?

The trade off for not paying fees is that you have to do all of the promotion to attract people to your website on your own. If you’re just starting out or you have a small following/audience, it’ll be tricky to get much volume to your site.

You’ll also need to handle all of the shipping details yourself, although this depends on the e-commerce platform you’re using on your site.

Print on Demand (POD) Sites

Disclaimer: I don’t have personal experience selling on these sites, but looked into it in the past. Here’s my take from what I’ve found in my research.

WHO IT’S GOOD FOR: Artists with physical products and their own decent sized followings

FEES: Depends on the platform you use, but typically you keep a small percentage of the retail price. For example:

Red bubble: Defaults to you earning a 20% markup per product sale, but this is customizable
Society 8: Defaults to you earning a 10% markup per product sale, but this is customizable

What can I sell on POD sites as an artist?

It depends on the site you use. Typically these sites have specific products they offer and print on. For instance, here’s the full list of products you can print on in a Society 6 shop—it includes things like art prints, mugs, coasters, clothing, phone cases, pillow cases, rugs, curtains, and more.

What are the advantages of selling art products on POD sites?

The main advantage of using one of these sites is that they handle everything having to do with printing, stock, inventory, and shipping. You just provide the designs, set a price, choose what you want to offer from their selection, and they take care of the rest.

What are the challenges of selling art products on POD sites?

It costs quite a bit to have someone take care of printing, inventory, and shipping for you, so typically the base prices for items on these sites is higher than you might set it if you were taking care of everything yourself.

Once you then add on your artist markup and shipping charges, the final retail price can seem pretty high to the end customer, which may deter customers from purchasing your products.

You also typically don’t get as much of an advantage of a built-in audience with these sites as you would from marketplaces like Etsy.

The platforms aren’t as well known, and there’s so much variety on the platforms that the audience is extremely broad and it’s harder to get in front of people who are interested in buying your products.

You’ll need to do your own promotion on other channels like social media or an email list in order to get people to your shop on one of these platforms.

Where Should I Sell Products Online as an Artist?

Since each platform has pros and cons, I recommend selling your products in multiple places to maximize your sales and get the best of both worlds.

For instance, since the biggest advantage of marketplaces like Etsy or Design Cuts is their ‘built-in’ audience, post your products on these sites to capture sales from new customers who aren’t following you on social media and aren’t on your email list.

But since the profit margin is generally much higher when selling on your own site (since there are less fees), I recommend also putting up your own e-commerce site and directing all your existing audience on social media or your email list there to purchase from you when you do promotion on your own channels.

However, you can always work up to this! Take it one step at a time.

If you’re brand new to selling your art products online, you may want to start with an Etsy or Design Cuts shop, which will give you the most support and help you with things like promotion and shipping.

Then add in additional shops as you get more comfortable selling your art products online over the long term.

Get Help Selling Your Art Products Online

If you want help making sure you’re selling the right art products and positioning them to attract the right people to generate income from your creative side hustle, I encourage you to look into my 1:1 coaching program for creative business owners.

In this program, I help artists turn their artistic hobby or skills into a profitable business. We define a strategy that makes business sense, while also is designed for a human being who wants to enjoy their life and not burn out. Sound useful? Get more info and apply for the program:

Learn more about coaching