How to Sell Your Art

> Selling your Art from your own Web Site
 

> Selling your Art at Online Auctions
 

> Selling your Art at Online Galleries

• It is the most professional way to present your work online as it is focused solely on you;
  
• It is your domain name (web address) and presents your art only, with no competition;
  
• It can be hard to find by buyers amongst all the other billions of web sites;
  
• It can be expensive to set up i.e. unless you do it yourself, a good web designer will cost upward of £500;
  
• If you go for a web designer who offers you a web site very cheaply, they may not optimise your site so that it is found easily by search engines like Google. Search Engine Optimisation takes a lot of time, and is often left out in cheaper web design quotes (and often from the more expensive quotes unless you know it should be there!);
  
• If you do it yourself, unless you spend a lot of time learning the craft of web design, it can look very unprofessional and negatively impact on the buyers perception of your art;
  
• If you do it yourself, unless you spend a lot of time learning how to search engine optimise your web site, then your DIY web site will not be found by anyone.

• It is comparatively low cost;
  
• It can be easy to get started;
  
• All the selling facilities are already there for you, however you will still need to have a PayPal account set up to receive payments by credit or debit card or PayPal;
  
• Depending on your experience of using online interfaces, it can still be confusing for some people to go through the online steps to set up their Paypal account and upload their artwork / necessary details to sell via the auctions;
  
• The traffic of buyers is huge on Ebay and no other sites, whether auction of any other, have this level of buying traffic;
  
• Your listing can be lost in the thousands of listings in your chosen category.
  
• If your chosen category is very popular then there can be many pages of 'Featured Plus' listings at the start of the category. This is basically where the artists are paying upwards of £9.95 to have their listing featured at the beginning of the category. In these categories it can be very difficult for the buyers to find you at all unless you opt to also make your listing 'Featured Plus'. The fees for this can be heavy especially if you fail to sell, or don't sell for enough to make any money;
  
• The buyers on Ebay are predominantly looking for a bargain, and this can affect the prices that your auction can achieve. It is often reported by artists that in the initial stages of eagerly selling on Ebay that they have regretfully 'given' art away at silly prices;
  
• It is possible to build up a following and push up prices successively higher;
  
• To do this your work has to
  a) be the type of art that the buyer is looking for,
  b) be marketed very well via your good use of keywords (so that it is found easily through Ebay searches),
  c) listed very regularly to create recognition,
  d) presented professionally with all the relevant info about shipping costs, returns etc, available to view and understand easily by the buyer,
  e) any sale should be handled professionally and quickly because you are rated by the buyer for 5 aspects of the buyer experience (i.e. communications, dispatch times, postal costs etc) and future buyers can base their decision on whether to buy from you, on your past seller ratings;
  
• It can be detrimental to some artists who are wanting gallery representation, to be listing on Ebay. This depends on the views of the individual gallery;
  
• It can be fantastic advertising for your main web site as it brings in viewers from the auction site, and if you are selling smaller items via your online auction, can often result in larger sales from the same customer directly from your web site. This is often because the buyer is now comfortable with buying from you, having previously bought a smaller / lower cost item from you and having been happy with that transaction.
  
• Ebay is making changes that may affect sellers in the future. Some of the more negatively reported issues include the holding of sales procedes of new sellers (feedback under 100) for 21 days or until the buyer has given positive feedback for the sale. Another is an increase in final sales commission.

• Having your artwork featured on pages of an online gallery is much cheaper than having your own personal web site and since you normally pay for a years subscription, it works out much cheaper than listing a 10 day Ebay listing back to back for the year;
  
• There are online galleries where you do the uploading of the images and the text onto the gallery site via an online interface. The ease of this just depends on how familiar you are with using similar interfaces, and how easy the interface is to use in the first place! You may be required to adhere to strict image quality guidelines also, which can be frustrating to get right before you can submit your art;
  
• There are online galleries that 'do it all for you' such as this site, Artdomain.co.uk. With this type of online gallery you can simply send your artworks attached to an email, fill in a simple form detailing dimensions and title of the artworks etc, and the online gallery will do it all for you i.e. prepare your images so that they are squared off / crop any unsightly backgrounds from around the artworks, optimise the images so they are low resolution and can download quickly and not be used by any unscrupulous third party to download and reproduce;
  
• You can often get a good web address to use from the online gallery, for the marketing of your artwork i.e. www.Artdomain.co.uk/joehush
  
• The online gallery can often, for a small extra fee, help you get a personal web domain to use for your artwork, and tie it up to your pages at the online gallery i.e. www.EscapeGallery.co.uk was chosen by the artist Sharon Ellis Hughes. We configured it to go directly to her pages on Artdomain. She can redirect this at a later stage should she want to create her own personal web site outwith Artdomain.
  
• The level of buying traffic is much less than Ebay auctions, however your online gallery pages can be used alongside Ebay auctions i.e. use Ebay to drive buying traffic to your pages on the online gallery;
  
• If the online gallery has put your work onto the gallery site for you, you don't have immediate control over changes to your pages i.e. you would ask the online gallery to do the changes for you. However most online galleries will do whatever changes you require quickly and cheaply (often free text changes);
  
• Your work is presented very professionally and consistently i.e. you can see beforehand how your work will look by seeing how other artists have been presented. The online gallery will often feature your work on key areas within the site i.e. front page / browse paintings page / browse by artist pages;
  
• Online payments have to be set up. As with Ebay you will have to set up a Paypal account to receive credit and debit card payments and Paypal payments. Payments can be received by buyers by sending an Invoice via your Paypal account - this gets sent to the buyer by email and lets them pay securely via Paypal, which you receive into your Paypal account. If you want Paypal 'Buy Now' buttons beside each of your artworks, then you have to do this via your Paypal account, setting up a Paypal button for each individual artwork item and getting the HTML code that Paypal supplies, then giving that to the online gallery to use for your artworks. Most online art gallery will help you with this process;
  
• You have the benefit of a relationship with an online gallery for issues relating to selling your artwork online. They are often better able to offer ongoing support to the artist which would not be available via the personal web site or auction route;
  
• Although, as with any web site, the artist still needs to market their art to maximise the opportunities to sell, using an online gallery that does the work of putting the art online, leaves the artist free to get on with creating and marketing their art, rather than going through the steep learning curve of web design.