My wife has been working on a bunch of prints and digital prints for last few years and after having a bunch of friends/word of mouth referals and now she wants to sell online.

We've been looking at sites to sell from.. ranging from Etsy where you do everything yourself to sites like Society6 and others like that. Where they do all the shipping, printing, etc.
and then just pay you a portion of the profit.

it is nice to have those sites that run everything... but do they all have such poor commissions?

I was wondering if anyone has any advice on what website they use to sell their work?

and any recommendations or things to look out for when starting that up.

Figured better to ask you folk than continually cruzing google only to find a crappy site.


Thanks in advance for any and all advice.

i hear deviant art is pretty awesome if you can get it started. my girlfriend is a fan of it at least.

deviantart is good. As for prints and stuff ... my Aunt is photography artist, I am not sure what she uses, I will ask her. But she does make books too with her prints and she uses blurb.com.

You might look around at her site and be able to tell what she uses... I really didn't look to hard :P
http://www.ritabuehnerartworks.com/index.html

One of the really nice things about deviant art is the sheer numbers of people that regularly (daily) visit the site that love art. Many doodle, and don't really "do" art but are there to check out what other people make.

The problem with such a big site is that when you upload a new image (called a deviation), once you click on "newest deviations" there have already been like 10-15 posted since yours. From my experience, I never post one image at a time, but bursts of 10, greatly increasing the chance that people will see.

It's tough to get "seen," but once you do, the network for being seen more is awesome! Kind of exponential growth. I've never tried selling prints there though.

In addition, I really believe in what they stand for as a company, and they have tons of really cool employees, not to mention the CEO and founder is a really nice and down-to-earth guy whose goal isn't to make tons of money, but to help artists be seen!

I personally don't like etsy. I have a problem with the price range that people set for themselves and seems to be rampant around the site. I'm sorry, but if you put 10 hours of work into something, you can't sell it for $50. Etsy items have always been underpriced to me

cool. thanks guys.

I'm clicking around the devient site and it looks pretty nice, also really good for exposure since artists can pretty much hit "like" on other peoples.

on the flip side, I really like what galleri's aunt did by having her own website and own shopping cart. times like this I wish i knew how to do more with my computer than just double click and home for the best :) making a page would be nice.

I think we'll give devient a try.

handling your own e-comm sucks these days. let somebody else handle it until you can afford to hire it done properly.

That's why you pay a guy like Pang to build a site for you... :)

ebay!

Start selling them on ebay, then become a trading assistant, put in long hours, get good returns!

if she does digital work, get her to design a new EE skin that has a responsive design!

if she does interaction design, even better! :p

lol... looking at her stuff and back to this and thinking of her demographic. We'd start having an influx of stay-at-home moms and 13 year old girls. haha :)