Suggestions for selling art online?

KevinPardoCA

Good evening, I have a set of finshed and planned images which I am interested in selling online. The only group artist site that I have tried shutdown.  The posters would be for people in specific fields rather than a general audience.  I am technical enough that I can use complex software though I would avoid handling credit cards directly.  (I am a programmer, not a professional artist.)  This would be part-time.  There seem to be different approaches:

1. Selling on a group site versus a dedicated, artist-specific site.
2. Selling files, e.g. PNG, and/or selling physical prints.
3. Using a general purpose e-commerce service versus an art-focused site or service.

I did search the forums but nothing jumped-out.

Do any basic pointers come to mind?  I know that this is a huge topic but I expect that there is some basic information to keep in mind.

Thank you, Kevin

Tobor

You're entering a very overcrowded field. The mechanics of selling is the least of your problems; marketing is by far the more intense activity you need to be planning. Marketplaces -- what you're calling group artist sites -- may have visitors, but they are spread out over all offerings. To make it you need to independently market your art via whatever means you can, such as your own site, blogs, social media, whatever. When you get a foothold and become known in the marketplace, customers will start gravitating toward you by reputation, but it can be a long haul to get there.

For selling physical work, there are numerous on-demand services that you can try (assuming your work fits within their acceptance terms; many will not sell anything of an erotic nature). Red Bubble is one such on-demand printers, offering many different types of physical goods, in addition to posters.

Etsy, eBay, and others provide the merchandizing platform to sell physical or digital goods. One of these might serve as a proof of concept before you invest the time, energy, and expense of setting up your own ecommerce site.

As for handling credit cards "directly," few do that these days. as the costs for compliance can be steep (as is several million in liability insurance, which you may even be required to have when using certain credit card processing companies). If they don't just skip it by using PayPal, they use an authorization gateway where the data may not even pass through the merchant's server. 

Tobor

Generalities now done with, for specifics: I've used Etsy to sell posters to a general audience. They were popular culture themed. I did my own printing, though these days it can be cheaper to outsource it. (There are limitations on Etsy what you can outsource, but at the time it was not allowed at all, so I did it myself.)

In addition to the printing, I fulfilled the orders and shipped them. After a time it got to be rote, so the process got simpler. I sold maybe a few thousand posters over a couple of years, then decided my time would be better spent doing something else. 

Selling on platform sites like Etsy make it easier to handle the financial transaction -- customer orders, money gets deposited to your PayPal or bank account, you ship -- but you're competing against a global force of sellers, some of whom have very low cost of living, and can underprice you every step. This is true even if your art is original and exclusive, or directed at business users rather than general consumers. On the bright side, it takes very little investment to sell a couple of products this way. Have some posters printed in low qualities, but them on the site, then work on getting customers to your pages.

KevinPardoCA

Many Thanks!  You are saving me a lot of headaches.  Active marketing does make a lot of sense, now that you mention it.  Your comments on content restrictions are quite important as about a third of my content would be political and is happily banned on some websites.  I had not seen etsy or Red Bubble before your post.  I will also keep my expectations from running away with me.  Very few people that I meet by chance create any type of new content at all.  It is easy to imagine that there are many untapped niches.  Thank you again.

Tobor

I think you'll find most marketplaces and payment processors lend considerable latitude to what might be called normal political discourse. But if it crosses into "hate speech" (words, depictions, symbology) or blurs the boundaries of normal journalistic expression, it could be removed without notice. PayPal specifically forbids this sort of thing, and they are known to freeze those accounts, disbursing the balance only after considerable time (enough for the usual chargeback period of 6+ months). The same is true of payment processors, who may even charge termination fees if they think their terms of service have been broken.

If you believe the content may cross the line, it's always good to query them beforehand and provide samples. They'll eventually find it anyway.

 

KevinPardoCA

Thank you.  I probably should separate the commercial from the political images.  Most human interaction should be polite but I do like the anti-Nazi collages of Bauhaus artists and the anti-war illustrations of Tomi Ungerer.  Both styles are probably too charged for most e-commerce services.  Distributing my political images gratis may be best.