HOW TO SELL YOUR ARTWORK ONLINE
For any emerging artist, one of the biggest challenges is finding the right channels through which to present and sell their work.
Alongside the more traditional avenues, the Internet has become an increasingly popular channel for buying and selling art, with popularity growing further during the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the temporary closure of shops, galleries and other physical spaces for buying and selling art.
However, the web is a multifaceted tool whose many possibilities need to be known and evaluated in order to make the most of this resource.
In this article, we will therefore see why you should choose to sell your works online, what the different possibilities are and how they work in practice.
selling one’s artwork online
Fonte immagine: https://unsplash.com/photos/-2vD8lIhdnw
WHEN AND WHY TO SELL ON THE WEB
The web is a crucial resource for many businesses, but not all artists are the same.
Popularity, connections, goals and career plans are all elements that the individual artist needs to consider in order to understand whether selling their work online is right for them.
For example, for an artist who is looking to turn his or her passion into a source of income, but whose primary occupation is still another and who has no particular knowledge or capital to invest, the web is certainly an avenue that is worth exploring.
Galleries and exhibitions undoubtedly have the advantage of allowing direct encounters between artist and potential customers, but at the same time the web allows you to reach a much wider audience of possible buyers worldwide.
Which, if you are an artist who is still unknown and without any particular financial or networking resources, is a not inconsiderable advantage. In order to understand whether the web channel is therefore the right one for one’s objectives, it is essential to draw up a business plan to answer the fundamental questions: what is my potential target audience, which channels can work best to reach it, what direction do I want to take my career as an artist, what financial and management resources can I rely on, how do my competitors behave.
Once these questions have been answered, it will be easier to understand whether the web is the right path for one’s needs.
THE FIRST STEP: CREATING A SITE
A professional website is a benchmark for any business, and art is no exception. Especially if you decide to sell your work online, creating your own site is the fundamental starting point.
There are three steps:
- Choose the name of your domain.
This is an important step for an artist, because it is the name that those who want to search for his or her work online will use and memorise. You can choose to use an artist’s name or your personal name, the important thing is that it is consistent with the name you have chosen for your career, so as not to create unnecessary confusion and to strengthen your brand image. - Selecting a web hosting provider
Hosting is the space that will host your website, so it is important to choose the solution that best suits your needs. For a professional website, it is always advisable to choose paid hosting, which compared to a free provider guarantees larger and scalable space, better performance and quality customer support. However, if you do not have a large budget, you can choose intermediate solutions, for instance by purchasing a web creation package with hosting included. - Adding content
Once a site has an address and a web space to be hosted, all that remains is to add the actual content. Information on events and exhibitions, image galleries for one’s creations, biography of the artist, contact information and, above all, a link to the page for online sales.
HOW TO CREATE A VIRTUAL SHOP
We have now reached the crucial step: creating an e-commerce to sell your artwork online.
Once you have created a site, in fact, you can connect platforms to it that act as a real virtual shop for your creations.
The first element of selling art online is to guarantee security for visitors to your site: it is therefore important not to forget to have an SSL certificate, which shows possible customers that the site they have decided to buy from is secure.
In addition, it is important to guarantee several possible payment methods: credit card, PayPal, bank transfer among the most fundamental. Finally, shipping: allowing your buyers to select the delivery method they prefer (DHL, GLS, Hermes, etc.) is an important plus.
Many e-commerce platforms allow you to customise your ideal solution in detail to achieve a unique, professional and successful digital shop.
To learn more, also read our article on How to set up a successful E-commerce on art.
AND SOCIAL MEDIA?
An alternative solution to e-commerce and chosen by many professionals in the art world is direct sales via social media.
This option is particularly attractive because you only need to create a page on Facebook or Instagram to start your own business at no cost and without any special IT skills.
Potential buyers can then contact the artist via contact details or directly via a private message on the social page, which also allows a direct relationship between artist and customer.
However, this sales method does not always guarantee success: without a targeted marketing strategy, it is easy for one’s artwork to get lost in the world of social media without leading to a satisfactory number of sales.
For this reason, if you have the possibilities, creating an e-commerce alongside your social pages is an investment you should always make to ensure the success of your artist activity.
