Hello everyone! Today I’ll be talking about how to open an online store. This article is written particularly for artists and the platforms they can use to start selling their work online.
As artists, some of us may want to make money from our art or enable people all over the world to purchase our work, but where do we begin?
First of all, you’ll need merchandise! Whether that be art prints, books, charms, or any physical/digital goods. But how do you get these made? Well, with a simple Google search, you can find many companies that create art prints, books, phone cases, and all sorts of materials! Heck, there are even websites that will have these materials ready for you and all you have to do is upload your artwork! (Example: Society6 and Redbubble). Also, if you’re the type of person that don’t want to deal with shipping out to customers, these might be the right stores for you.
After you have your materials you’ll need to choose a store platform. Lucky for you, there’s so many options to choose from. Here’s a list of several online stores that you can use to sell your merchandise:
Here are the stores that you can upload your artwork to and it can get printed on all kinds of materials (prints, t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, etc.):
Or you can create a store through store-integrated websites:
Please note that each platform has their own policies and fees, so please take the time to research and compare the different stores and see which one is the fit for you. Everything’s about trial and error, and if you don’t like how something works, you can always change platforms.
After you choose a platform to go with, all you got to do then is set up your store, merchandise, policies, and prices. From there, let people know that you have a store running and hopefully you can get your first sale!
I personally use Gumroad as my online store for now because I can sell PDF/digital versions of my books. Plus, I don’t have to pay a monthly fee and listing fee for each item that I put in my store. Gumroad does, however, take a percentage of your sales, but that goes for some of the other online stores. For my store I sell art prints and books (physical and PDF versions). I’m hoping to expand it and sell other merchandise in the future as well. The only downside of Gumroad is that it’s not super well-known, so you might not get as much traffic as per say Etsy or Storenvy.
If you are interested in checking out my online store, here’s the link: www.gumroad.com/duachakaher
Duachaka
DUACHAKA HER 