How Managed Pricing and Promotions Helps Artist Shop Owners

As a creative professional, running a sale can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of growing your business. Everything from when you’re marketing your products and how you’re communicating about them to what promotion you’re offering and for how long, can impact your sales and long-term growth. If you have a background in sales, marketing, operations, or finance, you might already have a feel for when to lower pricing for certain products in order to drive traffic to your online store and increase sales. But if you’re monetizing your designs to make a living as an artist, then odds are good you’re more interested in drawing, painting, and designing than developing pricing strategies and promotional calendars. 

Enter, managed pricing and promotions for Artist Shops. Now Artist Shops by Threadless offers artists a completely unique benefit—unlike other print-on-demand solutions—that makes pricing and promotions effortless. Read below to find out how managed pricing and promotions impact your products in the Threadless Marketplace and your Artist Shop. 

What’s the Threadless Marketplace? 

The Threadless Marketplace lets your designs and products be found by the robust and engaged customer base on Threadless.com. Similar to Amazon or Etsy, Threadless Marketplace aggregates products from individuals that can be sorted by category, popularity, product type, and more. It’s an ever-changing landscape with dynamic search parameters, showcasing the most relevant results for customers’ inquiries.

If you have an Artist Shop, allowing your products to be included in the Threadless Marketplace is a great way to increase sales over time. For example, a customer searching for buttons in the marketplace can navigate from the search results directly to your homepage in the Threadless Marketplace, which displays your products and designs exactly as you’ve outlined them in your Artist Shop. Your brand’s expression in the Threadless Marketplace mirrors your Artist Shop, so you maintain control over the display of your designs and products. Want to know more about the Threadless Marketplace? Get all the details in this resource

How Does Managed Pricing and Promotions Affect My Products in the Marketplace?

Managed pricing and promotions in the Threadless Marketplace means Threadless will set pricing and run promos for your products featured in the marketplace. The pricing and promos will match Threadless.com sales. Including your designs in our strategic, seasonally enticing promos can increase your sales and ideally, drive more traffic to your marketplace products.   

The Threadless Marketplace promotions calendar is planned, optimized, and executed by a dedicated team of marketing professionals. Harnessing our rich customer data, we’re able to iterate on previously successful promotions. We consider and experiment with when each promotion launches, how it’s communicated, how long it runs, and more. Managed pricing and promotions allows your marketplace products to benefit from a unique, incentivized shopping experience for customers searching the Threadless Marketplace. 

How Does Managed Pricing and Promotions Work in My Shop?

Your Artist Shop can also benefit from the strategy and execution of managed pricing and promotions. Similarly to the Threadless Marketplace promotions calendar, our marketing team creates a separate, unique suite of promotions to feature in Artist Shops throughout the year. These deals will always be different from the promos in the Threadless Marketplace, so you’ll always have an enticing promotion to share with customers. 

Before promotions are live in your shop, you’ll see the promo schedule with the offers and start and end dates in your shop dashboard. Your shop prices will automatically be updated to reflect each sale and a banner on your shop homepage will remind customers what promotion is currently running. Our team will continually iterate and optimize promotional offers based on customer and sales data. With Threadless managing your promos and correlating pricing, you can focus on making new designs, creating collections, and sharing the promos with your fan base through social and email marketing. 

How Do Artist Shops Stack Up 

Artist Shops combines the best of a highly engaged marketplace with the brand ownership and awareness of individual online stores. While it’s not the only e-commerce solution, it does give you the most control and ownership over your brand and customer data. Take a look at how Artist Shops compares to other print-on-demand sites.

Typical Marketplace (e.g. Redbubble, Society6) Artist Shops by Threadless
In most marketplaces, your brand presence is limited and not easily customizable. It’s your own fully customizable, white-labeled, ecommerce store.
Most marketplaces require unique files for each product.With one file, your design is available on hundreds of products.
When you promote your brand, customers have to make accounts to access your profile in the marketplace.When you promote your shop, customers land on your completely customizable homepage.
Your products are only available in the marketplace, you have little control over how they’re displayed.In addition to your branded store, your products can be included in the marketplace to get even more traffic.
The marketplace is your only sales channel.Threadless works with Artist Shops to license their work to a growing collection of offline retail partners.
You run whatever promo the marketplace chooses and promote it for them.You can choose to run your own promotions or let Threadless manage pricing and promos.
Most marketplaces offer you 10% of a sale.Threadless earnings can pay nearly twice the market average per unit sold.
Most marketplaces don’t share customer information with you. Threadless allows you to access and build your customer list.
Younger marketplaces may not be able to compete or offer as many benefits to artists. Threadless has 20 years ecommerce experience, pioneering the artist-based t-shirt business model.

Make Managed Pricing and Promotions Work for You

First, double-check you’re opted into managed pricing and promotions by reviewing your settings page in your Artist Shop dashboard. If the toggle is flipped to “On” for “Let Threadless manage my Artist Shop’s pricing and promotions” then you’re all set. You’ll also want the toggle to be “On” for “Allow my shop’s products to be available in the Threadless Marketplace,” so customers can find your products in the marketplace. Read more about the benefits and pricing structure of managed pricing in this useful resource. Interested in how pricing breaks down for the base fees for all products, including base fees for promotions in the Threadless Marketplace and Artist Shops? Review this pricing table in the Threadless artists terms and conditions. 

Artist Shops dashboard settings
Managed Pricing and Promotion Settings in your Artist Shop dashboard

Start Your Shop 

If you don’t already have an Artist Shop set up and you’re not convinced, then scroll through this overview of why Artist Shops works for artists just like you. Remember, you’re not alone on your journey to make your living as a professional artist. When you become an Artist Shop owner, you join our thriving community of small businesses, brilliant creatives, and driven artists. Have questions about running, managing, or optimizing your Artist Shop for growth? Explore our vast repository of in-depth help articles for answers to all kinds of Artist Shops-related questions.

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