As an artist, selling your art IRL is awesome, but it’s also a double-edged sword. On the one hand, who doesn’t want to see their work featured in a gallery, sold in a brick and mortar store, or killin’ it at an art festival? But on the other hand, these places limit you to 1: whatever area they’re being sold in and 2: to customers who actually decide to walk into the gallery or store.
That’s where having an online store comes in! While the internet can make you feel a little bit like a minnow in an infinite pond, an online store serves as both a place to sell your art and a virtual gallery that connects you to a much wider audience who are looking for exactly what you’re offering (like the home decor crowd). And with Artist Shops, opening your own online store has never been easier.
Here are a few crucial things you need in order to successfully sell your art prints online, and how Artist Shops takes care of them for you, leaving you more time to make more art!
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Print quality
When it comes to art prints, judging a book by its cover is totally justified. You can have the most beautiful, groundbreaking, Mona Lisa-level piece of art, but if it’s printed with crappy quality? It might as well be a crayon drawing (and even that would look better on a high quality print).
Artist Shops prints crisp, clear, high quality images at gallery-worthy quality…literally. Take the Chicago Design Museum; they had an art exhibition in Tokyo and printed all of their art through their Artist Shop. When we asked them about it, they said,
“I would absolutely recommend Artist Shops! The quality, price, and service were phenomenal. Threadless really helped us to showcase some amazing Chicago work to an international audience.”
The takeaway: Quality is key. Low print quality won’t do you any favors if you order your prints for yourself (*cough cough* at the low base fee!) to display in real life, and will definitely deter customers from ever shopping with you for prints again.
Paper weight
The weight and type of material you choose for your art prints is also an important factor when it comes to quality. A print with the crispest colors will still be lacking in quality if it’s printed on flimsy, thin material. Artist Shop prints are printed on 100% cotton hot press, acid-free ultra smooth white paper. It’s got just enough heft to it and has a smooth, finished, quality look.
The takeaway: The material of your art print matters. A good lookin’ print can be ruined when it’s on flimsy material and doesn’t look like it’ll hold up or distorts the print.
Options
Aside from different sizes, art prints seem pretty straight forward when it comes to offering variety. After all, when you’re printing prints yourself, variety can be expensive. But in your Artist Shop, you can actually offer several different types of wall art (at no cost to you)! When it comes to your high quality paper art prints, you can offer them unframed or framed. But you can also offer your work on a stretched canvas for a piece with a little more pop and depth. And for something completely different, you can offer your art prints on the largest wall canvas Artist Shops offer – a tapestry!
The takeaway: It’s always better to offer your customers options. give your customers some variety with regular art prints, framed art prints, stretched canvas, or tapestries!
How they’re shipped
From elements like rain and snow getting into the shipping container to a flimsy shipping method causing the print damage, no matter how high quality your print is, it’s all for naught if the shipping damages the result. We ship all of your Artist Shop items for you in a safe way, so you don’t have to stress about and scour the post office for the right shipping containers. And if something does happen? We take care of all the customer service too, so you don’t have to worry about re-sending anything.
Speaking of…
Customer service
Our whole thing with Artist Shops is that we want you to have more time to do your art and sell your art, without you having to deal with all the hassle in-between. We let you get hand’s on and creative with customization; all of the customer service, shipping, and returns is totally hand’s-off for you. We handle any and all order fulfillment, freeing up time for you to make more amazing art worthy of adorning print-hungry walls!
We can help!
We’re hand’s on with your customers service, but we’re also hand’s on when it comes to helping you! Selling your art can be hard, but you don’t ever need to do it alone. If you need help with anything from setting up your Shop to figuring out sizing and placement of an image or file type, we are here to help you!
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We’re an artist community built on the power of helping each other succeed — if you’re reading this and have tips of your own to share, please let us know in the comments! Thank you!
Illustrations done by the amazing Katie Lukes
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