From Gallery Walls to Online Sales: Choosing the Best Platform for Your Photography Prints by Liesl Walsh

Pros:  

• Clients can see your art physically to see the quality and colors of your print to know exactly what they are going to receive when they purchase. 

• You can meet locals in person to develop a stronger connection, which creates longer relationships and more chances of repeat sales. Seeing you in person helps them get to know you better than only seeing you online. 

• You can get more well known in your community because you are more visible.

• Having your art hang in a gallery adds value to your work and validates you as an artist. 

• You can easily sell signed prints because you see the print before the customer sees it. 

• You can offer limited edition prints. 

Cons:  

• It can be expensive to be in a gallery: you pay for the print to be made, pay rent, and pay commission when your print sells. This eats into your profit. You will have  pressure to sell a certain amount of prints each month just to cover rent and  expenses. You will need to raise your price of your art to cover that, so it will be  more expensive for your clients than from your shop online. 

• You will be limited to the size of the space you rent, so you will not be able to display your entire portfolio.  

• It takes time to make your prints and manage your inventory. 

• You can only sell when the gallery is open, not 24 hours a day.

• Other artists are also selling in the gallery so there is competition.

• If you don’t research what colors and topics are popular to sell in your area you may have a hard time selling.  

Pros: 

• Fine Art America prints your art for you so you don’t need to fulfill orders or worry about deadlines. So your website can run itself if you are on vacation.

• Prints are museum quality. 

• Prints are made to a custom size to the exact dimension of your image so you don’t have to crop or distort it. So you can print 16 x 9 images easily. 

• You can choose which products you want to sell on Fine Art America (wall art, home  decor, stationery, apparel, etc.) 

• Fine Art America is a popular place to shop for art. It is high in the Google Search.

• Artists worldwide can sell on Fine Art America, and your prints can be shipped  worldwide. 

• You can get discovered worldwide as an artist. 

• You can start with a free account and upload 25 images to see how you like it.

• It is only $30 a year to upgrade your account to Premium for unlimited image  uploads and a Pixels personal website. This is the only expense. There are no fees  for fulfilling orders, so this is a great option for someone on a tight budget. Because you are not paying for fulfilling orders or getting fees from sales your bookkeeping is more simple. 

• You can use a custom domain name on your personal website. 

• You can show your entire portfolio to increase sales. 

• You can use your Fine Art America personal website to promote your art, and visitors can’t exit off your page to another artist’s page, so you keep visitors on only your art.

• Setting up your shop is simple: you only upload your image and not mock-ups. Fine Art America automatically makes mock-ups for you instantly, saving you a lot of  time. 

• You can create discount codes for sales on your shop, offer limited time promotions, and participate in sitewide sales and designer print sales to get more sales.

• Clients can subscribe to your email newsletter where you can manage email campaigns from your Fine Art America site. 

• There is a 30 day guarantee for buyers which protects you as a seller. Fine Art America will handle customer service issues for you.

Cons: 

• When you get a sale you will only know the city the buyer is from, but not their name, address or email address. 

• When you get a sale you are only paid once a month, on the first 15th of the month 30 days after the sale (to cover the 30 day guarantee). 

• There are over a million other artists on Fine Art America, so there is a lot of competition making it hard to get higher in the search. 

• You can customize your Fine Art America page, but it is limited because the website needs consistency for many artists. 

• You can’t sign your prints because they ship directly to the customer.

• You can’t do limited-edition prints. 

Pros: 

• You can customize your SmugMug site to really showcase everything about your business, adding pages about other products and services that you offer. For instance, on my SmugMug site I have a page about my husband’s book and another one about my online courses. 

• You have unlimited storage on your SmugMug site for jpeg images, so it can be used  as backup storage (you can upgrade your account to add raw photo storage).

• You can choose your profit margin for prints and decide which products you want to  offer. 

• Your website has only your art so there is no competition from other artists.

Cons:  

• The subscription for a SmugMug website is expensive. 

• You can customize your SmugMug website a lot, but it can be complicated.

• Prints are made in only certain dimensions, so the image might have to be cropped, but you can move the crop left to right to work better with the image.

• You have to work hard at promoting your website to get traffic for sales. 

To learn more from Liesl Walsh about how to successfully market and sell your prints online, watch her class on KelbyOne: Selling Your Prints on Fine Art America.