The Best Website for Selling Art

I am in a love/hate relationship. I met my love in 1986, and since then, my love has made my life unbelievably richer and easier; my love has brought the whole world into my life and totally changed the nature of the work I do. On the other hand, my love is very complicated; my love has brought so many and such complex changes into my life and the lives of my friends that I sometimes long for times past. As I slow down, my love speeds up. My love affair is with digital technology.

My first PC was a bulky IBM 256K machine that cost $5000 and used 5.5" floppy disks. I bought it by taking out a loan. By 1988, my computer was neither upgradeable nor usable and the newest PC’s with vastly larger internal hard drives cost about the same amount as what I still owed on my useless old machine. Back then, operating systems were obsolete by the time you opened the package. I learned, therefore, not to rush to buy new software or hardware too quickly. (Are you with me Windows users?) Patience has become my primary response to technological innovation and it keeps paying off as a strategy.

Flash forward decades and social networking became the buzzword in marketing circles. New verbs were created and popularized as new digital tools emerged (twittering, facebooking, and texting for example). Just as computers were linked together to form the worldwide web, each of us with camera cell phones became individual cells of a global information sharing community.

Technology involves all of us all the time. We leave a digital record of our lives in the purchases we make and the communications we create – just ask Tiger Woods about digital trails – and our trails shape how we interface with the digital universe. Also, we are moving to increased and compulsory involvement with digital technologies.

The web as a sales tool has its advocates and its critics. Sites and ideas for handling sales (securely) have evolved, and the expectations of both buyers and sellers have settled in the face of thirty years of highly analyzed experience. Overall, however, I think there is consensus amongst artists that blogs and websites have become valuable components of the artist’s promotion and communications infrastructure – websites being ideal for longer-lasting, more “permanent” repositories of information, and blogs being the perfect vehicle with which artists can maintain an up-to-date web presence. In combination, these two tools have an incredible promotional value when properly designed and maintained.

The problem with the web for many artists has been how to create and carry out sales. The problem has led to various creative solutions. Early on, many artists saw eBay as an effective solution, and their involvement led to the breaking down of the “Art” category into diverse media and the creation of mini-communities within the eBay community. The EBSQ community, for example, created a sales model for small artist collectives using the eBay site. To learn more about them, visit www.ebsqart.com Web sales are not right for all artists and all art. Two-dimensional art remains best sold face-to-face in galleries and studios supported by a web presence. But for artists who create unique hand-made items that can be effectively sold on the web – crafts persons in particular – no site is more practical and valuable than Etsy. Etsy, says this man of patience, has proven its value over time to many artists who I have interviewed.

Etsy (www.etsy.com) is a sales site and a community. If you do not know the site and think it may be of interest, visit it and take a look around. When you go to the homepage, click on “Community” at the top of the page to gain access to these categories: “Overview,” “Updates,” “Forums” etc. By clicking on each of these categories, you can give yourself a tour of the community’s assets.

At the bottom of the “Community” page, if you scroll down, you will find a listing of “Virtual Lab” and “Team” events. This is valuable for newbies – people new to the community. If you join Etsy and become a newby, you can identify other members who live close by and contact them to see if you can find someone willing to have a coffee with you to explain how things work, if need be.

One thing I like about Etsy is its commitment to the education of its members. It encourages you to become part of a team because, as in life, the team approach works better than the independent approach. Etsy provides a lot of support services to teams, including grants to support innovative member teams. Just click on “Teams” on the “Community” page to learn more. The “Workshops” page is another great resource page for newbies. It has an extensive archive of topics that may answer questions that come to mind about using Etsy to sell your work.

If you are an artist who works in two-dimensional media, a visit to the site may ignite some dormant creative desire within you. Visiting Etsy can be inspirational in terms of stimuli for your creative voice. It may motivate you to undertake a creative project different from your usual work that is marketable on Etsy. Using Etsy can create an easy new source of revenue for the artist that does not require any marketing expense.

The caveats: Etsy is somewhat US-centric. Buyers can use the “Shop Local” feature to make it more effective, and there has been some criticism about people selling work that they have not made. Also, the operators of Etsy have been criticized for being slow to crack down on problematic sellers. For more information and a history of Etsy, visit the Etsy listing on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etsy)