If you’re like many visual artists, photographers, and designers, you know how to sell paintings or photographs through brick-and-mortar galleries and art fairs, and you view your personal website as a place to show your portfolio and the services you offer to clients. But using your website to sell digital art and photography can also be lucrative.
With a little extra work to set up an online store, your site can double as a commercial gallery, earning you passive income from your digital products long after their creation.
Read on to learn more about how to sell art online, including digital collectibles and custom merchandise.
Selling visual art on your own website
When considering where to sell art, many artists look to third-party art marketplaces and stock photography sites. These shops reach a wide audience, but they often charge high commission and transaction fees, and the competition is fierce.
Many web hosting services, including Squarespace, make selling artworks directly to customers seamless and convenient. There are two different approaches you can take:
Sell individual copies of your artwork just like a physical gallery would. To prevent customers from downloading your work for free, post a smaller, low-resolution image in the online showroom. When customers purchase the art, they can download a much higher-resolution version.
Sell membership access to your artwork. Set all your work in a gated membership area, then charge customers to access that section. This strategy might work best for artists who create a sort of private stock photography service for clients who want to download new pieces regularly.
To increase traffic to your site and sales, market your online gallery through social media and third-party sites. Consider labeling each piece with robust metadata (e.g., category tags and alt text) to make sure that it shows up in search. If you have concerns around protecting your copyright when you are selling digital products, consult a legal expert.
Making and selling NFTs of your art
More and more professional artists are looking to digital collectibles like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to earn income from their digital artwork and protect its value.
Digital artwork can easily be copied and reproduced. However, NFTs register a specific image or video through blockchain technology, which is a way of recording information digitally that’s difficult to change. Creating an NFT allows the creator to mark one specific version of their art as the original, which can then be sold and resold. Some NFT sites allow creators to earn a certain percentage as a royalty every time someone new purchases the artwork.
The question of how to sell NFTs is complex, since it involves evolving technology and cryptocurrency wallets, so you’ll want to do some research before you enter the market.
There are two basic parts to the process of selling NFTs:
Minting NFTs: Minting is the process of turning a digital art file into a digital collectible, which means securing the image or video on the blockchain. Once you’ve created your digital artwork, certain websites help you mint it.
Selling NFTs: Most NFTs to date have been sold on specialized marketplaces, but new ways to sell NFTs are appearing.
Selling art through print on demand services
A third way that visual artists earn income online is with custom products made through print on demand services. If you’re wondering how to sell prints of your digital artwork, these services produce—and ship—them to customers. In addition to selling prints online, they can produce posters, T-shirts, and other physical versions of your artwork. You don’t have to do the printing and production work or manage the inventory. Squarespace Custom Merch is an easy way to sell your work—and even easily create and sell other branded products—directly to customers.
For many artists, customized merch services promise the best of both worlds: the freedom to create digital art without competing for gallery space and the option to sell prints online for their fans to display in their homes.
Read about how to sell design templates through your website