Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’
Artist’s Online Shops..Point of Sale
- Image via CrunchBase
There’s an exploding number of sites and services aimed at making it easier for creative people to sell objects they produce to those interested in their work.
Sites like http://etsy.com & http://artfire.com are built around a large creative community offering higher volume of traffic and potential to attract more patrons to your work.
Other sites offer more traditional online selling like http://ebay.com or dedicated shop sites like http://bigcartel.com/ which is focused on Arts or the more recent & general http://shoply.com/.
These inexpensive or free sites and services promise easy to use ways to provide a point of sale mechanism to collectors or patrons of your work.
While my feeling is more options are always good, it’s not necessarily the most effective to choose an option based on it being an easy option.
If you’re investing in your work you need to invest in your own online presence, specifically, your own domain. The single biggest hurdle to any online business is developing their site, a following and traffic to their site. If you’re funneling traffic to community sites like Etsy or Artfire, or a ‘shop’ page where all you’re doing is offering items for sale, you’re not really engaging with your community. These sites are great as far as they go, but my advice is to use them for what they can do for your main domain.
In the case of Etsy or Artfire, perhaps offer 1-5 “entry level” items that may make a first impression on anyone who finds your work via these communities. If you absolutely must use a “shop” site for your transactions, don’t spend your time funneling interested persons directly to the “shop”, but give them background on pieces and other work on your site and if they decide to purchase then send them to the appropriate item on the “shop” site. Offering a more integrated payment method from within your own domain is more preferred since it doesn’t have the potential of breaking up the purchase experience. It also gives you other options for building a relationship with your customers that you may not have on other platforms.
Please add your own thoughts below.
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- The Handmade Artists’ Forum and Shop (beadinggem.com)
- Can a New Tool for Sellers Take on Etsy and Amazon Marketplace? (mashable.com)
Creative Individual Advantage!
What we need to remember is the advantage that each creative individual has over every other kind of information, product marketing or other content on the net is perspective and our ability to interact personally with our community.
Attraction of those interested in what we do is often easier for creatives because we have images of objects, recordings of sound, videos…obvious documentation of what we do. When others find our work, their decision is fairly simple. Our work either finds an interested person or it doesn’t, someone who finds our stuff worth paying attention to or not. Beyond that the burden is on us to construct an environment that communicates what we’re about in a clear, concise way that’s as easily found as we can make it.
Other companies and individuals have that same burden, but they’re also necessarily in the position of having to persuade and sometimes “sell” viewers that their version of “whatever” is better than everyone else’s version. They’re starting from a negative position of being one among many. They have to work to be unique and establish themselves as an authority.
Creative folks who make one of kind objects, performances or experiences are already uniquely themselves. We have credibility by being ourselves. We are unique and the authority. That’s a position of strength many of us often don’t think about. We’re already a leap ahead. Just be true to yourself.
Know who you are, be true to who you are and build a way to show others. Do everything you can to make it easy for those interested in what you’re about to find you if they’re looking.
Please let me know what you think and your own experiences in the comments.
