How Do I Sell My Paintings On The Internet?

There are a few ways to sell your paintings on the web. These methods could actually be used for selling all crafts and things. I’m going to stick with the easiest and least expensive ways to get started.

Many artists use their website to drive traffic to another site which sells their paintings. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to invest the thousands of dollars which it takes to create your own full-fledged E Commerce website. You let the other site take care of the complexities, and, in turn, you pay a small commission to them. This is a smart way for an artist to do business.

One such site is Etsy. What’s cool about Etsy is all you have to do is give them 20 cents for each item you list and 3.5% of the final sale price. Not bad. Registering for your shop is free. There’s no setup fee and no monthly fee. Etsy can process major credit cards.

A lot of artists are very happy with their services. The artists just focus on promoting their work through their personal websites and sending their visitors over to the Etsy interface to handle the sale.
Boundless Gallery is another site for artists that works similarly. The interesting plan at Boundless Gallery is the da Vinci which costs $240 a year and allows an artist to sell without any commissions. This can be a good option for an artist who is selling a lot of paintings a year.
Another option is to sell directly off your site using PayPal as the go-between to handle the credit card processing. What’s cool about PayPal is that people using any major credit card can pay you through PayPal. A PayPal account on their part isn’t necessary. PayPal accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Bank Debit Cards, and, of course, Pay Pal cards.
The Pay Pal transaction fees are 30 cents plus from 1.9% to 2.9% of the sale (depending upon the volume of money you make per month.) And, there’s no monthly, set-up or cancellation fees. To use PayPal in this manner as a merchant, you’ll need either a Premier of Business Account.

If you’re interested in learning a bit more about selling with PayPal, see my PayPal Selling Tutorial.