Ask HN: Selling framed physical art online | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Selling framed physical art online

35 pointsblunte28 comments

I want to help a family member show and sell their paintings online. The works are already framed (so no frame options/configuration is necessary). It is basically just "see this beautiful piece, as it actually exists" and "buy it!"

I'm aware of many general options and plenty of technical options, but perhaps there are some HN folks who already do this. If so, what site/service do you use?

Online payments are not absolutely necessary, but that would be a nice bonus.

There exist sites for photographers to sell their work, but those tend to have many, many options and seem to be overkill for this. At a minimum, this could probably just be a Shopify store selling individual, one of a kind items. But perhaps there's something better for this (with better presentation)?

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I run the same business. If I started again, here is how I would do it.

Ignore the website part. When someone asks to buy your art, just send them a message. Communicate, send them your bank account or Paypal. When you receive the payment, ship the item.

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If I were you, I'd create Reddit/IG/FB/Tiktok account.

On Reddit: Find a subreddit that you think people interested in your art. Post your arts there.

On Tiktok: make videos of your art with trending music.

On IG: Post your arts frequently. Post reels with your Tiktok content. Follow for follow strategy still works.

On FB: Find groups you think people interested in your arts, and post.

If your arts are not violated any copyright policy. Create an Etsy account. Post your listing there, and redirect everyone to this.

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This is a real business, you have to spend time and effort to make it work.

Not only marketing part, but product part too. You have to research what the market want, and draw following what they want to see (Not what you want to draw)

Don't expect overnight success.

Thanks for the suggestions. It's actually my retired father's works to be sold. Thus far he "only" enters (and frequently wins or places) in state and national competitions, and a few times he's had gallery showings.

Social media, aside from him posting a photo/link on Facebook, is not an option. This is not my forte, and he's not interested in working too hard (beyond spending 8 hours a day painting).

The key point here is that regardless of how someone hears about his art, they want a place to look at it online. That's what I'm looking for right now.

Maybe as others have suggested, Etsy is the place. Or maybe a custom simple website is enough. Heck, a WP site with a gallery plugin would probably suffice.

For what you describe Etsy is a fine starting place. It’s low effort, and you can actually sell there. But you may want to tailor your expectations. Selling art is hard, and art online doesn’t feel the same as art in person.

There’s sort of two things going on here, and it’s important to delineate the two. There’s a website for marketing and there a website to help facilitate commerce. Since you say online payments are not necessary, then marketing sounds to be the primary initial goal.

For marketing you’ll likely find that no single effort will be very useful. I am not a marketing expert, but I’ve seen the mistake multiple times of thinking a single X is all someone will need. Discovery is the hardest part of selling and I have only vague ideas as to how to discover art work online.

A place with a domain you control is sort of a minimum. You can set up a wordpress site almost anywhere, and there are lots of payment options these days. Etsy might suffice for this, but I can’t remember if you control the domain. After that a minimum 1-2 hour marketing spend weekly should go towards adding content to any and all places people go to find art work. The idea being to brand the artist and funnel people towards marketplaces in your control. It’s a real slog, and it will likely take years to gain any real traction. Chris Do has a lot of good content on marketing for creatives (though most of it is aimed at hourly/contract worker).

Perhaps Etsy is a good choice. It will bring some accidental business in, plus it will provide a seller system for listing/showing items.

Marketing isn't really a concern. He can post a photo/link on his Facebook periodically. He's retired, and his works win awards... so just having a website where people can see them is probably enough.

I'll look into Etsy. If that doesn't seem right for this, then I'll perhaps fall back to WP.

I also forgot to mention, but high quality images help a lot. I have experience as a framer, and frames can be particularly hard to showcase online.

Squarespace is fairly good for this - I made a website for my parents' pottery that you can see here: https://thebyersstudio.com.

It's nice in that it's made for non-technical users and integrates well with ShipStation, which saves a ton on shipping.

A lot of craft shows went online during the pandemic, linking to individual artist's websites, so you can see examples aggregated on sites like https://www.pmacraftshow.org/artists or https://www.minnesotapotters.com/online-shops-directory.

Yours is a really nice site. I'll look into Squarespace. Honestly this would be enough for my dad's needs (and since I would be managing it, I'm sure it would be quite easy).

Thanks!

Thank you, hope all goes well! My dad has had a easy enough time of it, I mainly hear about how it’s time-consuming to photograph everything.

I think the individuality and branding of "this is the artist's site, they sell their work complete and finished" may be worth the effort. Depends on how much they want to sell and how much effort they want to devote to it.

Artists, especially those working in the more traditional forms, have a real problem with online (and offline!) marketing. They want to do their art, not marketing, which leads to predatory service providers doing the lowest effort services for the highest prices they can charge. The markets get filled with lowest effort / broadest appeal stuff and tho there's great things there they're hard to find and hard for the sellers to achieve success.

Im told that the online art market is optimized around "prints" and the new trend is customized layers added to them. I can see the appeal but agree with my source that little of the work being offered that way has the expressiveness and completeness of her preferred, traditional styles and media.

there's always Etsy, which has not been a winning proposition so far as I have seen secondhand. Its better than nothing but in my (uninvolved and ignorant) opinion not a lot better.

Additional notes since people are graciously providing replies and suggestions! :)

This is unoffensive, professional level paintings of nostalgic things like typewriters, telephones, gas cans, shaving brushes, etc. None of it should be at risk of any kind of censorship or legal challenges.

The artist is a retired guy (my father), so high effort marketing is not an option. The main need is just to have a good place to show off everything he's painted.

It's basically a question of what platform or service is ideal for presenting a personal gallery, and optionally with payment processing. Thus far Etsy and Wordpress with plugins have been suggested. My own experience with Shopify makes me think that is an option, although less tailored to the purpose.

If it is the standard hobby level of painting, then Shopify works just fine. Any online store will do - the trick to selling art online is far more about marketing than the actual selling. Even on Etsy, the marketers do well regardless of the quality of the work.

But if they are really good, and have a history of showing their works in shows and galleries, a better option is to see if any of the galleries already have solutions in place. They'll take a huge cut, but will handle everything for you.

(On the other hand, if they are really bad, and just trying to recover the costs of the materials, craigslist works for cheap art.)

I've had a good experience on the _buyer_ side with https://www.saatchiart.com

Is your goal to run this as a business (lasting more than a year) or are you just trying to sell some art and be done with it?

The goal is to have a place where potential buyers (especially people who see only one of his pieces at a competition) can see the rest of his work and potentially buy something.

This would last until he runs out of work (but he's always producing), or until he runs out of life (which hopefully will be quite a few years).

I think currently he has over 100 pieces, and he's running out of room to store them!

I've been involved in a project like this. Beware of decency laws/censorship laws, which vary from country to country and which can cause a lot of trouble with art ending up impounded because it doesn't align with the local legislation, which can be quite absurd.

Thanks for the warning. I would have never thought about that, but in this case I think paintings of old typewriters, phones, cameras, and such should be safe!

Fair. Beware of anything depicting deities!

I opened an etsy store for that; though don't expect to get much (or any) traffic via if your art is very specialized. It was probably similar in work than setting up your own software

Yeah, accidental traffic is not the goal for us. This is so when people see an existing piece at a show or otherwise hear about him, they will have a place they can be told to go see more of his work.

I’ve been thinking about this myself. I’m going with ebay for two reasons. Easy exposure and clients who need art for a tax break. That would price my art at 20000 usd and upwards.

Not sure what you're saying here, the ebay sale would create a public price record. How would this lead to a tax break?

I would expect that customers who are willing to spend $20,000 and up would want to go to a gallery where they could see the art in person, and where they could get a certificate of authenticity from a reputable gallery. If I were buying expensive art I would be leery of buying on Ebay for fear of getting a fake.

You know spending $20k on art to get a $20k tax break doesn't lead to a profit, right?

You just have a nice painting and a lower taxable income.

See artfullywalls.com for more options for your family member.

My friend sells other people's art with success on Artsy . net, may be worth looking into if you haven't already.

I've definitely bought my fair share of non-framed art on Etsy, so that is one option.

I’d love to see his art! My email is in my bio if you have any pictures to share.

Just start with Shopify. You can be up and running in hours.

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