The holiday shopping season is 4 months away. It may seem like a long time to go but it is not. With 4 months until the holiday shopping season sell from your stores via video shopping officially kicks off on Black Friday, online store owners still have time to tweak their ecommerce solutions features, prepare which products to put on sale and carry out SEO work to ensure targeted shoppers find their stores with ease if they start now.
Products
What products you decide to promote actually depends on the type of products you sell. For example, if your shopping cart powered store sells console games, then naturally you would want to have the latest games ready for the biggest shopping event of the year. Hot games and gadgets usually do not require large discounts or offers to fly off the shelves because shoppers of these items want to get them while they are still ‘hot.’
It’s time to take your doodles and scribbles and turn them into cash by selling your art online, and now it can be done without any cost to you at all. Do you like to draw? Paint? Did you know you can make money from your hobby and not be a professional artist?
Thanks to the internet and improvements in technology almost anyone can now self-publish their work, whether it is a book or a painting. One of the largest new markets being provided via the internet is Print On Demand, sometimes known as Publish On Demand (POD for short). To put it simply, POD is when a manufacturer provides the raw material (paper, coffee mug, shirt, etc) and you provide the content (writing, painting, graphic, etc. Some POD suppliers even provide an online store or gallery for you to sell from, some which are provided free while others will charge a very small monthly fee. They handle the product manufacturing, shipping, and billing, but it is up to you to create the content and to manage the marketing.
While setting up my own art store, PackRat Graphics at Zazzle, I did a lot of the same research you are probable working on now. By sharing some of the information I collected in this blog, I hopefully will save you some time and frustration. I am going to assume you already know how to do the media of your choice, but how do you get it on the computer and on the internet for others to see and buy?
Where to sell your art online?
While there are a lot of different Print On Demand publishers available, during my research I narrowed my choices down to RedBubble, Imagekind, Zazzle, and CafePress. I am not going to do a pro and con comparison of the available POD publishers; others have already done this and have done a much better analysis than I could. But if you want to see numbers try the following review website, Art Business Advice
Each Print On Demand service has their own particular strengths and weaknesses, and are targeted to different crowds, markets, and artists. But for fine art prints RedBubble and ImageKind have already established themselves has the leaders of that particular market. These two are well established art communities, with a large number of members and very good internet traffic rates, but I was looking to hit a wider market share than just “fine art” and I personally tend to lean more toward Graphic Design rather than traditional fine art. I finally settled on Zazzle. Zazzle and CafePress both provide other types of products than just fine art prints, but Zazzle gives you a full unlimited gallery with as many products as you can design, for free. CafePress is better known, but for a full gallery or store you need to pay about $7 a month. But I was interested in the challenge of starting an online business for as little cost as possible so I went with Zazzle. I may open up a CafePress store some time in the future to test it out.