How to Sell Your Art Online
Selling art online has never been more straightforward – or more confusing. There are dozens of platforms competing for your attention, each promising exposure, sales and a global audience of collectors. The reality is more nuanced, and the right choice depends less on which platform is biggest and more on what kind of work you make and how much time you're willing to put in.
This guide covers the main options available to artists today.
Your own website
Having your own website is the only option that puts you fully in control. You set the prices, you own the customer relationship, and you keep every penny of every sale. No commission, no algorithm deciding whether your work gets seen, no risk of a platform changing its terms overnight.
The trade-off is that you're responsible for bringing people to it. A shop on your own site does nothing on its own – it needs SEO, social media, an email list, or some combination of all three to drive traffic. That's a longer game than joining an existing marketplace, but it's more sustainable.
For the shop itself, Shopify is the most fully featured option, built for e-commerce from the ground up. It handles payments, inventory, discount codes and shipping labels cleanly, and there are good themes designed with visual work in mind. The downside is that it's a subscription service – your site only exists while you keep paying, and the monthly cost can feel like overkill if you're selling twenty paintings a year rather than running a product business. Squarespace works on the same model and is a lighter alternative with more polished default templates – better suited to visual work straight out of the box, with a built-in shop that covers most bases without the complexity. Worth bearing in mind with both: you're renting your website, not owning it.
Drop-shipping fulfilment for your own site
If you want to sell prints through your own website without handling printing or postage yourself, services like Printspace or Prodigi connect directly to your shop. A customer orders a print, the fulfilment company prints and ships it, and you never touch it. You set the retail price, they charge you a production cost, and the margin is yours.
This is a good middle ground – you keep your branding, you're not sending customers to someone else's platform, and the operational side is handled for you. Margins are thinner than selling originals, but the workload is minimal once it's set up.
Build an email list alongside it
Whatever shop setup you choose, an email list is worth starting early. Social media platforms change their algorithms, reduce organic reach, and occasionally disappear. An email list is yours – no platform can take it away. Even a small list of people who've bought from you before or expressed real interest is worth more than thousands of followers you can't directly contact.
Marketplaces for original art
These platforms have existing audiences of collectors actively looking to buy, which takes care of the traffic problem – at a cost.
Saatchi Art is the biggest name in this space, with a large international audience and a curatorial reputation that lends credibility to the work shown on it. They take 35% commission on each sale, which stings, but they also handle some of the marketing and have an art advisory service that can put work in front of serious buyers. Worth considering if you make paintings, photography or sculpture at mid-to-high price points.
Artfinder operates similarly, with a focus on independent artists and a slightly more community-driven feel. Commission rates vary.
Etsy is a different proposition – vast audience, low barrier to entry, but you're competing with an enormous volume of other sellers and the platform is better known for craft and handmade goods than fine art. It works well for prints, smaller works and anything with a gift-market angle. Less suited to large-scale or high-value originals.
Singulart takes a more curated approach than most. Work is reviewed by professional curators before it goes live, which keeps quality consistent and means you're competing with fewer sellers. It's built around connecting artists directly with buyers worldwide, and has a strong international reach – particularly useful if your work sits in the mid-to-high price range and you want to be seen alongside other serious artists rather than lost in a general browse.
Print-on-demand marketplaces
These platforms let you upload your artwork and have it printed on products – posters, canvas prints, clothing, homewares – with no upfront cost. Every order is produced and shipped by the platform.
Redbubble is the most well-known. It has huge organic search traffic and a broad audience, which means your work can get discovered without much promotion. The economics shifted significantly in late 2025 though: Redbubble introduced a tiered fee structure where standard accounts now face a 50% platform fee on monthly earnings. Worth knowing before you factor it into any income projections.
Society6 used to be an open marketplace but pivoted in 2025 to a more curated, invite-only model. It's no longer straightforward to join, so treat it as a secondary option rather than a default.
The main thing to understand about print-on-demand marketplaces is that they suit a certain kind of work – bold, graphic, decorative imagery that translates well to cushions and tote bags. If your work is subtle, painterly or conceptual, the audience on these platforms may not be the right one.
Newer platforms
A newer wave of platforms is trying to address something that's frustrated artists for years: the commission rates charged by established marketplaces.
Mostra (built by The Holy Art Gallery) operates on a flat annual subscription rather than taking a cut of each sale. Artists keep 100% of every transaction, with direct Stripe payouts. It's very new, which means the audience is still small, but it's growing and the model is more favourable for artists who sell regularly.
Cara has emerged with a strong artist-first ethos, particularly popular among artists who are concerned about AI-generated imagery and want to be part of a community that explicitly values human-made work. It's less a traditional marketplace and more a portfolio and community platform – but with an engaged and growing audience.
These newer platforms are worth watching even if their audiences aren't yet as large as Saatchi or Etsy. Getting in early, while the competition is lower, can pay off as they grow.
Social selling
A meaningful number of artists make sales directly through Instagram, either through the platform's shop feature or simply through DMs after posting new work. It's informal, requires no listing fees, and keeps the relationship direct. It works best when you already have an engaged following, and it doesn't scale easily, but it's a real channel that shouldn't be ignored.
Commission enquiries often come through social media too – someone sees a piece you've posted, asks whether you do commissions, and a sale follows without any platform involved at all.
Should you be on as many platforms as possible?
It sounds like sensible marketing advice – maximum presence, maximum exposure. In practice, it tends to produce the opposite effect.
Every platform needs maintaining. Listings go stale, sold work needs removing, new pieces need adding, and prices need to stay current. If you're spread across six platforms and keeping none of them properly up to date, you're doing more damage than good. Outdated stock and sold pieces still showing up makes you look inactive, or worse, unreliable.
There's also the question of effort. Building a real presence somewhere takes time – responding to enquiries, engaging with the community, learning what the platform's audience responds to. Doing that half-heartedly across many channels produces worse results than doing it well in one or two.
The exception is print-on-demand platforms, which are relatively low-maintenance once your work is uploaded. Adding your portfolio to Redbubble doesn't require much ongoing attention, so the cost of being present there is low.
For original art, a more focused approach works better. Pick one or two platforms that suit your work and your price point, give them proper attention for six months, and only add another once those are running smoothly. A well-maintained presence in two places will consistently outperform a neglected presence in ten.
Where to start
If you're just getting going: set up your own website with a simple shop, choose one marketplace that fits your medium, and start building an email list from day one. That combination – your own platform, one external marketplace, and a direct line to people who already like your work – is more than enough to build on.
The platforms will keep changing. Commission structures shift, audiences migrate, new options appear. The one thing that stays constant is the value of having a website you own and an audience you can reach directly, whatever else changes around you.
If you need help designing and building your own artist website – or connecting it to a shop, a print fulfilment service, or a payment system – that's exactly what we do at Bluemoon. Get in touch and we can talk through what would work best for you.