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3/9/11

Posted by JATomlinson | 26 comments

Where To Sell Your Designs

There are a number of places online to sell your photoshop art, but very few will turn out to be profitable for you.  How do you choose the right selling platform?  How do you know what's a scam?  Which sites actually pay you?

I will list below what I have tried, and what my experiences have been.



Zazzle.com

In my opinion, this is by far the best place to sell your work.  Zazzle is a company based in San Francisco California.  You sign up for a free account, upload your designs, decide which products they go on and what the mark up will be (what percentage of money you will make off of each sale), and let your designs start making money for you!  Zazzle takes care of printing, packaging, shipping, and returns.  They will pay you by check or by paypal.com based on your preference.  It's not an immediate money maker, but if your stuff is good it will sell.  Zazzle has never failed to pay me what they owe.  There is a $30 minimum balance before payout, but it's pretty easy to get that far.

What products do they have?  Too many to list: Skateboards, shirts, sweatshirts, coasters, posters, greeting cards, business cards, shoes, ties, binders, stickers, stamps, aprons, mugs, hats, and even dog clothes.  My best seller there have been posters and skateboards.  Check out my site on zazzle.com HERE.

To see Zazzle's guide templates, click HERE.

Cafe Press

Cafe press is much like zazzle with one exception... it's NOT free.  Cafe press will allow you to open up a store and sell about 5 items for free, but any more than that and you will be charged around $8 a month.  I had a cafe press store for a long time, but I never made a profit because what I made each month was less than what I paid for the cafe press account.  They have a few products zazzle doesn't have, but on the other hand, zazzle has A LOT of products cafe press doesn't have.  Good luck to you if you try this platform, there's nothing wrong with it except that it's not free.


Deviant Art

Many graphic designers have a deviant art account because it's a great way to show off your work.  You may not know that they will also let you run a small store where they will print posters with your designs.  The problem?  It's hard to make money there.  They take a pretty big cut of any profits you might have.  Feel free to try it to have some options though!

These are just three of the sites I've tried, but I would recommend zazzle hands down.  I've made good money there.  If you open up your store and add about 13 items, and then one item per month after that, you're store will be thriving.  Keep in mind that you must use their templates for size requirements, and that you may not make money for your first few months.  It's always a good start to my day however when I open up my e-mail inbox and see the message from zazzle declaring, "Your products have been sold!"

Have other websites that you use to sell your designs?  Post them in a comment below!


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26 comments:

  1. I've had a Cafepress store for about 5 years, and have never sold a thing.

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  2. To Artsology: I never did sell a lot with Cafepress either until recently. I've been getting about $40/month from Cafepress and about $10/month from Zazzle. I'm not sure what Cafepress did to get more traffic to their site, but it's working. My best designs aren't even up on CP, they're on Zazzle. I still like Zazzle better for their interface, the fact that they're 100% free, and how easy it is to upload content, but Cafepress is currently the one making me the money.

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  3. Well I have been on DeviantArt quite some time. They take 25% so if you were going to get 100 dollars youd really only get 75 so yeah that sucks. But the upside the exposure is great. Though people go to tumblr for that it seems. or start their own blog.

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    1. Thanks for the input Kari. It's nice to hear from Deviant Art members who have experience selling there. I do most of my selling on Zazzle and Cafepress. Especially in the last year my sales have shot up on both sites, and I've recently considered selling some of my photos on Deviant Art because of the exposure there. I've also heard that there may soon be an option on Deviant Art to start selling stock photos. Can you confirm?

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  4. I suggest http://www.cowcow.com , also doing custom photo gifts, with much lower base pricing, for example, an custom iPhone 5 case at US$9.99/each, comparing with Zazzle, which is $39.95 for iphone 5 cases as base pricing. Same product, same quality.

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    1. What kind of traffic and purchase rate does cowcow.com have Kathy? I don't have any experience on that site, so any insight you can give would be helpful to other readers. Perhaps you'd be interested in doing a 'where to sell your art' tutorial on cowcow.com for us?

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  5. For the beta testers on deviantart they are going to start letting you sell your stock photos. They've expressed that they're going to try it with dev points first. Though if they do that they cannot stop you from using paypal.

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  6. I really need to start trying to sell more of my stuff online, thanks for the links.

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    1. Jason, I think you'll find that it's fairly easy. It may take some time to make your first sales on Zazzle or Cafepress, but if you keep uploading quality content on a weekly basis (I try for at least one new thing a week, but sometimes I do several in one day) then you'll start seeing sales (especially in November and December when all the Christmas shopping takes place).

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  7. zazzle.com is always works for me :)

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  8. You may also sell graphic design files on our site

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  9. Such an excellent and informative post. Thanks for sharing.

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  10. Hello,
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  17. Deviant Art is an awesome place to sell your arts. It's really amazing

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  18. This comment has been removed by the author.

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