You have decided to make the leap and start creating your own printable art to sell. Congrats!
That is SUPER EXCITING!
Or maybe you are just thinking about it and wondering if it is something that you could really do. The answer is yes you can do it! It’s not as scary as you think and doesn’t cost as much as you think either!
Isn’t that great!
I mean what is not to like about earning some extra money online?
I was listening to a podcast the other day and the presenter said something that really resonated with me…Done is better than Perfect!
Sometimes you are better off just starting and getting your product out there rather than waiting for it to be perfect because you’ll never get it perfect!
I know when I first started to try to make money online selling my artwork, various clipart like Flower Clipart, Animal Clipart in order to let others Buy Clipart for Commercial Use, it was exciting and terrifying all at the same time. Now nothing happens overnight but if you put in the work you can make money online selling printable art. Before we get to the best way to sell art online let’s focus on something else.
What is Printable Art?
I am guessing if you are reading this you actually know what printable art is.
But if you don’t here is a quick explanation. This definition might not be technically 100% correct but it will serve us for what we are going to talk about here:
Printable art is basically when you use art that you either make or buy online and then have it printed on an end product like canvas, mugs, bags, cards, planners, iPhone cases, pyjamas, pillow covers (basically anything under the sun!) either for yourself or to sell to others.
Technically, you could also print out clipart of various designs like Animal Clipart, Watercolor Rose or others you buy online and use it in something like your own personal planner or put it in a frame and hang it on your wall but today we are talking about selling printable art and where to do that.
This iPhone case would be an example of a printable art product. Somebody made the art themselves or purchased it from a site where you can buy clipart for commercial use and had it printed on the iPhone case. Now they have a very pretty iPhone case to sell and make some money!
The great thing about selling printable art is that with many of the sites you don’t have to stock any product. All your merchandise is made on demand as they are ordered. This is very convenient and makes it easy to enter the market compared to having to buy a bunch of stock to sell upfront. It also saves you the hassle of having to ship the actual products which is nice.
If you haven’t figured out yet where to go to buy clipart than check out this article on 6 Places to Buy Commercial Use Clipart So You Won’t Get Sued.
Sign up to get access to my free resources! You might just get some free art you can use!
Where To Sell Printable Art
For now we are going to talk about 4 places to sell printable art on a piece of merchandise.
Zazzle.com
Zazzle has been around for quite a while and is a great place to sell your designs or printable art like I had mentioned Flower Clipart, Arrow Clipart or more if you are just starting out. How Zazzle works is that they literally have thousands of products that you can publish your work on. You can choose the products that you want to sell. You also set your own royalty rates so you have some say on how much money you make per sale. And you don’t have any inventory to maintain!
You essentially create your own store on Zazzle by opening an account and giving your store a name. To open your own store on Zazzle is free. You then choose products that you want to add a design to. Upload your designs and add them to the products you chose. When you are happy with how a product looks you can post it for sale.
Zazzle sets the base price of the product and then you set the royalty or markup to arrive at the retail price. There obviously is a number of factors that go into what to price a product at but we won’t get into that here. Let’s just say you want to make money, be competitive and in the ballpark of what the market will pay as far as the price of your product.
Check out Zazzle.
Redbubble.com
Redbubble is very similar to Zazzle and you can sell everything from clothing to device cases to home décor and more related to the clipart designs or graphic clipart associated with your business! It is also free to start selling on Redbubble.
Redbubble sets the base price for any product that you want to sell and then you set your profit margin to arrive at the retail price. You upload your designs that you want to use and then Redbubble pretty much handles the rest from the transaction, printing and delivery of the product to your customer.
One thing to note with both Redbubble and Zazzle is that you always own the rights to your art so you can still sell it on other platforms.
Check out Redbubble.
Threadless.com
Threadless is another print on demand marketplace that you may want to check out. One of the benefits of Threadless is the amount of customization they allow you to do to your store. Threadless is free to sign up for and like the others offers many products for you to sell.
You upload your designs or the clipart for commercial use that you purchased and they pretty much take care of the rest of the transaction and shipping process. They have a base price for products and then you set your profit margin to arrive at your retail price.
Check out Threadless.
Society6.com
Society 6 is another POD marketplace and is similar to the others so we won’t go repeating everything again! Basically, you own the rights to your art, you set your prices and profit margin and Society 6 takes care of the rest of the transaction and shipping.
Check out Society6.
Which Is The Best?
This is really hard to say. In fact, we are not sure that one can be declared the best out of this bunch.
The real trick is getting traffic to your store in order to sell products. For this reason, we think it may be wise to consider which of the marketplaces get the most traffic and does the most marketing as this will help your sales. If you already have marketing in place and can drive your own traffic then you may want to consider other things like ease of use and user experience to decide which POD marketplace you like best.
Like we said at the beginning of this article don’t succumb to paralysis by analysis. If you can’t decide just pick one and get going!
Happy Creating!
Pretty Little Lines
