Is Shopify Good For Selling Art? (A Quick Artists’ Guide)

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Having a self-hosted eCommerce store is the ultimate way to sell your artworks online as it allows you to set your own unique value proposition and stand out from the crowd! But, is Shopify the right choice for selling art online? This is what you’re about to learn!

While Shopify is a platform that wasn’t specifically meant for selling art online, utilizing such an innovative drag-and-drop eCommerce platform could benefit artists as it gives professional insights into how the business is performing. Also, it’s very affordable and requires little to no technical or coding skills!

In this article, we are going to be discussing the advantage of leveraging a platform like Shopify for selling art online, the actual store creation process, plus some helpful tips for selling art online.

So, are you an artist who’s looking forward to selling their artworks online effectively? This quick guide could be of great help to you.

Before we dive in, if you find this post inspiring and useful, share it with your friends, please! (Virtual high fives and awkward hugs to all my sharers out there ✋)

Can I Sell Art On Shopify?

Shopify is an eCommerce platform that has everything you may need to start selling anything online, anywhere! On Shopify, you can sell art, gadgets, electronics, apparel, or anything you could have thought of! You can either leverage it to sell physical or digital goods and services, do dropshipping, or even start a blog!

So, yes, Shopify can be a great software for selling your artwork and printings online, and there are a lot of artists who have been leveraging this platform for building their brands and getting more exposure to their handmade crafts! You can grab your Shopify 14-day free trial, get full access to the entire platform for free, and see if it works for you!

How Much Does It Cost To Sell Art On Shopify?

The Shopify subscription fee starts at $29 and goes up to $299 depending on your need. Although the basic plan comes with basic features, it could be more than enough for people who are just starting out. You would also need to have some apps to enhance your store’s speed, features, and functionalities! Some are free while others are paid.

So technically, running a basic Shopify store with some apps installed from the Shopify App Store costs on average $50 a month, and it could be lower with annual plans. Yes, Shopify is not the cheapest, nor the costliest option around, but it has multiple benefits and advantages.

Related: How To Start A Shopify Store For Free (Business Kickstart)

How Do I Start Selling My Artwork On Shopify?

In order to start selling your artwork on Shopify, you would obviously need to pay for a Shopify subscription plan, pick an inviting theme that suits the purpose of your store, populate your digital storefront with the actual products you want to sell, and integrate a payment gateway so you can receive orders and capture payments from your customers!

The 4-Step Process of Starting a Shopify Art Gallery & Selling Shopify Art Prints

Starting a Shopify store is a process that roughly takes up to 5 minutes maximum! To help you get familiar with the platform and give you a headstart in your business, here’s a quick breakdown of the 4-step process of starting a Shopify store that sells artworks:

A big shoutout to Website Hosting Secret Revealed for sharing the helpful screenshots and tutorial of creating a Shopify art store.

Step 1. Create a Shopify Account

To create a Shopify account, you would need to visit Shopify.com (this link takes you directly to the Shopify registration page), put your best email address, and register for a free trial.

The free trial gives you the opportunity to test out Shopify and understand how it works. You will get access to the entire platform without paying any money.

This 2-week period is good for getting familiar with the dashboard and setting up your online store without a hassle.

However, in order to receive orders and capture real payments from your customers, you would need to pick a paid subscription plan. Check out this ultimate Shopify pricing guide for more information.

Your trial starts when you register for an account not when you start working on your store. Even if you have picked a paid subscription plan upon registration, you won’t be charged until the free trial expires!

Being said, the process starts with a couple of questions that frankly don’t matter. You can even skip it if you’re not sure what to answer yet.

Once registered, you will be assigned a back-end dashboard which you can control your online storefront from. From this point on, your trial start will start counting.

If you want to integrate a custom-branded domain name, now is the time to do so.

Start here > Click to signup and create a Shopify online store.

Step 2. Customize Your Store

Shopify is a fully customizable platform that allows you to control everything within your digital storefront, starting from your branding, (colors, logo, theme, fonts), to pages, categories, and everything in between!

Adding a custom-branded domain name is the first step toward your store’s branding. After then, you would need to add a relevant logo design that matches your brand.

You can hire someone from Fiverr to create you a professional logo design for as low as $5!

Shopify comes with a free theme that has basic features and functionalities. It’s advisable to pick and pay for a premium theme for better performance, speed, features, and user experience. This is an investment of approximately $180 that’s totally worth it!

Shopify Theme Store offers a variety of free and paid themes that you can download and install into your Shopify store.

If you’re not satisfied with the options offered by Shopify, you can always purchase a theme externally from theme marketplaces and install it manually on your store (here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to do that!)

For your safety, I’ve searched for you for the most trusted and verified digital assets and theme marketplaces:

• Template Monster 
• Creative Market 
• Theme Forest
• My Theme Shop

After setting up your mind on a theme, you would need to go to your dashboard – Online store – Themes – Customize theme.

You can customize everything within the interior design of your and adjust the different navigations. Menus, homepage, pages, text, fonts, colors, collections, and more!

It’s also worth mentioning that Shopify has an App Store that you can find in your Shopify admin panel under the Apps tab, where you can find useful tools and apps for content, marketing, SEO, sales, email marketing, and more!

Check here > Click to learn more about the Shopify App Store.

Step 3. Add Products

Adding products is pretty simple with Shopify and it’s a very straightforward process. To add a new product, go to your Shopify dashboard and click on products.

There you will get the chance to give your product a unique name, put it under a certain category, edit the description, and add some images!

After getting done, you would need to set a price for your artwork, prints, or painting, taking into consideration the quality of your work, the competition, and the cost of materials!

Step 4. Integrate a Payment Gateway

This is how you are going to get paid and charge your customers. There are multiple options for getting paid in your Shopify store. The most popular ones are Shopify payments and PayPal express checkout.

To integrate a payment gateway, simply go to your Shopify admin panel, settings – Payments.

If you’re a US or EU citizen, you would be eligible for Shopify payments. If the country where your business operates is not supported by Shopify Payments, then review the list of other payment gateways that Shopify supports.

Best Shopify Art Stores & Templates

Looking for a professional theme for your Shopify art gallery? Below are my top 5 picks for the best and most converting Shopify art theme templates.

Art House – Art Gallery Shopify Theme

This theme will allow you to get a fully functional website for your art gallery, and it has a wide set of features. Some of those features are:

• Multi-currency support allows people from different regions to checkout without exchange confusion.
• Product quick view that allows a user to view product details in a lightbox without leaving the page.
• This template is easy to deploy, cost-effective, and user-friendly.
• It has different layouts so you can easily customize the look and feel of your website and make it unique yet very easy for your customers to navigate.

Artista – Art Gallery Store Shopify Theme

This Shopify theme perfectly fits stores selling art and culture items online. It’s responsive and user-friendly as all the customization settings are provided in the admin.

It also a good fit for the other online stores selling Paintings, Sculptures, Vintage items, Clothing, Accessories, and other Art & Culture Products. The theme needs zero coding knowledge to use. It has powerful user-friendly features that would attract more clients to your online store and boost sales.

Artista theme basic features:

Artista theme top features:

Artrite – Marvellous Art & Paintings Online Store Shopify Theme

Pieces of art need exceptionally beautiful surrounding. A painting online store has to highlight pictures and doesn’t distract visitors from observing art. The Artrite Shopify template is created accurately to sell art and has all the necessary functionality.

A convenient shop has a quick view, wishlist, and shopping cart, which makes purchasing easier and more pleasant. The Multicurrency module allows customers from other countries to understand how much they will pay for the product.

The template’s design is bright, but not annoying and fully responsive to fit all types of screens. The template is provided with 24/7 tech support that will be able to resolve all possible issues of installing or maintaining it.

Artist – Art Gallery eCommerce Clean Shopify Theme

It has been a long time since artists and art galleries use the Internet to advertise and present their artworks. Yet, there are always issues with art presentations. And if you want to avoid these issues you need a website that is highly responsive and supports high-quality visual content.

In order to provide you with such a website, the developers have developed an Artist Shopify theme. And due to the designers’ hard work, it looks bright, yet soft and elegant. And of course, you can always play with design and create your own.

Moreover, it is easy to edit and you can do it without HTML or CSS knowledge. You can also blog about your works or tell about your inspiration objects. It is an eCommerce website theme and includes a cart, wishlist, and currency options.

Go Art – Art Clean Creative Shopify Theme

This Shopify template is great for selling artworks online, and some of its features are:

Click here to learn more about the Go Art theme.

If you want a wider variety of Shopify art theme collections, feel free to check out my other article that features 39 of the quality ones.

Selling Art On Shopify Vs. Etsy

While selling on Etsy allows you to leverage the platform’s huge organic traffic of users with buying search intent, having a self-hosted website on Shopify will allow you to set your own unique value proposition, have a brand-centered business, and show your customers exactly how your product is different!

This, of course, has advantages as well as disadvantages. Some of the advantages of selling art on Shopify are:

• You don’t need to commit to or follow a specific pricing range that was determined by the competition!
• You will have full control over your customers and you will be building your very own brand!
• You will have full control over your store’s appearance & design and adjust it on different occasions!
• A Shopify store is flexible and comes with more features, functionalities, and professional insights!

On the other hand, selling on Shopify has its own cons and disadvantages. Some of them are:

• It’s not the cheapest option around and it can get costly on the long run (but you will be making money!)
• You would need to get your own traffic and get noticed through ads as there is nobody knows you yet!

Selling Art Online Tips For Epic Results

If you’re eager to learn how to sell art online and make money, these are some tips that can help you succeed and achieve exactly that:

• Build your list – As an online seller, your ultimate goal should be building your mailing list of potential buyers who are interested in what you sell! By owning a list of people who are interested in artworks, you can reach out to them with a click of a button with an innovative email autoresponder like GetRepsonse, and sell them automatically!

• Use Social Media – One of the greatest social media platforms that works like charm for this niche is Pinterest. Pinterest is a great place for featuring your designs, paintings, prints, and artworks. You just need to be consistent and learn how the algorithm works so you can rank as many pins as possible.

• Leverage paid ads – Although free traffic methods could be beneficial for building a brand, paid advertising will allow you to distribute your message and reach your target audience faster. With paid ads, you can target people based on region, age group, interest, and more!

• Add a blog – Written content could be a huge plus for getting more exposure and awareness to your art brand! Luckily, most premium Shopify themes offer you a blogging section where you can go ahead and add valuable information or answer relevant art queries. Also, listicles work like charm for art and handmade crafts!

• Price your artworks wisely – Your art is worth what people are willing to pay for it. When it comes to pricing, there are many factors that play a role in the buying decision, such as scarcity, your reputation, your work’s quality, and more. Make sure to set realistic prices until you’ve successfully built your own unique value proposition!

Conclusion – Is Shopify Good For Selling Art?

At the moment of writing this blog post, Shopify is home to over 1.7 million eCommerce businesses around the globe, and the family is just expanding day after day.

Artists have their own way, style, and character! So, leveraging a platform like Shopify and having a self-hosted eCommerce store for your own will allow you to stand out, set your own unique value proposition, and show people exactly how your products and brand are different!

In this article, we’ve discussed what makes Shopify a good platform for selling your artwork online and what it really takes to start your very own Shopify art gallery and sell your valuable pieces.

Also, I’ve shared with you my top 5 picks of the best Shopify art themes and templates that you can purchase and download right into your Shopify store for better features, designs, and functionalities!

If you’re still hesitant about whether Shopify is good for selling art or not, I would advise you to claim the 14-day free trial that Shopify offers, test its water, and see how it exactly works, without even pulling out your wallet and paying a single dime!

After the trial ends, if you wish to continue using the platform, you would need to pick and pay for a monthly subscription plan. Otherwise, your account will be automatically closed and there’s no further action needs to be done if you don’t find it suitable for you!

If you find this post inspiring and useful, share it with your friends, please! (Virtual high fives and awkward hugs to all my sharers out there!)

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Cheers,
Odeh Ahwal