A few years ago, more precisely just before the pandemic broke out, I thought I had so many interesting pictures that I wanted to try exhibiting and selling. I have had a few exhibitions, which you can read more about on this page (link), but it was rare that I got any pictures sold, so I started looking into what opportunities there were to sell online.
One way was to make my own website, print, pack and sell myself but since I was working full time it felt like a big job even if it wouldn’t sell that much. Then again, I’m a bit of a curious tech geek, so I wanted to try some sales sites. There are many different solutions, dropshipping is one where the art is sold, printed and shipped through a company that specializes in this. Sometimes you have to have your own website where you link to the shop and others have a shop from which you can sell directly. All solutions have a cost somewhere, usually it is a percentage of the sale and then you have to pay extra for certain benefits such as uploading unlimited images or that the shop with them is adapted to the layout you have on your own website so that it is not visible that one changes site.
Fine Art America was one of the first I tried. It has several advantages: images can be printed on a variety of products including wall art, home decor, phone cases, bags and more. The customers come from all over the world, anyone around the globe who likes the pictures can buy them. There is a community that organizes competitions.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to spend entering contests or participating in discussions so I haven’t gotten much response to the images and I haven’t sold a single image there.
I’ve been meaning to delete the account for a long time but it hasn’t happened, I wanted to organize the pictures I posted so I can keep track of what I uploaded where. First, I wanted to check another thing that is important in dropshipping when selling images to and from countries outside the EU: taxes, VAT and customs duties. Serious sites inform about how to handle those pieces, for example, an F-tax number may be needed for VAT reporting. I searched every possible way on the site but did not succeed here
