I recently read the book Digital Disruption. The basic premise is that the economy has changed dramatically, which everyone knows, but few realize the positive nature of this change. The book posits that we no longer live in a capitalist society, that is, a society where those who control capital control the economy. But rather we now live in a society where the economy is controlled by those who control knowledge and information. Previously it took money to make money. Now it takes knowledge to make money. Why? Because technology has pushed the cost of production so low that virtually anyone can use technology to promote their ideas with little or no capital. Createspace, Blurb, and Graphicly are manifestations of this new, evolving economy.In previous blogs I mentioned experimenting with the above services as well as with Etsy and Wix. Wix is a website creation site with a shopping cart option. But the option costs $16 a month. Cheap, but not cheap enough. So I looked around and discovered that PayPal has an option to add a buy button to a website or blog that costs nothing up front. There is a deduction from the transaction. Few people seem willing to mention how much this deduction is, perhaps it fluctuates, but they claim it is nominal. I'll find out and report back. If the deduction is steep enough it might be better to go with the Wix shopping cart as they deduct nothing. I will experiment with the Paypal button and switch to a Wix shopping cart when sales warrant (that is, when Paypal deductions add up to more that $16 a month).
I was surprised how easy it was to set up the button with Paypal. Although it was disappointing I had to charge for shipping. Free or no charge wasn't an option so I made shipping $1 (I prefer to include shipping into the price of the item). I didn't have any paintings in an appropriate price range (it's difficult to imagine someone buying a painting for thousands of dollars via a Paypal button) so I made a button for my 9 value grayscale. It is like the one I use in my videos and it might save some from having to purchase all the grays from Golden Acrylic.
To buy a 9 Value Grayscale for $5 plus $1 shipping click the button below:
I have paypal and occasionally create a button, and it seems they deduct fees of around 4-5% in total. It's not bad, and it's very convenient. But I'm not set up as a merchant, so maybe the costs would go down?
ReplyDeleteI was doing DailyPaintworks.com for a while. Their transaction fees are very low. But found that I was creating their traffic rather than the other way around. It's all to easy on sites like Etsy or eBay or DailyPaintworks.com to take your hard won visitors and not lose them as they make it so easy to see other works from other painters.
Excellent points Robert. It makes me wonder if the Wix shopping cart might be the way to go. After all it's only $200 a year. I hadn't thought about the redirection problem. It definitely is true that Etsy is a poorly designed sales tool. I admire their values of keeping things simple and artist oriented, though. I suppose one could just try a bit of everything and see what worked. These strategies don't seem to be mutually restrictive.
ReplyDeleteBrad, PayPal does have a "free shipping" option... keep looking. May I suggest checking out FASO Web sites for artists - saves me a ton of time and aggravation compared to my old hand-coded site! http://faso.com/
ReplyDeleteLynn
Interesting idea Lynn. Do you have a free FASO site or do you pay for a site? I'd be interested to know how it has worked for you. I will definitely look for that free shipping button you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteBrad,
ReplyDeleteYea, finally saw this, was wondering how to get my hands on one of these, and it's a great way to support a great blog!! Thanks for all your wonderful advise and teaching points in this blog, you have inspired at least one painter in the Chicago area that's for sure!!
Thanks, Louie. I appreciate the sentiment.
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