Pros:  Large audience of 35 million active buyers.  Allows you to be discovered organically, with minimal marketing efforts required. Easy to use, direct deposit payment processing.  Good built in analytics to see your most viewed items.

Cons: Competitive market, there are more than 2 million sellers on Etsy.  Unless you sell extremely unique items, you’ll be competing with thousands of other who are offering similar products.  You can only sell handmade or vintage items.

Cost: Etsy charges $0.20 to list an item and takes five percent of your sale (including shipping and gift-wrapping fees) as a transaction fee. In addition, if you choose to use Etsy payments, which allows customers to pay by credit card, you’ll be charged an additional fee of three percent plus $0.25. Even if your customers choose to pay through PayPal, they payment is processed through Etsy rather than PayPal, so you’ll still be subject to the fee.

Tips:  Etsy shops look best with a cohesive collection of products.  If you are a jack-of-all-trades, you might want to curate your Etsy shop to have an aesthetic look and feel.

Pros:  Expand your exposure to collectors all over the world.  Supplement your income and reach a wider audience.  This is a marketplace platform so your work can be discovered organically.  You can also offer Open Edition print sales that Saatchi will print for you and ship directly to customers.

Cons: Many buyers expect lower price points online. According to industry expert Alan Bamberger, online art sells between $300 - $1200 on average.   Optimizing your price point for online sales may affect your valuation if your work typically sells higher than that range. When you leave the sales to an online marketplace, you won’t have the chance to build personal connections with buyers.

Cost: If you sell an original artwork, Saatchi Art will take a 35% commission on the final sale price.  They cover the cost of shipping the artwork, and the artist is responsible for the cost of packaging.

Tips:  It is very important to use high-quality images of your work.  Photos should be straight and properly white-balanced.  It also helps to have photos from multiple angles of the work.

Pros:  The prices and quality are good, and there is a wide selection of apparel products.  The company prints and ships products directly to your customers upon order.  They offer the option to customize your labels, branding, and packaging.  There is a 20% discount on sample orders.

Cons: Printful is not a marketplace or storefront platform, so you have to set up a separate online shop through a service like Shopify or Ecwid to offer your products for sale.

Cost: Like Fine Art America, Printful sets the standard product price for an item, and you are able to set your sale price on your website and keep any additional profit made on the item.  You will have to get a subscription for another online shop integration service such as Shopify or Ecwid.

Tips:  This is a great platform for creating and selling custom t-shirts.  The best one we have found and tried.

Pros:  Spoonflower has relatively competitive prices on custom fabric printing, good quality, and fast turnaround.  They also offer design challenges to help you get inspired and spotlight your work.  The design portal is easy to work with, and listing is an easy supplemental way to monetize existing pattern designs that you have created for other product design purposes.

Cons: The commission rate is low and there is a lot of competition.

Cost: It is free to list on Spoonflower.  If someone buys fabric with your design you will receive a commission of 10% of the retail price paid by the buyer.

Tips:  Order a fabric swatch book so you can see and feel all the fabric options for printing.  You can also get a printed color guide to help choose the perfect colors for your design.

Pros:  Squarespace allows for unlimited products and makes it easy to include variants of each product.  Accepting payments and keeping in touch with your customers is fairly easy, as well.

Cons: Marketing and business management are severely lacking. It does not integrate with Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, or Google.

Cost: Plans start at $12/month and increase if more premium features are desired. Squarespace provides 4 plans:

• Personal— $12 per month
• Business— $18 per month
• Commerce — $26 per month
• Advanced Commerce — $40 per month

See details of pricing structure here. 

Tips:  If you don't already have a website, you can use Squarespace to create a website and shop all in one.

Pros:  If you’re starting your store entirely from scratch, and online selling is the main focus of your project, then it’s hard to argue against Shopify — an established solution that will let you build a complete, elegant standalone online store.

Adding products as well as managing payment and shipping options and processing orders is absolutely painless. Excellent 24-hour customer support.  There are tons of other platforms that integrate with Shopify.  Seamlessly sell on Facebook and list products on Instagram.

Point-of-sale is more tightly integrated with Shopify than with Ecwid, and you can use a more extensive range of POS hardware at a cheaper price point.

Cons: They only offer about 10 free templates, you have to pay for a template if you want something more specific.  It can become expensive the more your customize and use the features.

Cost: Plans start at $29/month and increase if more premium features are desired. Shopify provides 5 plans:

• Lite — $9 per month
• Basic Shopify — $29 per month
• Shopify — $79 per month
• Advanced Shopify — $299 per month
• Shopify Plus — pricing varies depending on requirements, but typically comes in at around $2000 per month

 See details of pricing structure here.  There are transaction fees on all sales, and extra fees if you do not use Shopify as your payment processor.

Tips:  Click here to see a deeper analysis of Ecwid vs. Shopify.