How to Sell Your Creative Art Online Using BigCommerce Platform
So, how can we sell our creative art online?
When you have a working online platform to sell your creative art online, the whole world is now your marketplace and you can expose our product to more people.
In this guide, we will discuss how we can use BigCommerce platform to market and sell your creative art products. Without further ado, let us start at the very beginning.
What is BigCommerce
BigCommerce is an all-in-one eCommerce platform where you can build an eCommerce website, manage your inventory, process your orders (with a payment gateway), and more. In short, it’s a on
e-stop platform to build, run, and manage your eCommerce website, much like Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce, among others.
BigCommerce has been around for more than a decade since 2009 but has undergone a major overhaul back in 2016. Since then, BigCommerce is now very popular especially in selling creative art online due to several reasons:
Unlike other platforms and especially Shopify, there are no transaction fees with BigCommerce, so it’s more cost-efficient.
Not specifically a benefit for artists in selling creative art, but BigCommerce has a major partnership with Alibaba so we can access thousands of products to the merchant right from the BigCommerce platform.
You get some advanced features out of the box without forcing you to go into the BigCommerce app store, and some of the great features aren’t locked behind a paywall (i.e. the ability to create gift cards and coupon codes with the basic plan).
Great customer support, very friendly, and responsive.
BigCommerce’s plans start from $29.95/month, and there’s a no credit card, 15-day free trial. There are also many free and paid apps to market your creative art business, payment gateway solutions, and more.
Like most eCommerce platforms, BigCommerce offers a small but useful selection of free themes/templates, and there are also various paid options to choose from. The theme store is pretty intuitive with decent variations, so you can take your eCommerce’s store customization even further if you want.
How To Sell Your Creative Art Online on BigCommerce
Build a BigCommerce Website
To start selling your creative art products online, you’d need a functional eCommerce website that can:
Display your products properly where people can buy them with ease
Integrate with one or more payment gateway solutions so your customers can transfer money to your banking account
Support secure payment transactions (you’d need an SSL certificate/HTTPS), especially to process credit card payments
Manage your inventory
Collect shipping address information from customers and manage the shipping process.
With that being said, BigCommece offers the best in-house features in its basic plan compared to other eCommerce platforms, namely:
Versatile Product Types
With BigCommerce, you can sell physical (your creative art product), digital, and service products without needing to install additional apps. So, whatever your creative art products are, all of these sales types are already there in BigCommerce’s editor so you don’t have to install any third-party apps. Meaning, it’s more cost-effective and also easier to use.
Payment Gateway+No Transaction Fee
A very important selling point is the fact that BigCommerce doesn’t lock you to a payment gateway (unlike, for example, Shopify), and there aren’t any transaction fees on any BigCommerce plans. At the moment, BigCommerce supports more than 65 payment gateway solutions including popular ones like PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and so on. The only fees charged are the usual credit card charge applied by the chosen payment gateway solution (typically below 2.5%).
Shipping Options
BigCommerce does offer various shipping options with various third-party integrations, but quite recently BigCommerce also offers its own shipping tools. You can enjoy special discounts from major shipping services like USPS, DHL, FedEx, and so on. There are also various useful features like shipment tracking, in-store pickup, automation, and shipping operations.
2. Preparing Your Art Product
This is arguably the most important part of your eCommerce store: your creative art products.
You’d need products with great visual aesthetics that can connect to your target audience. This is how you can persuade them to buy your product. Obviously there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for this, but here are some general tips:
Provide professional-quality photos of your art
It’s very important to provide high-quality photos of your art for each product that you aim to sell. Also, make sure all photos of your products are credited for your work. We can do this by watermarking your images or add your logo/signature in each image.
Pricing strategy
Pricing your art product can be quite challenging. Research how other artists price their work online and don’t forget to factor in shipping expenses. Shipping art products might require specific treatment since they tend to be fragile and/or bulky, and so they might be more expensive to ship.
Consider digitizing your art
Consider digitizing your art so you can sell your creative art in more ways, for example, as print-on-demand products. This way, each of your artwork can be sold more than one time in potentially various different ways, instead of making it only as a one-off transaction.
3. Building a Client Base Through Social Media
If you are just getting started in selling your creative art you might start with a relatively small client base–and it’s perfectly okay. What’s important is to ensure the growth of this client base, and while there can be various approaches to try here, obviously social media is where people nowadays, and so we should utilize social media to promote our BigCommerce store.
Nowadays, we can also use our social media for direct sales to form a complete social media presence. On the other hand, just as the social media presence promotes our eCommerce site, the website itself should help promote our social presence.
BigCommerce and Facebook Shop
With BigCommerce, we can use the Facebook Shop feature to integrate our store catalog with your business’s Facebook Page. So, your Facebook audience can easily discover your product and share them through their network. BigCommerce’s interface will manage orders coming from Facebook just like orders from your eCommerce site.
Facebook Shop is available for BigCommerce for no additional cost, and you can use Facebook Payments to process payments (5% per transaction or $0.40 for transactions below $8). If your store is outside the U.S. shoppers will be redirected to your BigCommerce store (your website) to check out.
Instagram and BigCommerce
Obviously Instagram is very big nowadays and is an appropriate platform to promote our art product, which is visual in nature.
You can tag products from your Facebook Shop catalog in your Instagram posts, and users can link directly to your BigCommerce store for purchase without leaving the Instagram app. Users can simply tap on the post to reveal Shop tags that contain information like product name and price. Tapping this tag would reveal the details for this product like more photos, descriptions, and a direct link to your BigCommerce store product page.
You can tag up to 5 products in a single Instagram photo, and so it’s quite versatile.
Building Your Art eCommerce Brand
Building a powerful and engaging eCommerce brand is very important in the art niche. Your brand should convey the right message according to your art direction, and especially should cater to your target audience’s preferences. Make sure you develop and execute on the content marketing strategy to improve your brand awareness to get more sales in the long run.
Here are a few tips:
How to serve your customer better
The key to growing your creative art eCommerce business is to consider who your target audience is, their behaviors, their needs, and their pain points.
A very common mistake is for businesses to forget their initial target audience and put more focus on the product or service. This might seem harmless at first glance, but businesses might miss out on valuable customer information when they put too much focus on products.
Always remember that your business should be customer-centric: look for trends and always aim to improve their experience and how they relate to your product and brand.
Deliver your promise
Underpromise and overdeliver. Never disappoint your customers, and try to always deliver your promise. In eCommerce, we should especially pay attention to payment security and shipping/return policies. Always be transparent about your capabilities: if you can’t guarantee same-day delivery, be honest about it rather than risking a negative review.
Remember that the secret is not amazing return and shipping policies: honesty and transparency are much more important.
End Words
BigCommerce is a very powerful platform that can simplify your marketing and storefront creation, ensuring an intuitive and user-friendly eCommerce store that can encourage customers to purchase your creative art products.
There’s also the powerful analytics feature that can provide an in-depth look at your customers’ behaviors, which of your pages convert best, conversion rate of each platform, and a purchase funnel which provides a detail of how many site visitors that ultimately convert into actual customers.
BigCommerce also allows you to offer an omnichannel experience to your customers by integrating all platforms into a single storefront, so it’s much easier to manage and monitor your store.
In short, BigCommerce is a great, one-stop platform to sell your creative art online with a great set of functionalities.