The Easy Way to show, sell and collect payment for your artworks online

The easy way to setup a storefront to show and sell art

Imagine you stumble across a website selling watches. Hand-made watches and you are a watch collector! You spend some time perusing the website and you find a watch that you love. In fact, you love it so much you want to purchase it. But there's no price. And you don't see any way to actually purchase the watch. Would you give up? Or would you try to ask the site owner the price? Well, usually you would be irritated and give up, but you really love this watch, so you decide to contact the site owner. Exasperated, you click the "contact us" section of the site, you suffer filling out the form letting the site owner know which piece you love, and asking how much it is. You send the form off hoping that you'll hear back from this person.

Hours go by. Nothing.

Days go by. Nothing.

Finally, after you've forgotten about the watch, and are now no longer excited, you get a response. "Oh that watch? Yeah, I still have it. How much do you offer for it?"

Now you're irritated. You asked how much it was, you didn't want to start a negotiation.

Still, you remember that you loved it, and so you answer, "I don't know, I had asked you the price. I'll offer $1,000 I guess."

Another day goes by.

"I'm sorry, I can't sell it for less than $2,000 comes the reply."

Now you're really miffed. If the seller wanted $2,000, then why didn't he just say that up front? And furthermore, why didn't he just put that price on his website to begin with?

You decide to give up. But then you look at the photo of the watch again. Sigh. "OK" you reply, "I'll pay $2,000. How do I proceed?"

Another couple of days goes by.

And then you receive a Venmo link with no explanation except for "Charge for watch."

Now you're getting nervous. You've spent a week trying to buy this watch and you have no idea who this person is, and you have an anonymous venmo link?

"Screw it" you think, "I'm out." A lot of time and hassle for nothing. Feels to unprofessional and scammy to risk it.

Meanwhile, somewhere across the world, the site owner is talking to his colleagues, other watchmakers. And he's complaining, "I don't know what else to do! My watches aren't selling! Where are all the watch collectors anyway? And how do I get them to my site? My site host keeps giving me ideas on how to sell, but I never seem to. Maybe I need a new site!"

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Sounds insane that this watchmaker would expect to sell from such a poorly designed user experience on his website. But replace "watchmaker" and "watch" in the story above with "artist" and "artwork" and we, at FASO, see this same exact story play out every day. Artists continually say "I've had a website for several years and I haven't sold a thing!" Well, duh, of course not when the experience is as I describe above!

Now there are a number of reasons why your art might not be selling, but having a poorly designed website experience should not be one of them. One of the biggest mistakes artists make with their website is they optimize the experience for THEMSELVES and not for THEIR CUSTOMERS. You might love playing with beautiful page layout tools, and agonizing over the font and color choices on your website. But far too many artists spend too much time on the look of their website and not enough time designing the actual experience the customer has when trying to purchase. (The user experience of your art buyer is what we solve at FASO Artist Websites)

If you want to sell art you must price all the works for sale, and provide an easy, professional way for the customer to purchase the painting with no friction and no delay. In short, you need ecommerce on your website. That's what everyone expects today.

This is, of course, possible in most platforms today, however, the vast majority of art websites I visit do not have ecommerce enabled. In fact, many, especially on Squarespace, don't even have a detailed page for each artwork allowing zooming, viewing in a room, or even clearly showing the medium and size. I suspect, having tried generic website platforms myself, that is because actually enabling ecommerce and getting it all to work with the page paradigm is tricky and a bit clunky. Still, if you understand how to do it, then do so, at least if you want to sell art and not just have a pretty showcase.

At FASO, we do things a bit differently because our websites aren't designed to be page layout programs, they art designed to be real, collector grade art storefronts that are easy to update and ready-to-go in terms of ecommerce.

Let's look at what you actually need set up to easily sell your art and how easy this is with FASO. We'll be using the site of Gayle Faucette Wisbon in this email, her art is unique and she is part of our award winning support team so if you're a FASO member, chances are you'll end up at some point communicating with her.

1. Easy to update

First, the way FASO works is almost the reverse of most site builders and this is designed to be EASY and FAST. Most site builders encourage you to design your pages, and then you drop your products into them. The issue with this happens later, when you want to add new products. It can be clunky to set up, and even harder to keep up to date. No wonder so few artists' websites have full ecommerce on them! At FASO, we turn the whole thing around, you simply add your artworks (we don't even make you call them "products!") and we build all the pages you need around that. Adding a new artwork for sale is as easy as uploading it, and adding a price. It can be done from your phone in less than 2 minutes and we'll build all the supporting pages you need. Here's an example of the ONE form you need to fill out for each artwork you wish to sell:

And here's what that looks like in what we simply call "Your Art Portfolio" - logical right?

2. Well designed product page on your site with collector features

That's the only form Gayle filled out in her FASO account to get the artwork ready to sell. We do the rest! Below is the "Product Detail" page for this painting that we created on her art website. Complete with price, shipping info, and an add to cart button. We don't even require that you set up Stripe or Paypal to add the cart button, you can choose our automatic "Direct pay" option and have the customer pay you directly after checkout (although we DO recommend you use Stripe).

Below the portfolio page we created containing all of Gayle's original works. Notice how we don't crop all the images to squares and cut off half of your beautiful artwork most site builders are guilty of? (You can pick from four different portfolio designs including squares if you want).

3. Make it easy for the customer to pay with a real shopping cart with a great checkout flow.

Below are screenshots of the checkout flow you get with FASO, notice how we even have an option for the user to get your newsletter and new art alerts right within the flow, since we're collecting their email anyway.

Now, consider the experience the customer had in the story about trying to purchase the watch and compare that to what a customer experiences on Gayle's FASO website.

Instead of being frustrated, a collector on Gayle's website can easily find the piece(s) he's interested in, see all the pricing, check out and join the artist's newsletter list, pay with a credit card and (not shown) receive a beautiful email receipt with all the details. Gayle will also receive an email with all the order details and simply have to ship the painting.

Done! Easy peasy. No Muss, no fuss.

So, if you want to actually sell art online, please design an experience like the one I've outlined in this email or, better yet, simply move your website to FASO (and save money over most other services), and you'll get this flow for free by simply uploading your art and filling out a simple form for each work. You can do it the easy way or the hard way, but if you want your website to sell, FASO is the easy way

Clint Watson

PS - You can also use a FASO Website to sell fine watches if you so desire! We’ve put together an insane holiday bundle that can save you about 70%. We don’t run sales often, so if you’ve been procrastinating on your own art website, now is an opportunity to save money and get it done. Details below…..

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If you're not currently using FASO, what are you waiting for?

We've already shared with you how We Are In this Together, how we help you with promotion to 65K art lovers when you Launch Your Site, how FASO Protects Your Art from Unsanctioned AI Use, how to Save time with Marketing Automation, and many more features you won't get anywhere else. We're confident that you'll love your FASO website and all the great marketing tools like the "Artful Alerts" feature.

If you haven’t gotten yourself a FASO website yet, now is the time to do it! We’ve put together the best deal you’re going to see. We don’t put our services on sale very often, but this year, we decided to put together an insanely good deal for the holidays. With the risk of AI taking your art to train their models, and the problems with big tech companies not respecting the content created by artists, now, more than ever, you need to work with a company that is by artists and for artists. So, if you join before December 31st and midnight, here’s the offer…..

2024 FASO Holiday Bundle (70% Savings on Bundle):

Get A Year of FASO Gold Membership for $150!

(Normally $312/year)

You'll also get the following included at no additional charge:

• $100 in BoldBrush Ad credits to help launch your site.

• $100 Site Review by FASO to make sure your site is ready to launch

• A FREE Holiday Preparation for Artists Guide

• Full Access to our Marketing calendar, videos, and resourcesd

• Access to our Friendly and Fast Support Team.

• Automatic protection of your Art from AI bots

• Software to Send Newsletters Included

• Marketing Automation in the form of Artful Alerts sent to your fans

• Access to our Private Art Marketing Center with playbooks, videos and a community to guide you in your marketing.

• This offer saves you $362 compared to the normal price of these items.

• * Site renews at normal price after the first year

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Start a FREE Trial Today to take advantage of this offer!*

*Activate your trial site and become a paid member before December 31st, 2024 at midnight CST to get the special Holiday Bundle pricing!

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Not Sure Yet?

If you have questions before signing up for the Free FASO Trial, please send them to clint@faso.com.

Creatively,

Clint Watson
FASO Founder
Creativity Fanatic