Selling Your Art on eBay

A few days ago I received an email from a friend and client of mine who asked, “why is art sold for so little on eBay?”

The answer to that question involves supply and demand. Hundreds, if not thousands of artists are trying to sell their work on eBay. I just did a quick check of the ‘paintings’ category on eBay and there are almost 50,000 different paintings! Many of these, especially by newer and unknown artists, are going for ridiculously low prices, often below $5. How can you ever make a living like this?

You can’t.

If you produce a less common form of art, say hand-formed clay tiles or wooden totems, you should have better luck. But with the current abundance of paintings, it is only natural that the prices have been driven so low. Now, certain paintings are going for a very decent price, but these are for the works of well-known artists.

I have a few suggestions on how to utilize eBay successfully. One method is to become well-known. In a future post I will give you some ways that you can accomplish this. Another method is to only try to sell art that falls within a category that does not have a high level of supply. If you are only a watercolorist, though, this will not do you much good.

The third method is to use eBay to help increase awareness of you and drive people towards another website. eBay rules do not allow you to include web addresses in your item description. One way to get around this is to use the About Me page to include that information, but I have an even more effective method. Sell an ebook. Create an ebook about a subject that will attract the sort of person you know would be interested in your art. If you are a pen and ink artist, write an ebook about the lives of well-known pen and ink artists and how to choose art that will increase in value as an investment. Include yourself in that list of artists and include your biography. Give your website in the book and let the reader know that there will be more information available there. Sell it for a price that is low enough to encourage purchasing, yet high enough to imply that there is value. I would suggest $7 and make sure that after they purchase it, they are sent a link to download it immediately. You can either just send them the direct link or go through a company like E-Junkie which charges only $5/month to provide protected download services (among many other really cool services).

There are many other ideas for ebook topics and I’m sure you can come up with several. Be creative and put on your marketing cap!

Speaking of value, provide it. Do not just throw together a few pages that talk about how wonderful you are. Provide useful and interesting information and do a good job. Get help writing and designing it if you need to and make sure that you provide real value for your customer. Here is a great article by Steve Pavlina that talks about this (sort of) and is well worth reading. And stay tuned for that post about how to become well-known!

Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com