Artist’s E-commerce Dream – using online user-customized on demand products to maximize your artwork profits

As I was navigating the net for some research the other day I came across Café press. Café press is an online retailer of stock and user-customized on demand products. This service enables artist’s to create and sell their own designs, photos and images on a wide variety of customizable products with zero upfront costs and zero inventory investment. This find caused my metaphorical light bulb to go off and I got very excited. 

You see both my parents are lifelong artists and with myself being a new media geek we often talk about how they can get their artwork to be more widely represented. I designed and built their website and uploaded their artwork to virtual galleries which was a good start. I also help them from time to time enter various art shows as most of this is now done through online services. I even got them to use Facebook, sort of. But discovering Café press… could this be the opportunity we've been waiting for?

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I went to work uploading my logo and customizing it onto a variety of products and set up a storefront which I embedded on my website. I showed this to my parents and boy were they impressed. It was Go! Go! Go! from that point on. The biggest challenge for my parents and I believe for other artists is there's a certain level of text savviness needed in today’s world not only to build an online store and website but in customizing the artwork for the individual product templates themselves. Without their "tech savvy” son my parents wouldn't be able to venture into this arena. So this gave me the idea to share my experiences with others and offer my services to help other artists build their own online storefronts.

I will continue to blog about this project and offer tips and tricks as I learn them on my e-commerce page on my website so check back from time to time. Perhaps as a share my experiences working with my parent’s art and building their storefront I can help other artists venture into this untapped area. At the very least I can avail myself to other artists to help them realize their Artist's E-commerce Dream.

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