Fine Art America
Review - by Les Palenik
Fine Art America provides an online and fullfilment service for photographs, paintings, digital artwork, sculptures, and other art work. Prior to joining, I looked at other companies, providing similar services, and came to conclusion that at this time, Fine Art America is the best platform for me. It is easy to setup and upload the pictures, and very inexpensive to operate. If your art collection is small, they even have a free plan that allows you to show all your images, but there is a limit of 25 items for sale. The full version costs only $30 per year and you can upload unlimited number of images. You don't even need to have your own Internet domain, FAA will create a subdomain with your name within their main domain, so your site can be operational literally in an hour or less.
Once you upload your images and set your prices, Fine Art America takes care of the printing, framing, matting, packaging, shipping, collecting payments from the buyers, and sending profits to you. Each print is manufactured at Fine Art America's production facility and delivered "ready-to-hang" with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Of course, if your images start to sell, you'll make money - and not only from your own images, but also as commissions from framing and other upgraded products. With a few clicks, artists and photographers can upload their images to FineArtAmerica.com, set their prices, and instantly sell prints to a global audience of art collectors. There are many art collectors following the latest art submissions on the site and they may purchase your artwork as soon as you put it on the network. This would be of interest specifically to producers of unique art, such as paintings and scultptures. However, there are many ordinary people looking for a specific image, even for certain color schemes to match their interior decoration, so the buying audience is indeed global. At the time of writing, more than 95,000 artists and photographers currently offer two million images for sale on FineArtAmerica.com - with thousands of new artists and images being added each week, and the annual visitor traffic amounts to five million visitors.
The website setup is an easy and quick process. After
registering your account, you can create multiple
galleries (by subject, media type, or any other criteria
that applies to your particular situation), and start
uploading your images. Each image can be annotated and
slotted into one or more categories you created. For
example, if you have a picture of a blooming flower taken
in Hawaii, you could link that picture to your Flowers,
Hawaii, and Nature categories, and visitors looking at any
of these categories would find it there. In addition, you
can link your images to some of the global
groups/collections, which should help with the image
visibility and promotion.
During the installation, I encountered a problem which
didn't allow completion of the uploaded images, and that
may have been caused by having opened multiple FAA
windows. Even closing all FAA windows didn't help,
eventually I had to reboot the computer and that solved
the problem. Since then, the software worked flawlessly.
One thing, that I find annoying, is that the website times
out very quickly, and logs you automatically off after an
hour or even less of inactivity, and then you have to sign
in again.
When you set your prices, Fine Art America adds their markup, but they don't take a commission cut from it. A small difference in terminology, but to many artists, this can add up to substantial savings or increased profits. In addition, Fine Art America allows you to self fulfill your orders, and in that case you don't pay any fees. Unless you have your own website, very few companies allow you to do that. When you log on to the site, you can see a display of the recently sold images by other artists, which can be quite interesting and inspirational. Another nice and potentially useful feature is the statistics page. You can see which images were viewed how many times, and through another click, you can also see individual details about the visitors for each individual image.
Date & Time of Visit. Statistics - view recent:
Viewed 5 Times - Last Viewed by a Visitor from Japan on
07/06/2012 at 11:49 PM) Japan
07/06/2012 at 11:49 PM New York, NY
07/06/2012 at 11:44 PM Warwick, RI
07/06/2012 at 11:36 PM Beverly Hills, CA
07/06/2012 at 11:27 PM Beverly Hills, CA
The website really works. In one day, I uploaded about
100 images, and two days later, some of my images have
been featured in specific interest groups, I received
about ten image comments, and one marriage proposal.
My gallery: http://www.les-palenik.artistwebsites.com/