First week on Fine Art America Learnings and Thoughts

Hi! I hope everybody has been having a good day!

It's been exactly one week since I've officially gone live on my Fine Art America storefront. So far, uploading has been an interesting, if a somewhat tedious, process.

Here's some of the things I've learned so far:

> The premium membership is a necessary expense. I don't see how you'd be able to manage with just the 25 upload limit on the free membership. I'm glad I spent the $30 right off the bat when I finally got off my a** and finished setting up the store! It's an easy expense to swallow, as that comes to about 2-3 sales of prints and then you're golden.

> There are a lot of artists here on Fine Art America, but with the searches I am targetting, there doesn't seem to be as much competition in the niches I'm looking at as compared to other stores.

> I am interested to find out how big the platform is in terms of market share to other print on demand platforms out there. What I do know is, out of the marketplaces I sell at, Fine Art America has been at it the longest. This was one of the factors I considered when I opened my store here. With that limited information, I am guessing that FAA is about the same size in terms of customer base size as the other sites, but the additional barrier to entry for artists (the need for the premium membership) means that competitors in the niche spaces I participate in are smaller.

> Why is there a limit on daily uploads, even for premium members? Ok, I get why they put it, but if you're already established elsewhere, you already have a large portfolio to upload and the timings make it complicated. From what I've discerned (since the customer support person ignored my question)... The daily biggest one time limit is around 150 uploads. The limit cap resets every 4 hours form your last upload at least, and then you can upload at least around 40 before you hit the limit again.

> Why is there not a simple check box for if you want to enable or disable products? It took some doing to find the information I needed to do this! One has to leave the markup box for the product blank (not zero) for you to disable a product.

> The search algorithm on FAA is easier to work with than other sites. So far, I found that the search captures the title and the tags you input... but more importantly. the tags are cumulative AND transitive. It's nice to know.

> I wish Fine Art America had a more intuitive way of placement of the uploaded images on the products to sell like they have on other sites like Society6 and Redbubble. I've now decided that I just had to cull the products I make available for sale to focus on just straightforward prints. I was looking at the rundown of announcements for people who made sales (the one you see when you first log in...) and I find that most of the stuff sold are prints... so, "That's that!" I thought... Focus on prints here on this platform and make my life easier.

So that's what I've gleamed so far... It's always interesting and nerve-wracking to open a new store. You always question yourself if your work would be received as well on the new store versus your other storefronts in other platforms. FINGERS ARE CROSSED! FINGERS ARE CROSSED SOOOO HARD!

As always, after launching I have to get to marketing my new store so here's what I've done:

> Updated links on my social media (via linktree). Go see: It's www.holyrockarts.com (I do a redirect... It's easier to tell people and they get to my landing page faster)

That's it.

Pfft! Hahaha! I can't help but laugh... You see, I'm not finished promoting my other stores, and I'm still in progress uploading to FAA... so I don't have the time yet to go full HAM on FAA marketing. It'll take some doing to work FAA into my marketing rotation since I already have my hands full!

I'm interested to know what other artists' marketing workflow looks like. I think that'll be one of my future blog posts. Also, I realized that Society6 killed their blog feature... I instantly worried that maybe FAA would do the same, but since it looks like it's been so long and they've kept it, maybe it'll stay!

Whew! This has been a fun way to decompress!

Talk to you all soon!

Holy Rock Design
(IG | FB | Twitter | Pinterest | Tiktok : @holyrockarts)
www.holyrockarts.com