Sell Your Art Online: The Complete Guide for Artists

What twenty years and roughly 3,700 artworks sold have taught me.

Selling your art online quickly raises a lot of questions. Where should you list it? How should you price it? Should you use a marketplace or build your own website? How do you find buyers, present your work properly, ship an artwork, or sell internationally?

My name is John Beckley. I’m a painter and the founder of Khroma. Since 2005, the internet has been part of almost my entire journey as an artist. I’ve sold thousands of artworks online and built a YouTube channel that now has around 800,000 subscribers. Over the years, I’ve had to answer all of these questions, and I wanted to bring together what I’ve learned in this guide: what worked for me, what caused problems, and what I would do differently today.

In the summer of 2005, I happened to come across a documentary about painting on Arte. I don’t even remember exactly what struck me so deeply, but I remember very clearly what I thought while watching it:

“I want to do that.”

I had no idea where it would lead. I simply started painting.

A month later, in September, I began listing my paintings at auction on eBay and, to my surprise, sold my first pieces for around €100 (roughly $125 at the average 2005 exchange rate).

It wasn’t much, but what mattered most to me was something else: every painting I sold allowed me to buy more canvases, more paint, and above all, to keep going.

It was the best encouragement I could have received.

Things moved very quickly during that period. I sometimes painted several pieces a day, and most of them sold fast. Prices had climbed to around €300 or €400 (roughly $375–$500 at the time), with some auctions reaching €700 or €800 (roughly $870–$1,000).

Looking back, I know that start was unusually fast. I was probably also lucky to arrive on eBay at the right time, with work that happened to connect with an audience.

At the time, I didn’t think too much about why. I mostly wanted to paint even more.

Of course, my prices continued to evolve over the years, just as my work did. A little more than twenty years after those first eBay auctions, I’ve sold around 3,700 original artworks.

But back then, everything was only just beginning.

Even though eBay was working extremely well for me, I quickly felt the need to create my own website.

I simply wanted a place of my own.

A place where my paintings wouldn’t be mixed in with thousands of other listings, somewhere between a used dishwasher and an ancient Roman artifact.

I wanted to present my work the way I wanted, and make it possible for someone who discovered one of my pieces to see more, understand my world a little better, and maybe come back later.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking in terms of “branding,” “strategy,” or “customer relationships.” I just wanted my own space.

Looking back, though, I think it was one of the most important decisions I made.

A platform like eBay had given me something valuable: an audience I didn’t have. My own website would let me start building something around my name and my work.

And for a long time, it worked very well.

The problem is that a website evolves along with the business.

You add one feature, then another. A store. A plugin. A new payment method. A translation system. SEO tools, security, caching, backups... and over the years, what was supposed to simply help you show and sell your work can become a job in itself.

I experienced this especially with WordPress. It’s a very powerful tool, and it served me extremely well for years, but my artist website had become so cumbersome to manage that I had almost stopped publishing new work on it. After spending so much time dealing with the machinery behind the site, something as simple as adding a new painting had become a task I kept putting off.

And the website is only one part of the problem.

You also have to photograph the work, write the listings, set prices, attract visitors, communicate, post on social media, answer messages, send newsletters, package paintings, deal with carriers, payments, invoices, and all the administrative work.

But before you can do any of those things, you often have to learn how they work.

If you want to attract visitors from Google to sell your art online, for example, you first need to understand at least the basics of organic search and SEO. Before sending a newsletter, you need to learn how to build a list, choose a tool, and understand what you’re allowed to send. Before you sell your paintings internationally, you need to learn about carriers, customs, taxes, and sometimes languages.

And all that learning time comes on top of the time it takes to actually put those things in place.

So you don’t just spend time running your business. You also spend a lot of time learning how to run it.

When I put it that way, I realize the list can sound intimidating. That really isn’t the point.

I didn’t learn how to do all of this before I sold my first painting. I started with almost nothing, without a guide and without knowing where any of it would lead. I simply learned as I went, every time a new problem appeared.

That is also the idea behind this guide: to keep you from having to figure everything out alone and help you move forward step by step, without trying to master everything on day one.

Over the years, I learned something I never could have imagined when I watched that documentary on Arte:

to sell your art online, you have to build a lot of things around the creative work itself. The real challenge is doing that without letting everything around the art eventually take over the art.

That realization is a big part of what led to the idea for Khroma. After twenty years of managing everything surrounding the sale of my work, I wanted to create a tool that could simplify — or even eliminate — as many of those frustrating steps as possible, for me and for other artists.

But this guide is not a presentation of Khroma.

It’s closer to the guide I wish I’d had when I started.

I’m going to walk through the major stages that have shaped these twenty years: what you can sell, how to set your prices, where to present your work, how to find buyers, how to prepare an artwork for sale, and finally, how to handle everything that happens once it sells.

I won’t go into every detail here. This article is the starting point: each of these topics will be explored in greater depth in dedicated guides that I’ll link to throughout the article.

And above all, I’m not going to try to sell you a universal formula.

I’d rather tell you what I actually did, what worked, the mistakes I made, and what I would do differently today.

After twenty years of learning all of this in the real world, I have a few things to share.

So let’s get started.

1. What Can You Sell Online as an Artist?

When I started, I obviously wasn’t asking myself what my “offer” was.

I painted, listed the work on eBay, and watched what happened.

It was much more instinctive than strategic, but because I was selling a lot during that period, I quickly began to notice differences between the pieces. Some attracted more attention, received more bids, and sold much more easily than others.

In my case, it was mainly my abstract polyptychs that began to take off.

I created compositions made up of several panels that formed a single artwork once hung together. At the time, I saw relatively few pieces like that, and I think that difference helped me a great deal.

At the same time, I was also beginning to explore a style closer to street art. But back then, my abstract work clearly found buyers much more easily.

If I had looked only at my sales at the time, I could have concluded pretty quickly that street art simply didn’t interest my audience and that I would be better off staying with abstraction.

What Sells Can Change Over Time

Over the years, my work evolved a great deal. Eventually, I came back to something closer to street art and Pop Art, especially through the use of stencils.

And this time, the response was completely different.

Around 2020, I started receiving inquiries from galleries that were specifically looking for this kind of work. Some told me very directly: “This is what our clients want.”

I find that reversal pretty interesting.

Early in my career, my abstract work sold easily while my street art attracted much less interest. About fifteen years later, galleries were contacting me specifically for the latter.

That’s why I’m very cautious when I see advice about “the type of art that sells best.”

I can tell you what sold for me at a particular time. I can tell you what my own buyers preferred. But I would never claim that this tells you what you should paint today.

And more importantly, I think there is a real danger in starting to create only according to what sells.

Looking back, I was lucky to understand fairly early that I needed to find a balance between the two: obviously, if I want to sell my work, people have to want to buy it. But I also have to still want to paint it.

Because a style that sells very well but that you no longer want to make will probably become another problem eventually.

What sales can do, however, is teach us a lot.

Which paintings trigger an immediate reaction? Which ones sell quickly? Which sizes keep coming up? Which subjects attract the same kinds of people? Does a buyer come back a few months later?

I didn’t have a spreadsheet to analyze any of this in 2005.

My first “market data” was simply strangers on eBay deciding whether or not to bid on what I had just painted.

And in the end, that was already a huge amount of information.

Originals or Limited Editions: Why I Offer Both

Original artwork has always been at the center of my work as an artist.

But over time, I added limited-edition reproductions, generally capped at 30 copies, along with a few digital works based around double exposure.

I find limited editions especially interesting, and not only because they make it possible to offer a more accessible price point.

Buying an original artwork for $900, $1,100, or $1,700 from an artist you don’t know very well yet can feel like a significant step.

I completely understand that hesitation.

A limited edition offers another way to begin. The price is more approachable, the perceived risk is probably lower, and the buyer can still bring home a work by an artist they appreciate.

For some people, it can even be their first real art purchase.

And I think that matters.

Because someone who starts today with an edition may very well come back later for an original once they know my work better and a relationship has developed.

Of course, this isn’t an automatic mechanism — I don’t sell a reproduction thinking I’ve just created a future $1,100 buyer — but I genuinely see editions as an entry point, not simply as a cheaper version of my paintings.

That’s also why I want to preserve a certain degree of scarcity. My editions are generally limited to 30 copies, and each one is numbered.

Adapt Your Offer to the Way You Create

There is one very personal point I think is important to make.

I paint quickly.

Most of my works can be completed in a few hours. Not because I rush so I can produce more, but because that is simply the way I work.

For me, painting feels a lot like a jam session in music.

I begin without necessarily knowing exactly where I’m going. One color leads to another, something appears on the canvas, I respond to it, I change direction, and at some point, I feel that the work is finished.

I love that spontaneity.

And naturally, it also affects the way I’ve built my business.

An artist who spends three weeks or three months on a single piece cannot have exactly the same pace, the same prices, or the same number of available works as I do.

That’s another reason I struggle with one-size-fits-all formulas for selling art.

I can explain what I do.

I can show what has worked for me over twenty years.

But the goal is not for you to copy my model. It’s to understand why I made certain choices, so you can build something that fits the way you work.

And of all those choices, one raised a lot of questions for me when I was starting out.

Price.

No one had explained to me how to price a painting.

That’s what we’re going to look at next.

2. How to Price Your Artwork

Pricing became a problem for me almost immediately.

When I started selling paintings, I had no idea how an artist was supposed to set prices.

And unlike today, I couldn’t simply type the question into Google and find fifty articles, videos, and calculators.

So I did what seemed most logical: I asked other artists how they did it.

Most of them didn’t answer.

I don’t know whether they considered it too personal, didn’t want to share their method, or simply didn’t have one.

Either way, I was left alone with the question.

So eventually, I created my own method.

And somewhat surprisingly, I still use a version of it today.

How I Calculate the Price of My Paintings: My Formula

For my original work, I start with the surface area of the painting.

My current formula is very simple:

width × height × 0.17

The dimensions are in centimeters.

For an 80 × 80 cm painting (about 31.5 × 31.5 in), for example:

80 × 80 × 0.17 = €1,088 (about $1,240 at September 2026 exchange rates)

For a 100 × 100 cm painting (about 39.4 × 39.4 in):

100 × 100 × 0.17 = €1,700 (about $1,940 at September 2026 exchange rates)

That famous 0.17 is not official in any way.

I didn’t learn it in art school, and no one told me artists are supposed to calculate their prices this way.

It’s simply the coefficient I arrived at.

In the beginning, it was much lower, and I gradually increased it over the years.

I use this formula as a starting point, but I don’t apply it completely rigidly either.

I regularly sell certain works for a little more than the calculation suggests, especially my street art pieces, which generally require more work than my abstract paintings.

I’m not talking about doubling the price. It’s usually a few hundred euros more — roughly a few hundred dollars — when I believe the work justifies it.

So the formula gives me a reference framework, not a price I’m forbidden to adjust.

What I like about this method is that it keeps me from reinventing the price of every painting.

Two works in the same size stay in the same general range, even if I personally prefer one over the other.

And from the buyer’s point of view, I think that also creates a certain consistency.

When and How to Raise Your Art Prices

I would be unable to reconstruct every pricing grid I’ve used since 2005.

But obviously, I no longer sell my paintings for the same prices I did when my first auctions were ending around €100 (roughly $125 at the time).

Over the last five years alone, I would say my prices have increased by about €300 for comparable sizes (roughly $340 at September 2026 exchange rates).

Why did I raise them?

There was never one specific moment when I told myself, “I’ve sold X paintings, so now I can add 10%.”

It was more gradual than that.

My work was evolving. I had more experience. Sales kept coming. And above all, I simply felt my paintings were worth more than before.

So I increased my coefficient.

Little by little.

I think that approach suits me better than one huge price jump overnight.

I’ve Always Built My Own Model

Today, many of my works fall somewhere around €800 to €1,200 (roughly $900 to $1,370 at September 2026 exchange rates), depending on size.

To me, €1,000 (about $1,140 at September 2026 exchange rates) is not an especially high price for an original work of art, particularly after twenty years of work.

But I’ve always done things largely my own way. I never built my career around trying to reach a certain price simply because that was what an artist with twenty years of experience was “supposed” to charge.

What mattered most to me was that the business worked and allowed me to keep creating.

Over time, that business also expanded beyond paintings. I developed painting courses, a YouTube channel, and later my stencil stores. Those activities are all different, but they grew out of the same creative world.

That has probably given me more freedom in the way I price my art as well: I’ve never needed the price of a single painting to carry the full financial weight of my entire business.

And in the end, that way of doing things suits me pretty well.

Time Spent Alone Does Not Determine an Artwork’s Value

This choice is also connected to what I explained earlier about the way I paint.

An artist who spends three months on each piece obviously won’t have the same constraints I do. Our prices therefore can’t be built in exactly the same way.

That’s also why I’ve never really subscribed to the idea of simply calculating:

hours worked × hourly rate + materials.

That calculation can be useful for understanding the point at which you start losing money.

But to me, it does not tell you what an artwork is worth.

If I finish a painting in four hours and consider it one of my best pieces, why should it be worth five times less than another one that took me twenty hours?

Conversely, spending an enormous amount of time on a painting does not guarantee that it is successful.

Time matters economically.

It simply isn’t enough to determine artistic value.

I think that distinction matters.

Your Pricing Should Also Stay Consistent Across Sales Channels

There is another point I pay attention to: I don’t like the same artwork appearing to have several different values depending on where someone sees it.

If my painting is $1,000 on my website, I find it difficult to justify listing it elsewhere for $1,400 simply because a platform charges a large commission.

I completely understand why some artists do it: commissions can be high, and they have to be accounted for somehow.

But from the buyer’s perspective, seeing two different prices for the exact same artwork can be confusing.

Personally, I’ve always preferred to maintain a certain consistency across the different places where my work is shown.

That is not a rule of the art market.

It is simply the way I choose to do it.

And when a gallery or platform takes a commission, that means the commission has to be anticipated somewhere in my overall pricing model.

A $1,000 Sale Does Not Leave the Artist With $1,000: Commissions and Costs

This is probably one of the easiest things to forget when setting your first prices.

The number displayed next to the painting is not what remains at the end.

There may be:

• materials;

• payment processing fees;

• a marketplace or gallery commission;

• packaging;

• shipping, when you cover it yourself;

• social contributions;

• taxes;

• and sometimes costs you never even thought about at the beginning.

This is especially important when selling through an intermediary.

A commission can represent a significant share of the artwork’s price.

But again, I wouldn’t look only at the percentage.

If a gallery charges a substantial commission but introduces me to a buyer I never would have reached otherwise, that is not necessarily a bad deal.

On the other hand, a very inexpensive platform that brings me no visibility may end up generating nothing at all.

We’ll compare these different models in the next section.

If I Were Setting My First Prices Today

I wouldn’t look for a magic formula.

I would focus on starting with a consistent baseline, simple enough that I wouldn’t have to ask myself the same question every time I finished a new piece.

If I had already made a few sales, I would start with those real selling prices. If I had never sold anything yet, I would look for a reasonable starting point based on my medium, my background, and the market I was trying to reach.

Then I would build a pricing grid and try to stick to it.

And above all, I would start selling.

Because the perfect price probably doesn’t exist before the first sale.

If no one buys, that is information — even if price is not necessarily the only reason. If everything sells immediately, that is information too.

Over time, actual sales give you much more useful reference points than theory ever will. And if the work evolves, buyers come back, and demand increases, prices can evolve as well.

That is exactly what I did.

→ Not sure where to start? Try our [artwork price calculator](/en/tools/artwork-price-calculator): it estimates your point value and generates a complete pricing grid for free.

The next question then becomes almost inevitable:

where should I put these artworks up for sale?

3. Where to Sell Your Art Online: Marketplace, Website, or Gallery?

When I started selling on eBay in 2005, I hadn’t really thought much about choosing a platform.

To be fair, the landscape looked nothing like it does today. There were already a few art-focused websites, but artists did not have the huge range of marketplaces, specialized platforms, and tools that exists now.

For me, eBay was simply there. It had an enormous amount of traffic, I already had some idea of how it worked, and I could list a painting at auction fairly easily.

I had no audience, and almost no one knew my work.

It was by starting to sell that I discovered the power of a platform that already concentrated so many visitors in one place.

So the first thing eBay taught me was very simple:

an existing audience is incredibly valuable when no one knows who you are yet.

From eBay to My Own Website

As I remember it, I sold around 700 original artworks on eBay. That is a substantial number, especially in my early years, and the platform played an essential role in helping me get started.

But out of the roughly 3,700 original artworks I have sold since 2005, the vast majority were later sold elsewhere — and mainly directly through my own website.

On top of those originals are the limited editions I have also sold directly through my website, which represent a meaningful part of my art business as well.

That did not happen simply because I bought a domain name and installed an online store. I put a huge amount of work into my websites, especially their SEO, and over the years Google brought me a tremendous number of visitors.

The difference from a marketplace was fundamental: all the work I did to attract those visitors was work I was doing for myself.

When someone arrived from Google, they entered my world directly. They did not see my painting mixed in among work from dozens of other artists. They could discover my originals, my editions, learn more about my work, join my newsletter, and come back months later.

It takes a lot of work — I definitely do not want to suggest that simply creating a website makes sales appear — but in my experience, my own website ultimately brought me much more than marketplaces did.

There is another difference I find important: when I work on my own site’s SEO, content, or reputation, I am building something for myself. A page that ranks well today can still bring visitors months or even years later.

That is probably why, if I had to choose today between putting all my energy into a marketplace or working on my own website, my experience would clearly lead me to prioritize my own site over the long term.

That does not mean I would abandon marketplaces.

eBay is the best proof of that.

They can be extremely useful when you are starting out, when you want to be discovered, or simply as an additional sales channel.

But for me, they work best as a complement to something I own.

Marketplace, Personal Website, or Gallery: Different Roles

A marketplace and a personal website do not play exactly the same role.

A marketplace can give you access to an audience that already exists. Your own website requires you to bring in visitors yourself, but it allows you to build your own world and a more direct relationship with them.

And there is a third model that is very different from both: the gallery.

Selling Through Galleries: Commissions, Services, and Visibility

Over the years, I have worked with several galleries, first with my abstract paintings and later with work that moved more toward street art and Pop Art.

But one thing needs to be clear from the start: not all galleries operate under the same model.

In the traditional commercial gallery model, the gallery selects artists, exhibits their work, and earns most of its revenue when a sale is made. The commission can be substantial — sometimes 40% or 50% — but the gallery’s interests are then directly aligned with the artist’s: to make money, it has to sell.

Other galleries or exhibition spaces work differently. They may charge the artist a participation fee, an exhibition fee, or rent for the space, then take a lower commission — or sometimes no commission at all — on sales.

That is not necessarily a bad model. It is simply a different model.

In that case, the artist is not only paying for the possibility of making a sale. They are also paying for space, an exhibition, visibility, sometimes promotion, organization, an opening reception, or access to a particular audience.

There are also hybrid models that combine fixed fees with a sales commission.

So the real question is not whether a gallery takes 50%, 20%, or charges you to exhibit. The real question is what you get in return.

A gallery with a high commission can be extremely valuable if it brings collectors, a network, exhibitions, a presence at certain events, credibility with a specific audience, advice, or simply handles the commercial work the artist would otherwise have to do alone.

Likewise, paying to take part in an exhibition can make perfect sense if the venue, audience, and services justify the investment.

These are simply two different ways of distributing cost and risk.

I think many artists, especially when they are starting out, still see being accepted by a gallery as a kind of validation: someone from the “art world” has finally decided that their work deserves to exist.

I do not really see it that way.

To me, a gallery is first and foremost a commercial and artistic partner. And whatever its business model, I ultimately ask the same question:

what does it give me in return for what it costs me?

That idea of selection, traditionally associated with galleries, also exists on some online platforms today.

Open Platforms vs. Application-Based Platforms: Two Different Approaches

Not every platform selects artists in the same way.

Some are completely open: you create an account, publish your work, and can start selling.

Others require an application. They review an artist’s work before allowing them to join the platform. Artsper, Singulart, and Artfinder, for example, use this kind of model.

Both approaches make sense.

An open platform allows almost anyone to get started quickly. An application-based platform generally tries to maintain a certain consistency in its catalog, the quality of how artworks are presented, or the experience offered to buyers.

At Khroma, this selection applies only to the marketplace. Creating an artist website is open to everyone: you do not need to apply in order to create a site and begin presenting or selling your work there.

However, an artist who also wants to publish work on the Khroma marketplace needs to apply. The goal is not to make an arbitrary judgment about who is or is not a “good artist,” but to review certain elements: the quality of how the work is presented, the consistency of the portfolio, the reliability of the information provided, and whether the submitted work fits what the marketplace is designed to feature.

For the artist, being accepted onto the marketplace can obviously feel rewarding. But I think the more important question is what that selection actually delivers afterward: the quality of the catalog, the audience on the platform, the tools provided, and of course its ability to connect artworks with real buyers.

Ultimately, the access model is only one factor among many when choosing a platform.

Then comes a much more practical question: what does each of these options actually cost the artist?

How Much Do the Main Platforms for Selling Art Cost?

Here is the information I was able to verify as of September 28, 2026.

Pricing changes regularly, so this table should be checked again over time.

Khroma’s pricing and features may evolve; current information is available directly on Khroma.

Main sources used to verify this comparison as of September 28, 2026: Etsy, Saatchi Art, Singulart, Artsper, Artfinder, ArtMajeur, Big Cartel, and Shopify.

Etsy: The Famous “6.5%” Does Not Tell the Whole Story

I want to pause on Etsy for a moment because I also know the platform from the inside: we sell our stencils there.

When you quickly look at its pricing, the number that tends to stick is the 6.5% transaction fee.

But that is only one line among several.

For a seller with a US bank account, Etsy Payments currently adds 3% + $0.25 in payment processing. Combined with the 6.5% transaction fee, that means the headline 6.5% is clearly not the whole cost of a sale — and that is before the $0.20 listing fee and any other applicable charges.

And if an order is attributed to an Etsy Offsite Ad, an additional 12% or 15% can apply. For a shop that has already reached $10,000 in revenue over a 365-day period, the rate is 12% and participation in the program becomes mandatory.

In our own stencil shop in France, when we look at everything that is actually deducted, we can quickly end up around 20% on certain sales. That exact number is specific to our own situation and should not be treated as a US Etsy fee estimate.

That is exactly why I am wary of comparisons that simply say:

Etsy: 6.5%.

Technically, that number exists.

But it does not really answer the question the seller is asking:

what is this sale actually going to cost me?

A High Commission Can Still Be Worth It

Let’s take an intentionally extreme example.

One platform charges me 40%, but helps me sell ten paintings.

Another charges 0%, but does not help me sell any.

I would obviously choose the first one.

So a commission is not automatically “lost” money.

It can pay for an audience, sales work, support, logistics, or access to buyers I never would have reached on my own.

Singulart, for example, explains that its 50% commission helps cover its Art Advisors, communication with collectors, and the team that coordinates shipping, customs, insurance, and documentation.

Big Cartel sits at the opposite end of the spectrum: no platform commission, but you have to build your store and, more importantly, bring the visitors yourself.

So simply comparing:

50% vs. 0%

does not tell you very much.

The question is always the same:

is what I receive worth what I pay?

And even more importantly:

am I making sales?

When My Own Website Became Too Much to Manage

The problem I ran into was not that having my own website did not work.

It was almost the opposite.

For years, WordPress was incredibly useful to me and allowed me to sell a large share of my work. But over time, my site accumulated more and more plugins and technical layers.

WooCommerce, payments, SEO, translations, caching, security, backups... none of those elements was necessarily the problem by itself.

It was the accumulation of all of them.

And for an artist, there is an additional difficulty: WordPress and WooCommerce were not designed specifically for selling art.

Of course, you can do almost everything you need with WordPress. I did it for years. But it often means adapting things, adding fields, installing extensions, and maintaining the entire system.

Eventually, that complexity started having a much more serious consequence for me than a few extra seconds of loading time:

I simply no longer wanted to deal with my website.

Publishing a new painting had become a task I kept putting off.

For an artist whose website is supposed to be one of their main sales tools, that is a real problem.

One Sale Can Lead to Many More

There is something else I came to understand over time: a sale is not necessarily an isolated transaction.

Some collectors have bought several works from me over the years. In a few cases, we are probably talking about around ten paintings.

A marketplace can be fantastic for creating that first encounter with someone who has never heard of me. But once that relationship exists, I think it is essential to be able to keep building it in my own world.

A marketplace can create the first encounter. My website allows me to build what comes next.

Looking back, those two experiences are not in conflict. They complement each other.

And that is a big part of what I wanted to bring together with Khroma.

After more than twenty years of selling my art online, my experience obviously extends beyond paintings. I have built and evolved several websites, worked on their SEO, grown a YouTube channel, used social media and newsletters, sold internationally, and later developed my stencil stores.

Above all, all of that has allowed me to see what works in practice, not just what should work in theory.

The Website Remains Independent From the Marketplace

This is probably the most important point for understanding how Khroma works.

The artist website and the marketplace are two separate things.

Creating a website is open to all artists. It is a real website designed from the ground up for their activity, with their own visual identity, artworks, SEO, customers, sales, invoices, translations, and newsletter — not simply a profile page inside a large platform, and not a collection of tools they have to assemble and maintain themselves.

An artist can therefore use a Khroma website without publishing work on the marketplace.

If they also want the additional visibility of the marketplace, they can apply from their account. Marketplace publishing is optional and subject to approval. Once approved, the artist remains free to decide whether or not to publish individual works on Khroma.

That separation is also reflected in the business model: when an artist brings their own buyer to their website, the commission remains low, at 1%. When a sale is made through the marketplace, where Khroma helps create the connection with the buyer, the commission is 30%, calculated on the artwork’s price excluding shipping and sales tax.

That is exactly what I was explaining earlier: I think it makes sense to pay more when an intermediary genuinely brings me something I probably would not have obtained on my own.

The idea remains the same: bring together as many genuinely useful tools as possible in one place for artists, while still giving them the choice of whether or not to use the marketplace.

Whatever route you choose — marketplace, gallery, or personal website — one thing does not change: to sell an artwork online, you first have to make someone want to stop and look at it.

And online, that first impression depends largely on the way the work is presented.

For me, it starts with something I understood from my very first sales on eBay:

photography.

4. How to Present Your Art Online So It Has a Better Chance of Selling

When I started selling my paintings on eBay, there was one thing I understood almost immediately: photo quality is essential.

I even think it was one of my strengths from the beginning.

When someone buys an artwork online, they cannot walk up to the canvas, look at the surface, move around it, see how the light catches the colors, or fully understand its scale.

All they have in front of them is a screen.

Photography therefore has to communicate as faithfully as possible what the buyer would have seen if the artwork were right in front of them.

That sounds obvious, but I still see a huge amount of interesting work presented very poorly online.

And I am convinced that a bad photograph can cost a good painting a sale.

How to Photograph Your Artwork for Online Sales

I am not trying to make an artwork look better than it really does.

On the contrary, I am trying to create an image that is as faithful to the original as possible.

That matters because a heavily edited photo may look attractive on a screen, but if the customer receives an artwork whose colors look nothing like what they saw online, disappointment begins immediately.

My method is actually quite simple.

I photograph my paintings in light that is as even as possible, avoiding reflections and areas that are much brighter or darker than the rest.

The camera needs to be positioned directly in front of the artwork.

That may sound like a small detail, but if you photograph a painting slightly from the side or from below, the rectangle turns into a trapezoid. Some of that distortion can be corrected afterward, but it is much better to start with a properly shot image.

I also use a tripod when necessary so the camera stays stable and correctly positioned.

And I avoid lenses that are too wide-angle when they begin to distort the artwork’s proportions.

After that, I make only the corrections that are necessary: exposure, white balance, and perhaps a few adjustments so the image matches what I actually see in front of me.

The goal is never to transform the painting.

The goal is for the person who receives it to think, “Yes, this is the one I bought.”

One Photo Is Not Enough

I would never show only one overall view of the artwork.

The buyer needs to be able to move closer to it virtually.

So I recommend showing:

• one full, straight-on photograph;

• several detail shots that reveal the surface, gestures, textures, or distinctive features of the work;

• a side view if it adds something useful;

• the back of the artwork;

• and, when helpful, an in-room view that makes the scale easier to understand.

That last image is especially useful.

A 50 × 50 cm painting (about 20 × 20 in) and a 120 × 120 cm painting (about 47 × 47 in) can look almost identical when both fill the width of a screen.

A photograph of the artwork in an interior immediately makes it clear that you are looking at two very different physical objects.

But here again, I would be careful not to mislead the buyer with a staged image in which the proportions of the artwork do not match reality.

The Artwork Listing Should Answer the Buyer’s Questions

A good photograph makes someone want to look.

Then you need to provide enough information for them to make a decision.

When I create a listing for an artwork, I think the essential information should be immediately accessible:

the title, dimensions, medium, support, year of creation, and any important characteristics of the work.

For an edition, you obviously also need to state how many copies exist.

If an edition is limited to 30, for example, the buyer should know that clearly.

The listing should also answer the practical questions someone may have before pulling out a credit card.

Is it an original artwork?

Is it signed?

Is it ready to hang?

Is it sold framed or unframed?

Does it come with a certificate?

What are the shipping costs and delivery times?

You almost have to put yourself in the buyer’s position and ask a very simple question:

if I were about to buy this painting without being able to see it in person, what would I want to check first?

Then try to answer those questions directly on the listing.

All of this information may seem secondary when you are focused on the painting itself.

It is not secondary to the buyer.

When someone is about to spend several hundred or several thousand dollars online, one unanswered question can be enough to create hesitation.

In the best case, they contact us and ask. But even then, we have just added another step between their desire to buy and the purchase itself.

They have to write, wait for a reply, and then potentially come back to the website.

And with an artwork — which can trigger a very emotional, sometimes almost immediate purchase — every extra step creates friction and can cost you the sale.

The more questions the listing answers before they are even asked, the simpler the path remains between falling in love with a piece and buying it.

The Listing Should Also Say Something About the Artwork

That does not mean I think an artwork listing should read like the technical specifications for a washing machine.

An artwork may also need a few words to communicate what the image alone cannot necessarily tell you: an intention, the idea behind the piece, where the title came from, or what interested me while I was painting it.

But I want to be very clear: writing about my own work has never felt natural to me.

I am much more comfortable in front of a canvas than in front of a blank page.

For years, on my WordPress site, my descriptions often came down to the essentials: dimensions, medium, support, and a few practical details.

Not because I thought text had no value.

But because writing about my own work has always required much more effort from me than painting it.

You have to find the right words without sounding pretentious, without simply describing what everyone can already see, and without inventing some grand story just to make the painting seem more important.

If the artwork shows a woman in a black jacket against a red background, I do not necessarily need three paragraphs explaining that it is a woman in a black jacket against a red background.

The buyer can see that.

What may be interesting is what cannot be seen immediately.

Why this image?

Why this title?

What idea interested me?

What was I trying to do with this piece?

Sometimes a few lines are enough.

The text should enrich the artwork, not try to rescue it.

Writing a Good Artwork Listing Is Harder Than It Looks

And this is exactly where things can become tedious.

A properly built listing requires more than a description.

You also have to think about the page title, the Google description, categories, the artwork’s style, image alt text, then add the photographs, dimensions, price, shipping information, and more.

All of that takes time.

And you end up facing exactly the problem I mentioned at the beginning of this guide:

the time spent selling your art starts taking over the time spent creating it.

That is one of the problems I specifically wanted Khroma to reduce, including through the use of artificial intelligence.

The artist uploads photographs of the artwork and adds the information they already know. AI can then prepare much of the listing: suggest a description, write alt text, prepare the SEO title and description, and suggest a style or certain categories.

The goal is simply to save the artist time on all of those tasks.

But there is an important limit.

I do not want AI to invent what the artist thinks or pretend to know the story of a painting it knows nothing about.

I see it more as an assistant that prepares the work.

It can start from what it can genuinely observe in the images and from the information provided by the artist, then propose a first draft.

The artist remains free to correct it, personalize it, expand it, or simply approve it.

To me, this is exactly the kind of task where AI becomes genuinely useful.

Not to paint instead of the artist.

To remove some of the work that keeps the artist from painting.

A Strong Artwork Listing Can Also Bring Visitors From Google

There is another reason not to neglect all of this information: it does not only serve the person who is already on your website.

It can also help someone discover your work through Google.

And I know how much that can matter.

Over the years, SEO on my own websites has brought me a huge number of visitors.

Every new artwork you publish can therefore become another entry point into your world.

That does not mean you should write artificial, keyword-stuffed copy just to try to please Google.

But you still need to give Google enough information to understand what the page is about.

If my painting is called Whispered Fragments, that title alone does not necessarily tell Google that it is an original painting, what medium it uses, what size it is, or what artistic world it belongs to.

The artwork description, page title, SEO description, and image alt text can provide that context.

And when you publish dozens — sometimes hundreds — of artworks over the years, all of those pages eventually become an important part of your website.

Again, that represents work.

And I do not think an artist should have to become an SEO specialist just to present their work properly online.

The Certificate of Authenticity

For an original artwork, a certificate of authenticity can also help build buyer confidence.

I do not see it simply as a piece of paper you put in the package.

Its real value is that it creates a clear record of the artwork and its origin.

Years later, that document can make it possible to identify exactly what was purchased: the artist’s name, the title of the work, the date it was created, its dimensions, medium, support, and, for an edition, its number.

You can also include a photograph of the artwork, the date the certificate was issued, and of course the artist’s signature.

That can become useful to a collector if they later want to insure the work, resell it, pass it on, or simply document their collection.

It is important, however, to make one distinction: a certificate of authenticity is not what creates the artwork, nor is it what gives the artist rights over it.

The certificate is primarily there to document and identify the work.

For artworks produced in multiple copies, numbering and authentication become especially important, particularly because some rules defining what qualifies as an original work take into account the number of copies and their authorization by the artist.

I will go into much more detail on this in a dedicated guide, because the rules are not exactly the same for every type of artwork.

Good Presentation Does Not Turn a Bad Artwork Into a Good One

Photographs, copy, SEO, alt text, certificates, in-room images...

It would be easy to get the impression that every painting has to be turned into an extremely sophisticated marketing product.

That is not what I mean.

Good presentation does not create the artistic value of the work. It simply prevents that value from being undermined when the work is shown online.

The artwork remains the starting point.

But if I spend several hours creating it, I think it is a shame to rush through in five minutes the only representation a potential buyer may ever see.

For me, the logic is fairly simple:

make an artwork I want to sell, give it a coherent price, choose where to offer it, then present it online as seriously as if it were hanging in a gallery.

And when certain tasks can be automated without taking anything away from the work or the artist’s personality, I see no reason not to use that help.

I would rather spend the time I save painting.

At this point, everything can be perfectly in place.

The artwork is ready.

The price is set.

The photos are strong.

The listing is complete.

The website works.

And yet one question can still make everything else fail:

who is going to come see any of it?

That brings us to what is probably the most important part after creating the work itself:

finding buyers.

5. How to Find Buyers for Your Art Online

Getting people to your artwork is one thing.

Getting the right people there, and then finding a way to stay in touch with them, is another.

Over the years, I have learned that not all audiences are equal.

Having a lot of website visitors is not the same as having a lot of people who are genuinely interested in your work.

Having a lot of followers is not the same as having a lot of collectors.

And getting a first visit is not the same as building a relationship that may last for years.

In my case, Google played a huge role. Later, YouTube, my newsletter, existing customers, and social media gradually added new sources of visitors.

But the most important thing was never simply getting traffic.

The two questions I kept coming back to were:

“Where am I taking them?”

and

“How do I stay in touch with them afterward?”

For me, the answer for a long time was my own website.

And it still is.

SEO for Artists: How Google Can Help People Discover Your Work

For a long time, Google was one of my main sources of visitors.

I put a lot of work into the SEO of my websites over the years, sometimes without even really calling it “SEO” at first.

SEO — search engine optimization — simply means helping search engines understand the content of your pages so they can show those pages to people looking for that kind of content.

For an artist, that can allow someone to discover an artwork while searching for a style, medium, subject, type of painting, or even the artist’s name directly.

And over time, that work became extremely important for me.

Some pages on my websites ranked very well and continued bringing visitors for months, sometimes years.

That is probably what I like most about SEO: work you do today can keep producing results long afterward.

Of course, that requires pages to be clear and structured enough for Google to understand them. I talked about that in the previous section on artwork listings.

And most importantly, visitors who arrive from Google land directly on the artist’s own website.

They are not sent to a page where their paintings are surrounded by hundreds of artworks from other artists.

They arrive on their site.

They can discover one piece, then another, look at editions, understand the artist’s background, or join a newsletter.

So SEO is not only about generating visits.

Over time, it can also help build the artist’s world, name, and audience.

Getting Visitors Is Not Enough

Getting someone to visit once is already difficult.

But if that person leaves and I have no way to stay in touch with them, I have to do the same work over and over again.

And in art, the moment someone discovers a piece is not necessarily the moment they are ready to buy it.

Someone may discover my work today, like it, and then buy something three months, one year, or several years later.

That is why I think it is essential to think early about what happens after the first visit.

And for me, one of the most important tools for that is the newsletter.

My Newsletter Is Now One of My Most Important Channels

A newsletter is ultimately something very simple: a list of people who have chosen to give you their email address because they want to keep following your work.

They may have discovered your art through Google, YouTube, Instagram, a marketplace, or directly on your website.

Some have already bought something.

Others simply like your work and want to see what you do next.

And that is exactly what makes it interesting.

Someone may discover one of my artworks today without wanting to buy it right away, or simply without being able to afford it at that moment.

But if they join my newsletter, I can continue showing them my work over the months and years that follow.

A new series.

A painting that just came out of the studio.

An exhibition.

A video.

Or simply something that makes them want to come back and see what I am doing.

A newsletter can turn a one-time visit into a relationship that develops over time.

And that relationship can sometimes last a very long time.

Today, my newsletter includes people who have followed my work for years, many of whom have already bought one of my artworks.

Some collectors have not bought just one painting from me, but several over time. In a few cases, we are probably talking about around ten artworks.

That taught me never to see a first sale as the end.

It can actually be the beginning of a relationship that lasts for years.

A collector may buy another artwork, purchase an edition, talk about my work to someone else, or give one of my pieces as a gift. That has happened to me many times.

Of course, an audience like that does not appear quickly.

It grows gradually as people discover your work and decide they want to keep following it.

That is why I think it is worth starting early, even when the list only has a handful of people on it.

And unlike social media, I do not depend entirely on an algorithm to try to reach the people who have chosen to follow me.

On a social platform, someone may follow my account and still see only a small fraction of what I publish afterward.

The platforms decide which posts appear in their feed, in what order, and today they mix content from accounts people follow with a large amount of recommended content.

So you can spend years building an audience without being sure you can actually reach it when you publish something.

And when you want to increase that reach, the platforms are of course happy to let you pay to promote your posts.

With a newsletter, the relationship is much more direct.

The person voluntarily gave me their email address because they wanted to keep following my work.

Of course, I cannot guarantee they will open every message, but at least I can write to them directly without a social network first deciding whether my content deserves to appear in their feed.

That obviously does not mean every email will generate a sale.

That is not the point.

The main value is staying present, showing how your work evolves, and gradually building a relationship with people who have already shown an interest in what you do.

Finding someone who genuinely appreciates your work is difficult. Once you have found them, it would be a shame to start from zero again with every new artwork.

There is another problem that appears very quickly as well: language.

With social media, your audience can become international almost naturally. But managing a multilingual newsletter across several tools can quickly become complicated.

With Khroma, we wanted to remove that technical burden: the artist writes the newsletter in their own language, then Khroma can translate it and send each subscriber the version that matches their language.

To me, that is exactly the kind of automation that makes sense: the artist remains the person writing and communicating; Khroma handles the machinery around it.

YouTube Brought Me Buyers, but I Never Fully Used Its Potential

YouTube has played a huge role in my journey.

My channel now has around 800,000 subscribers, and my videos have accumulated millions of views.

A large part of that audience came to watch my painting demonstrations, learn techniques, or simply see how I worked.

That audience was extremely effective for growing my painting courses and later my stencil business, because those products matched directly with what people came to my videos to find.

YouTube also brought me buyers for my paintings.

I know because some customers told me they had discovered my work through my videos before buying one of my artworks.

But looking back, I think that number could have been much higher.

The problem was not the audience.

I had close to 800,000 subscribers and millions of views.

The problem was that for years, I almost never told that audience that my artworks were for sale or where they could buy them.

I rarely presented new available pieces, and I did very little to connect my videos with my artist website.

So much so that even today, people who have followed me for years still ask:

“Do you sell your paintings?”

Even though selling my art has ultimately been my main profession.

Looking back, I find that pretty revealing.

People watched my paintings come to life right in front of them, but I left interested viewers to discover on their own that they could actually buy them.

So I think YouTube probably could have generated far more artwork sales for me if I had built clearer bridges between my videos and my website earlier.

That taught me something important:

an audience can genuinely bring you customers, but you have to show them the path.

That does not mean turning every video or post into an advertisement.

Sometimes it is enough to naturally mention that an artwork is available, show people where to find it, talk about its story, or invite interested viewers to discover the other pieces on your website.

Audience size obviously matters.

But the reason people follow you matters just as much.

Out of 800,000 subscribers who largely came to learn about painting or watch it being made, not everyone is ever going to become a collector.

But across millions of views, some of those people can also fall in love with a piece and want to own it.

You just have to avoid making that difficult for them.

Give People a Reason to Follow You

I think showing your process is one of the best ways to build a relationship around your art.

For years, people watched my videos because they enjoyed seeing a blank canvas evolve.

At the beginning, there was nothing there. Then the colors arrived, shapes appeared, and the painting gradually came together.

There was already a story in the creative process itself.

And that is probably one of the biggest strengths of content for an artist.

You are no longer only showing:

“Here is a finished painting. It costs $1,000.”

You can show everything around it.

The creative process.

The choices.

The doubts.

The techniques.

The studio.

The idea behind a work.

An experiment that did not work.

A new series.

Or simply the person behind the paintings.

That gives people a reason to come back even when they are not actively buying art.

Because if every post I publish comes down to:

“New painting available, buy it here,”

I am not sure many people will want to follow me for ten years.

Of course, not every artist wants to become a video creator or share their life online.

And they do not need to.

But I think you need to find what you actually want to show around your work.

Because people do not only follow a succession of finished paintings.

They can also become attached to a way of working, a creative world, and the person building it.

Social Media Can Quickly Become the Main Job

There is still one problem I have felt more and more over the years:

all of this takes an enormous amount of time.

Creating an artwork takes time.

Photographing it takes time.

Planning, filming, and editing a video takes time.

Posting on Instagram, making Stories, replying to comments and messages takes time.

Then you have to do it all again.

Eventually, all of that communication can become the main job, while creating the art moves into second place.

And the most frustrating part is that the amount of time you spend on a piece of content does not always have much relationship to the result.

You can spend hours on a post that barely gets seen, then publish something almost spontaneously that performs much better.

There is a part of the process you simply do not control.

That is why I would not necessarily advise an artist to try to be everywhere.

YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest...

Then you can add a blog and a newsletter on top of that.

At some point, you also need time to paint.

If I had to choose, I would rather use one or two channels that genuinely fit the way I work, consistently and well, than try to be everywhere without enough time to do any of it properly.

What About Paid Advertising?

There is obviously another way to get visibility: pay for it.

Meta Ads, Google Ads, and other platforms make it possible to show your work to people who do not know you yet.

But in my case, paid advertising has never really been part of my strategy for selling my artwork.

I ran a few isolated Google Ads tests a long time ago, but nothing I would consider a real advertising strategy or a serious enough experiment to draw strong conclusions from.

Most of my painting sales were built in other ways: through my website, Google, YouTube, my newsletter, existing customers, and word of mouth.

I know Meta advertising much better in another part of my business, because I use it today to sell my stencils with good results.

But selling a product for a few dozen dollars and selling an original artwork for several hundred or several thousand dollars are two very different things.

So I would rather not turn a handful of old experiments into a universal method for selling art.

There is one thing my experience advertising stencils has taught me, though: before paying to send visitors to a page, you need to make sure that page already does its job properly.

Photos, essential information, pricing, reassurance, shipping, presentation of the artwork, simplicity of the buying process... all of that should already be solid before you start buying more traffic.

Advertising can bring visitors.

It cannot fix a bad page.

If I were seriously testing advertising for my artwork today, that is where I would start: first make sure the page I am sending people to genuinely gives the artwork the best possible chance of being purchased.

Advertising deserves a topic of its own, with its own strategies, tests, and numbers.

Keeping Buyers Engaged After a Sale

People talk a lot about how to find buyers.

But once someone has bought an artwork, the work is not completely finished.

You need to reply properly to their messages.

Keep them informed about shipping.

Package the artwork carefully.

Make sure it arrives in good condition.

And when a problem occurs, try to solve it quickly.

All of this can feel quite far removed from creating art, but for the buyer, it is part of the experience of purchasing the artwork.

And that experience matters.

I have seen this very clearly in my stencil business as well, where we handle a much higher volume of orders.

The customer relationship is crucial. The customer should feel respected before, during, and after the purchase.

Problems can always happen. A package can be delayed, damaged, or an error can be made.

What matters enormously is also how you respond when that happens.

An original artwork may then hang in someone’s home for years.

Friends visit, someone notices it, asks who painted it, and your name starts circulating.

I obviously have no way of knowing how many sales came to me that way.

But after thousands of artwork sales, and with the experience from my other businesses, I know that a satisfied customer can become much more than a completed transaction.

The way you handle a sale today can influence the sales you make tomorrow.

And before any of that can happen, the artwork first has to arrive safely with its buyer.

That brings us to the less visible side of selling art online: packaging, shipping, invoices, taxes, and international sales.

If I Were Starting From Zero Today

If I had to start again today with no followers, no customers, and no one who knew my name, I would definitely not try to do everything at once.

I would start by building my own website properly.

I would publish my work with strong photographs, complete information, and pages built well enough to be useful both to visitors and to Google.

I would also set up a newsletter very early.

Even with ten subscribers.

Because a list of ten people who are genuinely interested in my work is already better than a list that does not exist.

Then I would probably choose one main channel for getting discovered.

For me, that was YouTube.

For another artist, it might be Instagram, TikTok, a blog, or any format they feel comfortable enough with to publish consistently.

And this time, I would do something I failed to do for all those years:

I would clearly tell people that my work is for sale and where they can find it.

Then I would keep working on all of this over the long term.

Not for three weeks while waiting for a miracle.

For months.

Probably years.

I think this is one of the least glamorous realities of selling art online:

visibility is built over time.

In my case, everything accumulated gradually.

My website gave me a place of my own.

Google brought me visitors.

YouTube dramatically expanded my visibility.

Some visitors became customers.

My newsletter allowed me to stay in touch with some of them.

And other channels came in around those pieces.

So I do not believe there is one source of customers that replaces all the others.

But if there is one principle I would keep from all of this, it is this:

gradually try to turn the visibility you gain elsewhere into an audience you can build a relationship with over time.

That is probably what I would prioritize if I had to start all over again today.

Once the first sales begin to arrive, another reality appears very quickly.

You have to package the artworks.

Ship them.

Create invoices.

Understand self-employment taxes, sales tax, returns, and international sales.

It is a much less artistic part of the job.

But if you want to sell seriously online, you also need to understand how it works.

That is what we are going to look at next.

6. How to Package and Ship Artwork

Making your first online sale is a pretty special moment.

You are thrilled that the painting sold. Then you look at the artwork, look at the box, and think:

“Now I have to make sure this painting reaches the customer in one piece.”

At first, shipping an artwork can feel a little intimidating, especially when it has to cross the country or travel to the other side of the world.

After twenty years of shipping artwork, I have found that serious problems remain fairly rare when the packaging is done properly.

As I remember it, over all those years, perhaps 10 to 15 paintings were lost or seriously damaged in transit.

Across several thousand shipments, that remains marginal.

That obviously does not mean shipping should be taken lightly. But I also mention it to reassure artists who sometimes imagine that sending a painting is an extremely risky operation.

How to Package a Painting for Shipping

My method is not especially sophisticated.

I mainly use bubble wrap and a single size of corrugated cardboard sheets that I fold and adapt myself to fit each artwork.

That keeps me from having to stock many different box sizes.

I protect the artwork carefully with bubble wrap.

And I do not skimp on it.

I do not just wrap one layer around the painting: I use several layers until there is a real thickness of protection. To give you a sense of scale, I easily aim for around 5 cm (about 2 in) of protection on each side.

Only then do I build a sufficiently rigid outer shell around it with the cardboard.

What matters most to me is that the painting cannot move freely inside the package and that the corners are properly protected.

For very large works or certain special orders, I go much further.

I have bought shipping crates specifically designed for transport, with extremely thick cardboard — around 3 cm (about 1.2 in) — and an integrated pallet underneath.

And for an artwork that is particularly large, fragile, or valuable, you can go all the way to a wooden crate.

So there is no single packaging method that works for every situation.

It all depends on the artwork, its size, its value, and where it needs to be shipped.

For the past several years, I have mainly used UPS.

To give a rough sense of cost, my shipments often run around €20 (about $23) within France, €30 (about $34) to Germany, and about €70 (about $80) to the United States, using September 2026 exchange rates for the dollar equivalents.

Those are my own rates, and they can obviously vary enormously depending on size, weight, destination, carrier, and any negotiated terms.

But I think it is useful to share real numbers, because when I was starting out, I would have liked to know roughly what shipping a painting might cost.

Insurance Matters, but Good Packaging Comes First

Even with excellent packaging, accidents can still happen.

A package can be lost, crushed, or arrive seriously damaged.

That is why insurance can be useful, especially as the value of the artwork increases.

But over the years, I have also learned not to rely on insurance alone.

My experience with shipping insurance has actually become somewhat less positive in recent years. Claims can be slow, complicated, and require a great deal of documentation before compensation is issued.

So I never treat insurance as an automatic guarantee that reimbursement will be easy.

For me, the first priority is still to build a package strong enough to give the artwork the best possible chance of arriving intact.

Insurance comes after that, as an extra layer of protection in case something goes wrong despite every precaution.

You then need to look carefully at the carrier’s terms, keep documentation that proves the artwork’s value, and ideally keep records of its condition and packaging before shipment as well.

I will go into my full packaging and shipping method in a dedicated guide.

For My Editions, I Prefer to Let the Print Lab Handle It

I use a different system for my limited editions.

When someone orders an edition from my website, I place the order with the print lab I work with. They produce the copy and ship it directly to the customer.

That keeps me from having to store prints at home, prepare even more packages, and spend time on a part of the process the lab already knows how to handle very well.

Of course, I give up some control over shipping.

And proportionally, I have actually seen more breakage issues with certain editions shipped directly by the lab than with the original paintings I package myself.

The reason seems fairly simple to me: their packaging is less generous than mine when it comes to protection. They also have to control their costs and the amount of time spent on each package, which is understandable for prints that can be reproduced.

When a problem occurs, the lab can usually reprint the copy and send another one.

With an original artwork, obviously, you cannot simply print a replacement.

And that difference confirms something twenty years of shipping have taught me:

it is better to use a little too much protection than not enough.

So for me, outsourcing the editions remains a good compromise. But for my original works, I prefer to keep control of the packaging myself.

Selling Internationally: The United States Eventually Became My Largest Market

I have sold my work in many countries and, over the years, the United States actually became my largest market.

When I think back to where I started, I find that pretty extraordinary.

The internet allows an artist based in France to show their work to someone living thousands of miles away and sell directly to that person.

But to truly take advantage of that opportunity, it is not enough to offer international shipping.

People also need to be able to understand your website.

To grow my sales in the United States, I had to offer my work in English and gradually manage a multilingual website.

On paper, that sounds fairly simple.

You might think all you have to do is translate the text.

In reality, a multilingual website can quickly become much more complicated to manage than a single-language site.

You have to translate pages, artwork listings, practical information, sometimes emails, SEO elements, and then make sure each language displays the right content in the right place.

And when the system was not designed from the start to work that way, problems can accumulate quickly.

Adding a language is not simply adding a translation. It also adds another layer of technical management.

And the larger the business becomes, the more space that layer takes up.

At first, a few pages and a few artworks can still be managed fairly easily by hand.

Then the catalog grows.

New pages appear.

The copy changes.

More languages are added.

And every update eventually has to be carried over in several places.

That is how tasks that seemed small at the beginning gradually start consuming many hours of work.

For a long time, I absorbed much of that work myself.

Then, as my business grew, that simply stopped being realistic.

So I began delegating some listings, translations, and part of the management of my websites.

And that is when I understood something very simple:

what you stop paying for with your time, you often end up paying for with money.

That is also one of the reasons I wanted multilingual functionality to be designed into Khroma from the beginning, rather than added later as another layer on top.

The artist creates content in their own language, Khroma can generate the other versions, and the artist remains free to edit them.

The idea is simple: let artists sell internationally without forcing them to manage the entire machinery of a multilingual website themselves.

And despite all that complexity, I think international reach is more than worth it.

If I had focused only on the French market, I would have missed out on a huge share of my sales.

But language is obviously only one part of international selling.

You also have to get the artwork to the customer.

When I send a painting to the United States, for example, the package leaves the European Union and therefore has to go through export procedures.

You need to declare what is in the package, its value, its origin, and its destination.

The first time, that can feel intimidating.

In practice, the carrier or customs professional handling clearance can help with a large part of the process.

Because I am based in France, my business uses an EORI number for customs operations outside the European Union. If you are based in the United States, EORI does not apply to you. US exporters typically work with documents such as a commercial invoice, and Electronic Export Information (EEI) may need to be filed through the Automated Export System when the value under an individual Schedule B number exceeds $2,500 or another mandatory filing rule applies.

The exact paperwork depends on the destination, value, carrier, and type of shipment, so this is one of those areas where it is worth checking the current requirements when you actually need them.

Again, all of this sounds much more complicated before you have done it once.

After a few shipments, it mostly becomes a set of procedures you learn to recognize.

And when I think about how many artworks I have sold to the United States over the years, I would find it a real shame to give up on international buyers simply because customs feels intimidating.

7. Selling Your Art Legally in the United States: Business Setup, Sales Tax, Records, and Copyright

When Art Sales Become a Business

At first, you mainly think about one thing: selling your work.

Then, when sales become regular, another question inevitably appears:

how do I report all of this?

For a US-based artist, there is no single nationwide equivalent of the French artiste-auteur status.

Your obligations depend on how your activity is structured and where you live and operate.

Many artists begin as sole proprietors. If you operate a business or profession as a sole proprietor, the IRS generally uses Schedule C (Form 1040) to report business income and expenses. Self-employed people may also owe self-employment tax and may need to make estimated tax payments during the year.

That does not mean every artist needs to form an LLC before making a first sale.

The US Small Business Administration notes that a sole proprietorship can arise simply by doing business without registering another business structure. An LLC, corporation, partnership, DBA, state registration, or local license may become relevant depending on your situation and location.

So the principle I would keep is simple:

once selling your work becomes a real business activity, treat it like one and keep proper records from the beginning.

For the exact setup, check the current federal, state, county, and city rules that apply to you, and get professional advice when the amounts or complexity justify it.

Sales Tax Is Not VAT

For a US artist, the tax question is very different from the French VAT system.

The United States does not have one national sales-tax rate for artwork. Sales tax is primarily a state and local issue, and the rules can vary substantially from one jurisdiction to another.

Whether you need to register and collect sales tax can depend on where your business is located, where your buyer is located, whether you have physical or economic nexus in a state, what you sell, and how much activity you have there.

That is why I would not memorize one threshold and assume it applies everywhere.

A marketplace may collect and remit sales tax on certain marketplace transactions, but that does not automatically answer every question about sales made through your own website.

Tools such as Stripe Tax can help calculate tax and monitor potential registration obligations, but the important distinction is this: software can help with the calculation; it does not replace the need to know where you are actually required to register and collect.

When your sales start reaching enough states or enough volume for this to matter, verify the current rules for the jurisdictions involved.

Receipts, Invoices, and Recordkeeping

The US does not use one universal VAT-style invoice format for every artwork sale.

But good records still matter enormously.

You should be able to reconstruct what you sold, when you sold it, the price, the customer, the payment, any sales tax collected, shipping charges, refunds, and the expenses connected with your business.

That information becomes useful for taxes, bookkeeping, customer service, insurance, and simply understanding whether your activity is actually profitable.

And as sales accumulate, the repetitive administrative work accumulates with them.

That is exactly the kind of task I wanted Khroma to simplify.

When an artwork is sold, the platform already knows the artist, the customer, the artwork, the price, and the transaction.

Khroma can therefore generate the sales document from the transaction instead of asking the artist to enter the same information again.

If the order is later refunded, the corresponding records can be updated as well.

The artist still has to enter their business information correctly and make sure it remains up to date.

But my principle remains the same:

if the system already has the information needed to perform a repetitive task correctly, it should not ask the artist to do that task manually again.

Returns and Online Orders in the United States

This is one of the areas where a direct translation of a European guide would be misleading.

The United States does not have the EU’s general 14-day withdrawal right for ordinary online purchases. The FTC’s three-day Cooling-Off Rule does not apply to sales made entirely online, by mail, or by telephone.

That makes your own return and refund policy especially important, while state laws can add requirements of their own.

Federal rules still matter for online orders. Under the FTC’s Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule, a seller must have a reasonable basis for the shipping time it promises. If no shipping time is stated, the general rule is that the order should ship within 30 days. If you cannot ship on time, the customer must be given the appropriate choice between accepting the delay and canceling for a refund.

For an artist, the practical lesson is simple:

publish a clear return, refund, and shipping policy before you start taking orders.

Be especially clear about original works, commissioned pieces, damage in transit, return shipping, and the time window you offer for returns.

Selling the Physical Artwork Does Not Mean Selling the Copyright

This principle translates very well to the United States.

When a customer buys one of my paintings, the physical painting belongs to them.

They can hang it in their home.

Give it away.

Resell it.

But buying the physical object does not automatically transfer the copyright in the artwork.

US copyright law explicitly distinguishes ownership of copyright from ownership of the material object in which the work is embodied.

So buying one of my paintings does not automatically give someone the right to make 500 posters from it, sell T-shirts using its image, or use it in an advertising campaign.

Owning the painting and owning the rights to reproduce or commercially exploit the artwork are two different things.

If specific rights are going to be transferred or licensed, that should be handled separately and documented clearly.

Official Sources for Checking the Rules

For US readers, the main references I would start with are the IRS Self-Employed Individuals Tax Center and Schedule C information, the U.S. Small Business Administration for business structure and registration, Stripe Tax’s US documentation for an operational overview of state sales-tax registration and collection, the Federal Trade Commissionfor online-order shipping rules, and the U.S. Copyright Office for the distinction between ownership of an artwork and ownership of copyright.

For international shipping from the United States, the International Trade Administration’s export documentation guideand EEI guidance are useful starting points.

You Do Not Need to Master All of This Before You Start

Taken together, shipping, insurance, customs, business registration, income tax, self-employment tax, sales tax, returns, and copyright can make it feel as though you need to understand everything before selling your first painting.

You do not.

I certainly did not start out knowing how to do all of this.

I learned as the problems appeared.

The first time I had to ship a painting, I learned how to package it.

When I started selling internationally, I learned what I needed in order to do that.

And as my business grew, new questions appeared.

That is probably the most important advice I can give for this entire section:

do not try to master everything before your first sale. Learn what you need when you need it.

And when a subject becomes important or complex enough, get professional help rather than trying to become an artist, accountant, tax specialist, and lawyer all at once.

Conclusion: Build Around Your Art Without Losing Sight of What Matters

When I listed my first paintings on eBay in September 2005, I had no idea how much I would eventually have to learn.

I wanted to paint.

I wanted to sell enough to buy more canvases, more paint, and keep going.

That was pretty much my entire strategy.

Then one sale led to another.

I learned how to photograph my work better.

How to present it.

How to price it.

How to package it.

How to build my own website.

How to attract visitors.

How to sell internationally.

How to communicate with people who appreciated my work.

And little by little, I built an entire business around my painting.

More than twenty years later, after thousands of artwork sales, I still do not believe there is a magic formula for selling art online.

But there is one thing I am convinced of:

selling an artwork is not simply a matter of putting it online and waiting for someone to buy it.

You have to create the conditions that allow that connection to happen.

Someone needs to be able to discover your work.

Understand what you do.

See the artwork properly.

Know the price.

Trust you enough to buy it.

Be able to pay easily.

Receive the artwork in good condition.

And ideally, want to keep following your work afterward.

All of that has to be built.

Do Not Try to Recreate Another Artist’s Path

My path is mine.

I sold a great deal on eBay, built my own websites, attracted a huge number of visitors through Google, expanded my reach through YouTube, worked with galleries, and sold both in France and internationally.

But that absolutely does not mean an artist starting today should follow the same steps.

The internet has changed. The platforms and tools have changed too.

And above all, artists are different.

Some will be very comfortable in front of a camera. Others will prefer writing. Some will grow through social media, others through Google, a gallery, a marketplace, art fairs, or a local community.

You do not need to be everywhere.

What matters most is understanding what each channel can offer and building something that fits the way you work.

A First Sale Is Only the Beginning

Selling one painting is one thing.

Building a business that can sell work consistently is something else.

After a sale, I find it much more interesting to ask why it happened.

How did that person discover my work?

What made them want to buy that particular piece?

What gave them enough confidence to pay for it?

And above all: will they be able to find my work again easily six months from now or two years from now?

Little by little, the goal is to build something that makes the next sale a little less dependent on luck.

That is when the website, Google, content, the newsletter, existing customers, and all the other elements we have discussed begin to work together.

And Above All, Keep Making Art

There is still one trap.

When you spend enough time building everything that allows you to sell your work, you can end up spending an enormous amount of time doing everything except creating.

I know that problem very well.

A website to manage.

Artworks to publish.

Copy to write.

Translations.

Customers.

Shipping.

Invoices.

Administrative work.

And all of those small tasks eventually add up to an enormous amount of time.

That is also one of the reasons I created Khroma.

Not because I think a tool can build an artistic career for an artist.

It cannot create a good artwork for you.

It cannot build your creative world.

It cannot force someone to like your work.

And it obviously cannot guarantee that you will sell.

But it can try to remove some of the technical, administrative, and repetitive work that builds up around the creative process.

After more than twenty years, my goal has not actually changed all that much from the one I had when I sold my first paintings.

Keep painting.

Everything else should help make that possible.

Sell Your Art Online With Khroma

Your artist website, with the option to apply to the marketplace.

→ Discover Khroma

Frequently Asked Questions About Selling Art Online

How Do You Sell Your Art Online as an Artist?

Start simple: an artwork to sell, a clear price, and a place where someone can actually buy it.

Then focus on desire and trust: strong photographs, enough information about the artwork, a simple payment process, and clear shipping terms.

Then comes the main challenge: getting people to discover your work.

That can happen through Google, social media, YouTube, a marketplace, exhibitions, or other channels.

You do not need to have everything in place on day one.

Start with a few properly presented artworks, then improve your system gradually.

Where Can You Sell Art Online?

The two main options are marketplaces and your own website.

A marketplace can give you access to an audience that already exists, but your work is presented alongside many other artists.

Your own website takes more work to attract visitors, but it allows you to present your world without competing artworks around yours and to build a direct relationship with buyers.

For me, the two can work very well together.

That is also the idea behind Khroma: allow every artist to create their own website and, if they choose, apply separately to publish their work on the marketplace.

Do You Need Your Own Website to Sell Art?

No.

I started selling paintings on eBay before I had my own website.

But if you want to build your activity over several years, I think having your own website becomes extremely important.

It is a space that belongs to you, where you can present your work, available pieces, your background, and make it easy for interested people to find you again.

It is also the place where Google, social media, YouTube, a marketplace, or your newsletter can ultimately send people.

If I were starting again today, I would build my own website very early.

How Do You Price a Painting or Artwork?

There is no universal formula that automatically determines the “right” price for an artwork.

The most important thing is to build a consistent pricing logic.

Size, medium, costs, your background, the prices of your other works, previous sales, and demand for your work can all serve as reference points.

Personally, I started very early with a formula based on the dimensions of my paintings. It did not decide the value of my work for me, but it gave me a consistent baseline for setting prices and gradually increasing them over the years.

You also need to think about what will actually remain after any commissions, payment fees, packaging, shipping, and taxes.

To help artists start from something more useful than a random number, we also created an artwork price calculatoron Khroma.

It obviously does not claim to determine the value of an artwork. Its purpose is to help build a coherent starting price from several criteria, which the artist remains free to adjust.

→ Free tool: Khroma artwork price calculator

Do You Need to Register a Business to Sell Art?

Not necessarily before your very first sale, but once selling your work becomes a real business activity, you need to report the income and follow the rules that apply to your situation.

Many US artists begin as sole proprietors. Sole proprietors generally report business income and expenses on Schedule C, and self-employment tax and estimated tax payments may apply.

Whether you also need a state registration, DBA, local business license, sales-tax registration, or a different business structure depends on where you live, where you do business, and how your activity is organized.

The important thing is not to assume that “artist” means “outside the normal business and tax rules.” Keep good records and check the federal, state, and local requirements that apply to you.

How Do You Find Customers for Your Art?

I would not try to be everywhere.

I would start by choosing one main way to get discovered: Google, Instagram, YouTube, a marketplace, exhibitions, or another channel that fits my work.

Then I would make it easy for people who are genuinely interested to find my artwork again and keep following me.

And above all, I would do something I personally neglected for far too long:

clearly tell people that my work is for sale and explain where they can find it.

People can appreciate your work for years without necessarily knowing they are able to buy it.

How Do You Package a Painting for Shipping?

For my paintings, I mainly use several layers of bubble wrap followed by sheets of cardboard that I adapt to the size of the artwork.

I deliberately use a lot of protection: to give you a sense of scale, I can easily end up with around 5 cm (about 2 in) of protection on each side.

The painting should be held securely, the corners protected, and the packaging rigid enough to withstand transport.

For very large or particularly valuable works, a reinforced shipping crate, pallet, or even a wooden crate may be necessary.

It is generally better to use a little too much protection than not enough.

Can You Sell Your Art Internationally?

Yes, and I think it would be a shame not to.

In my case, the United States actually became my largest market.

There are a few additional things to plan for: a website the buyer can understand, shipping costs, appropriate packaging, and, when the artwork crosses an international border, the necessary customs documentation and procedures.

It can seem complicated during the first few shipments.

Then, like many things in this business, you gradually learn how to handle it.

What Type of Art Sells Best Online?

I would be very cautious about the idea that there is one type of art that always sells better than everything else.

In my own career, my abstract work sold much more easily at the beginning, while about fifteen years later, galleries came to me specifically for my street art and Pop Art work.

What sells can change with time, audience, and context.

So I prefer to pay attention to what sales teach me without starting to create solely according to what seems to work at a particular moment.

Do You Need a Certificate of Authenticity to Sell an Artwork?

For an original artwork, I think a certificate of authenticity can help build buyer confidence and, above all, create a clear record of the artwork and its origin.

It can include the artist’s name, title, date of creation, dimensions, medium, support, a photograph, and the artist’s signature. For an edition, it can also include the edition number.

The certificate’s main purpose is to document and identify the artwork. It does not create the artwork and, by itself, does not transfer copyright.