I am a painter and I already have a website but I want to build another one that has a shopping cart. I will be uploading lots of images on the site. I dont really want to use etsy as I want to direct people directly to my website.Thanks for the ideas!
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thanks greta! Those prices are very good! I wil check it out. I like that there is a mobile version
Thanks for all of the suggestions! I really appreciate the input. Linda
Linda,
A friend of mine has used her own website and set up the purchasing with PayPal. I am in the process of revising our website and I will be incorporating the pay pal payment option into our gallery area. Fairly easy to set up and use. Perhaps you might want to look into that.
B. David Kay
You can use PayPal with virtually any web site. The difficulty is in adding multiple items to a gallery, and having to code each item separately. The key to a good artist's web site is gallery management -- the interface, the ease of uploading new images and pricing them, keeping track of inventory (if necessary), and so on.
Manually managing sales via PayPal and coding it yourself is possible, but cumbersome in practice, unless you only have a few items on sale. I used a Lightroom plug-in for several years (LRG PayPal), but it isn't supported in the latest iteration of Lightroom. That's when I migrated to a hosted model, rather than writing my own.
That's why gallery and shopping site software is so popular, and so useful. All the heavy lifting is done for you, and you only need to deal with managing your own content. Sure, it's easy to add an item via PayPal. They even have a little configurator tool online that you can use to create the code snippets, with options, that you paste into your page. But multiply that times 200 images, and it is unworkable, unless you are masochistic by nature.
You are definitely better off using a template like Photocrati, or integrating a gallery system like ZenFolio, into your existing website if you want to do your website development. Then the problem is more of style integration than back-end coding.
ZenFolio also has a very good cart system, and many options for setting it up. It has a tiered subscription-based pricing model, and for most artists, the $120/yr would be sufficient. I use it, and find that the gallery uploading hooks to Lightroom and Aperture work flawlessly.
If you like WordPress, Photocrati also has a built-in gallery system. You can host it on BlueHost, or any number of other sites, but you have to install it yourself. It's not hard, and the basic template with 65 "looks" is around $85: a one-time purchase.
Both of these are slanted towards photographers, but as a 2-D artist, most of the features and functions will work well for you as well.
If you like ZenFolio, you can use my referral code that will save you a bit in the first year. I think it's a 10% discount. Use code 9BP-ZYX-ECM when you sign up.
i appreciate your input and thanks for the discount code!
Off topic, but Jim, do you have one of the Zenfolio labs do your printing with orders from the websight?
No, but I could cherry pick from mPix or Millers, or a number of sources if I wanted to.
Hi Linda. Great questions. There are many better resources out there. I particularly like IndieMade.com. This company was started by Jennifer Peterson, an artist and geek, who "gets" all this end of web building and also knows about marketing art. It has beautiful interfaces, lots of gallery space, good ecommerce built in and ongoing support for marketing ideas and up-to-date tech stuff to help you out. I think you'll be surprised how easy this is.
I did a podcast with her this winter and it is full of tips to help you make this choice: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/artfairs/2013/01/16/are-you-homeless
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