The best platform for selling art online

Every so often, people ask Brian what he's been up to since he retired back in February. He usually answers, truthfully, that he hasn't tackled any big new projects; instead, he's just doing more of the things he used to do outside of work. For example, he's spending more time in the garden, on his bike, and on the couch reading books. But he has also embarked, with my help, on one little project we haven't revealed until now: a shop to sell his artwork.

Folks who were around back when this blog first got started may recall that it was originally an offshoot of Brian's blog, Modern Troll, which he used mainly to share his drawings. After I started mine, he let his fall by the wayside and hasn't updated it since 2010. But I always had this vague idea that it would be cool at some point to make some of his art available to fans in a physical form, like posters or T-shirts. So, once he was officially retired and had some time to spare, I suggested setting up an online store for this purpose.

The first thing we did was go through his collection of artwork and select various pieces we thought might be appropriate for different uses. For instance, we thought this piece, which I've dubbed "Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear," would work well on a T-shirt, as would his "Killer Tofu" sketch (which I envisioned with a snarky caption like, "Don't mess with Soy Boy"). Some of his bigger pieces, like "Mind" and this cartoon inspired by a trip to the Grounds for Sculpture, seemed suitable for posters. And a few of his little sketches, like this little guy, looked like they'd be nice for note cards.

Once we'd figured out what kinds of merch we wanted to sell, I started looking at websites that offered these types of products on a print-on-demand basis. That way, instead of having to order a whole batch of, say, 100 shirts and then try to find buyers for them (and a place to store them in the meantime), we could just list our choices online and wait until someone placed an order to print one up and ship it out. The two most familiar sites of this type are Redbubble and Zazzle, which have the advantage of a wide reach, making it easy for people to find the products they sell. The downside was that these sites charge both high prices for shoppers and high fees for sellers. For instance, the base price for a T-shirt on RedBubble—not counting the artist's cut—is $20.39. You can set your own markup on top of that, but with a basic account, RedBubble also keeps half of all your earnings as an account fee. So if Brian were to charge, say $24 for a T-shirt—which is more than he'd personally consider a reasonable price—he'd only get to keep $1.80 in profit for each shirt sold. Zazzle is a little more generous, keeping only 30 percent of the profits, and the base price for the cheapest "value" T-shirt is only $16.24. That means we could price them at a slightly more reasonable $20 and earn $2.63 per shirt—better, but still not great.

We also considered alternatives like Printify and Printful. These stores charge only a base price for the materials (for example, a unisex T-shirt from Printful costs $9.44) and you can decide how much profit you want to tack on top of that. The catch is that these sites provide only the printing; you have to set up your own online store to sell your products through another site. If we used a platform like Shopify for this, we'd have to pay a monthly fee of at least $29, which we'd almost certainly never sell enough product to cover. If we went with Etsy, we'd pay a one-time fee (of an unspecified amount) to set up the store, plus a multitude of other fees for product listings, sales, and payment processing. For a little store like Brian's, all these fees would probably more than eat up all our profits—and while we weren't expecting to make much money from selling Brian's designs, we weren't willing to set ourselves up to lose money.

Eventually, we settled on a platform that seemed like a happy medium: Fourthwall. It allows you to set up your online store right on the site, with no up-front fee and no listing fees for its basic plan. There's no fee for sales, either; all you pay to the site is a reasonable flat fee for its materials ($11.75 for a unisex tee, for instance, or $5.50 for a matte poster). You can set your own final price, so how much you earn on each sale is up to you. The site handles sales and customer support for you. It even has an AI assistant to help you create your designs (though, once I figured out what I was doing, I found it easier to go in and build the products myself).

So, without further ado, it is my pleasure to present Modern Troll Designs. So far, we've only created listings for a small handful of products (two T-shirts, a poster, and a notecard), but I thought we'd go ahead and unveil the store now so we could get feedback on these few products, and on the layout of the store itself, before adding more. Check it out and let me know what you think. And if you're a fan of Brian's art who would like to put in a request for a specific product featuring one of his pieces, like a sticker or a mug or something, let me know—we can probably make it happen.