How I Started Selling Physical Art Online

The act of selling physical art for the first time has felt deeply rewarding. Having run my pen plot shop for just over a month now, I thought I’d share a small behind the scenes look at the logistics involved, as well as some statistics.

Initially, I explored Shopify as a possible storefront but I quickly found myself overwhelmed by its feature rich UI, which felt unintuitive as a new user. Having seen several Big Cartel shops before, I decided to give them a try instead. I'm very happy I did, as their product's ease of use and refined feature set for creators were exactly what I was looking for.

The pieces in the shop are all pen plotted on 5x7" paper using an AxiDraw V3/A3. Depending on the piece, the plot time ranges between roughly 5 to 25 minutes. Once completed, the work is sealed in a protective sleeve and shipped out in a hard cardboard envelope. Because the pieces are plotted on smaller-scale paper the reduced size of the envelope allows for relatively cheaper shipping rates.

The top 5 most viewed and ordered pen plots rank pretty similarly. A clear favourite has been the series of works that “break” an object by displacing elements within it (pictured above) — all of which were created in the open source software Inkscape.

So far, 26 orders have shipped out to 6 different countries, resulting in the sale of 34 pen plots, and generating a total of $1,440 CAD in revenue. The day with the most orders and highest traffic was on March 13th when kottke.org wrote a blog post about my art. Thank you, Jason!

It's a really cool feeling knowing my art has found some new homes. Thanks to everyone who has purchased a pen plot so far! Shop link: adamfuhrer.bigcartel.com

Adam Fuhrer — 2024·03·28