Online Art Selling Channels Gain a Foothold
WHAT HAS CHANGED?
In 2008, having a “solid online strategy” for a contemporary art dealer generally meant having a good website with an easy-to-remember domain name, a strong presence on Artnet, and perhaps a gallery page on Facebook that promoted upcoming events. Actually selling contemporary art online was a very rare occasion. By 2015, though, there were many more new considerations for a “solid online strategy,” including having a presence on Twitter and Instagram at the very least; a gallery Tumblr site perhaps; a prominent presence on Artsy, Artnet, and Artspace; pages with videos on Vimeo and YouTube; savvy usage of Paddle8, FirstDibs, Amazon, Artviatic, etc.; and even perhaps proprietary ideas about turning one’s own website into an e-commerce platform. Online business consultants whom an art dealer might hire to advise them about strategies and best practices had to admit that what they said at any point would very likely be significantly outdated six months from then. Nowhere in the art industry were things moving as quickly and confusingly as online, especially when it came to knowing how to combine all this to increase sales.
Indeed, in March 2015, London-based art dealer and art market pundit Kenny Schachter linked from his Facebook account to an article on the New York Times website about the online art market and declared “art sales and the internet isn’t working now and won’t—until there are paradigm shifting changes in technology. Sure it’s deal for prints and photos or resale to people in the know; but, other than communicating what is out there to be seen, it ain’t gonna happen anytime soon, nor should it.” Schachter is well known for perhaps unconventional opinions, but not for being conservative about the art market or its future directions, making this declaration a good indication of the way many art dealers most likely still feel about the potential the Internet has to revolutionize the contemporary art market. Indeed, many dealers don’t see the revolution coming any time soon, nor do they wish for what the Internet did to the music or book industries to happen to the art industry. The fact that what they wish for may be clouding their assessment of what’s actually happening here shouldn’t be discounted.
In an interview about her 2015 edition of the TEFAF Art Market Report, economist Clare McAndrew noted that the “big trends” she noticed in the art market in 2014 were the art fairs and the online market.1 Her new report put the estimated total for online art sales in 2014 at about €3.3 billion, or $3.5 billion. An earlier report published by the specialist insurance company Hiscox, The Hiscox Online Art Trade Report 2014, had estimated total online art sales for 2013 to be about $1.57 billion and predicted that would “rise to $3.76 billion in 2018.”2 In their 2015 report, which came out right before this manuscript went to my editor, Hiscox had estimated the global online art market had risen to $2.64 billion in 2014 (still under the TEFAF estimate) and projected it would reach $6.3 billion by 2019.3 All of which demonstrates either that the online market is rising more quickly than experts have anticipated or, again, how the opaque nature of the art market makes it difficult for experts to agree on how to measure such totals.
Even splitting the difference to guesstimate that the global online art sales total for 2014 was between $2.5 and $3 billion, this is still less than 10 percent of the estimated overall art market for that year, suggesting that there is time before contemporary art galleries go the way of music or book stores. Indeed, the Hiscox 2014 report concluded that for the foreseeable future, “physical galleries and auction houses are likely to thrive, as their online component becomes another important part of the customer journey— . . . it is not so much about where the sale takes place, but rather how an online strategy could influence potential buyers to transact.”2
And yet, $2–3 billion (and growing) is enough money that any ambitious art dealer should not entirely discount the potential of online channels to help them increase sales. Toward that end, and as McAndrew noted, it may require looking at online sales in the contemporary art market from a new perspective to make total sense of it:
The development of the online art space is very much themed towards the democratization of art, bridging the gap between the elite world of top collectors and the general public, and making art more accessible. However, many of the highest-spending top collectors of art do not need any alternatives to the top auction houses and galleries so online sales at the high end are still very small. For art buyers below the highest levels, the online art space certainly makes art more accessible.1
The next section of this chapter is designed to deconstruct the business logic of online sales channels as a means of helping art dealers, who may not have much experience in this realm, make better strategic decisions for their business. Later on we’ll look at specific online art selling business models, discuss some of the various channels’ strengths or weaknesses, and finally delve into specific online business strategies for contemporary art dealers. For the purposes of this chapter, “online art sales” will refer specifically to situations that involve a third party and not merely an art dealer closing a sale after calls about the images on their own website or by emailing a client JPEGs, which I’ll assume are straightforward enough activities for most readers. As McAndrew also said in her interview, “The online space has added whole new layers of intermediaries to transactions, some of which are intermediaries to intermediaries in the offline market.” It is predominantly these online intermediaries we’ll consider in this chapter.
Basic Principles and Perceptions of Online Art Businesses
Before we look at the growing list of art selling websites or social media channels disrupting the contemporary art market, let’s discuss a few of the basic perceptions that exist about selling art via online channels. The arguments that any online art sales channel will make for why their platform will contribute to your success fall into two basic categories: (1) buyers’ convenience and (2) buyers’ comfort/access. While these are often conflated, the convenience argument is generally one made for more established fine art buyers: they can search and find the art they know they want (even if they don’t know you’re selling it) more easily online than they can by randomly visiting many physical spaces. The comfort/access argument is one made for newer fine art buyers, who may be intimidated by the legendarily icy reception or arcane rituals they have experienced or even only heard are common in physical galleries or high-profile auction houses. Moreover, the comfort/access argument is often used specifically in relation to younger wealthy consumers who demand instant access to the things they want, and, we are told, simply will not tolerate being told they are on a gallery’s waiting list. They would rather spend their money on other things than risk such humiliation.
The conventional wisdom among art dealers, though, remains that there is no need to ever post the art they have a waiting list for or their “best art” to any of the online channels. They can sell it easily enough without an intermediary, and so why would they share the commission or even publicize it that way? For secondary market sales, in particular, having any work linger online without being purchased (getting “burnt” in the eyes of potential buyers, as the saying goes) is highly undesirable. Likewise, it is assumed that top collectors have the kind of direct access to dealers that makes competing with other collectors online unnecessary. They can simply call or email the gallery and seal the deal without any fuss, and possibly even enjoy interacting directly with the dealer (stranger things have happened). Both these factors have contributed to the wide perception that the art available on any online channel is not in high demand or of the highest quality, nor do these channels appeal to the top collectors. These opinions further contribute to many art dealers’ hesitance to post artwork they wish to be viewed as being the highest quality to any online channel, making it perhaps a self-fulfilling cycle.
Therefore, the arguments many online channels make about convenience may not matter much to dealers or top collectors when there is high demand for work by particular artists, suggesting any online sales strategy should focus on artwork that is harder to sell and collectors who are still gaining prominence. That being said, at least one new online channel has begun to turn those very perceptions to their competitive advantage. ArtRank (www.artrank.com) posts only one artwork every forty-eight hours or so by an artist in “high demand,” with a listed price that usually falls below the established auction records or professed market price; a very convenient “Buy Now” button; and a first-come, first-serve policy that appeals to collectors who perhaps cannot get those popular artists’ dealers to return their calls. This is perhaps the first truly disruptive model among the online art sellers, but its reported success suggests it may not be the last to try this model.
We’ll return to ArtRank below, but to understand what to look for (or avoid) in potential online sales partners for your business, it’s important to first understand a bit about the basic principles of online businesses in general. The long and short of it for most online start-ups these days is that they initially spend a great deal of energy trying to gain the attention of investors/venture capitalists for the funding they will require to get their digital dream off the ground. Another thing many of them have in common is that the real business strategy behind much of what they do is selling their platform as soon as they can for as much profit as they can bring their investors and themselves. One of the key concepts that venture capitalists seem particularly drawn to, and hence one that makes it into many a hopeful online entrepreneur’s PowerPoint deck (for making sales pitches), is the notion of “disruptive innovation.” Coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation describes “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.”4 Faith in this process is so widespread across American businesses now that Christensen has twice been awarded the “Number 1 Management Thinker in the World,” and his best-selling books are virtually required reading in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Another way of describing disruptive innovation is that a new company finds a simpler, cheaper, more efficient way to do what established companies have been doing and eventually takes enough business away from those companies to put them out of business. For online art selling channels, the initial theory was that they could disrupt the gallery system because they would not have the overhead it would cost brick-and-mortar galleries to get their artwork before millions of untapped potential buyers. The reality so far, however, has been that many online art channels spend millions of dollars on promotions and developing software, only to find they cannot figure out how to turn a steady profit without catering to the current gallery establishment. Furthermore, it is precisely this initial notion of “displacing established competitors” that likely accounts for at least part of many experienced art dealers’ initial ambivalence or outright hostility toward online art sales channels, which becomes its own challenge for these entrepreneurs if or when they decide to change their original concepts and propose collaborating with galleries instead.
Promoting one’s start-up to venture capitalists by claiming you have “the disruptive innovation” that is going to revolutionize a particular market has a way of making it into that industry’s press and grabbing the attention of existing businesses. Aside from the hostility generated by any suggestion that this or that disruptive innovation might eventually put the established gallery system out of business, not many start-ups targeting the art market have managed to actually disrupt very much. Other than ArtRank, perhaps, I would argue none of the current online channels have accomplished true disruptive innovation in the classic sense. Not only are none of them showing signs of successfully displacing established competitors, but many have actually been forced to start catering to those established competitors, alongside insisting they never intended to displace them or be their competitors, which probably comes as a surprise to a few of the venture capitalists who initially wrote some of them checks.
I would also note here that some critics are beginning to question whether disruptive innovation is truly the business panacea Christensen has been selling it as since 1997. Jill Lepore, for example, in an extensive examination in the New Yorker of how ineffective disruptive innovation tends to be as a strategy over time, concluded it is clear now that it is not a good strategy for every industry. “When the financial-services industry disruptively innovated, it led to a global financial crisis,” she noted as one example.5
Moreover, when several of the current generation of online arts channels were launching, in or about 2011, many of them were promoting their “innovative” approaches by suggesting that art galleries were too intimidating to reach the wider field of younger potential consumers of fine art. A good example of how such opinions made it into the press is found in a 2010 Interview magazine piece on Paddle8, which, although it actually now is an online art auction platform, launched initially with a series of primary market exhibitions:
Despite its name, Paddle8 is not a web site that hosts auctions. The core of the site is a curated online group exhibition. Each month, Paddle8 invites a high-profile individual from in or around the art world to create a show, with 20 exclusive artworks available. . . .
Founded in 2010 by Alexander Gilkes, formerly the Global Marketing Director and charismatic auctioneer of Philips de Pury, and entrepreneur Aditya Julka, Paddle8 comes from the latter’s experience as a new collector buying art from intimidating galleries but craving the type of community they can engender. “[The world of art auctions] can be very clubby and esoteric,” says Gilkes. The site aims to educate, and welcome collectors to the club—and maybe loosen up the art world along the way.6 [emphasis mine]
Describing the existing gallery system as intimidating or the art world as needing to loosen up likely did not endear many of these start-ups to the very businesses many of them would later conclude (when millions of new art buyers failed to flock to their sites and buy art there) were their most likely viable source of ongoing revenue: the established art dealers. As I write, the majority of online art selling channels have tweaked their models to cater to or partner with the very brick-and-mortar galleries they initially set out to disrupt. That may be changing soon, though; this is an area of near constant change.
Compared with previous generations of online art selling channels, the current field deserves credit for their commitment to experimentation. I strongly believe the work they are doing will eventually benefit artists and collectors and will hopefully increase the overall size of the art market. The wisdom in online channels continuing to evolve is not entirely understood by the industry yet, though. In a particularly blunt op-ed about the state of online art channels published on Artnet News in late summer 2014, editor-in-chief Benjamin Genocchio took a somewhat confusing swipe at Artsy, one of the higher-profile online art sellers, writing, “Like most people, I can’t even work out what Artsy is anymore, as it changes and evolves at a rate of what seems like every five minutes in search of a business model.”7 This obvious hyperbole was confusing not only because Artnet has its own online art selling initiatives, leading many to question the op-ed’s objectivity, but also because the very nature of any successful online business is to evolve.
Indeed, in his book Viral Loop8, which explores a common component among the most successful online businesses, Adam L. Penenberg offers anecdote after anecdote within the same theme: an online entrepreneur throws some new service out onto the Internet, having designed it to solve this or that problem (even if the problem was simply the need for entertainment), and becomes successful by being savvy enough to perceive and then adapt to how online visitors are actually using the service. In short, many of their original ideas for their online businesses were not at all how customers ended up using them. PayPal, for example, was originally developed to enable people to pass money from their bank account to that of another person via Palm Pilots (a PDA, or personal digital assistant). PayPal’s eventual evolution and subsequent explosion of usage on eBay was not something its creators had initially imagined. Had they stubbornly stuck to the idea that what they had created was only designed for handheld devices, and continued to promote and develop for that concept, they would have missed becoming one of the most successful companies of the era.
Penenberg makes a really convincing argument that the online businesses that listen to and evolve with their users stand a greater chance of succeeding, suggesting that perhaps the most important thing you should consider before spending money on an online art selling channel is how well this company listens to and responds to its customers and partners. If what they’re telling you in their sales pitch does not ring true to your experience and you tell them that, yet they insist you just need to give it a try and the sales will come through, I would ask several other art dealers first about their experience with them. Don’t let them dazzle or provoke you, even with obviously sincere faith in their disruptive innovation model. Just because they believe they’re revolutionaries doesn’t mean anyone else is actually going to join them at the barricades.
Having said that, do pay attention to the values that are leading many innovators to experiment with new models for selling art online. In this digital age, when the brightest “millennial” entrepreneurs have literally grown up with the Internet, values like transparency and fairness are just not strategic positions, but often firmly held beliefs. I think it is foolish to assume these beliefs will give way to business realities entirely as they evolve. These values are as much a result of the information age as they are forming it, making it important to not simply dismiss them as youthful folly lest you miss not only a good opportunity to expand your business, but position yourself in a way that discourages younger potential clients from trusting you. For example, as discussed in Chapter 2, the concept of transparency (something the art market is known to have gone out of its way to avoid historically) was perhaps the most important factor driving Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s thinking in developing his social network:
For [Zuckerberg], Facebook is primarily a social movement, not a publishing platform: as he tells it, he is motivated not by money (he consistently refuses to sell up) but by a passion for radical transparency. Sharing our data and making our lives publicly available to each other turns us, he believes, into better people. A narrower gap between public and private reduces the potential for hypocrisy and connivance, making it harder, for example, for people to cheat on their partners.9
Not every new channel has perfectly aligned their stated values with their particular twist on some online business model, but again, the impressive array of experimentation going on at this point is often being driven by sincere principles that seem incrementally to be changing how artists believe art should be sold, which is something no primary art dealer can afford to ignore. Let’s now look more closely at some of the current online art selling business models.
Online Art Selling Business Models
Noting that their categorization reflects significant evolution within the online art selling field, the 2014 Hiscox report defined six separate online art selling business models, which are paraphrased below (they did not revise any of those categories for their 2015 report). Some channels are hybrids of these categories, but in general I think they cover the field well. The first three and the last model serve predominantly the secondary market, although that is changing in interesting ways. Models four and five are often tailored to the primary market.
1. Online-only auction: auctions that don’t have a physical space and hence buyers often cannot inspect the work before bidding
2. Bricks and clicks: auctions with both physical spaces and online methods for bidding and possibly paying, with increased probability the work is available for inspection before the sale
3. Online auction aggregator: platforms that provide online bidding for physical auction houses
4. Online gallery/marketplace: any non-auction platform (either part of a physical space or a gallery that exists entirely online) that lets buyers immediately purchase artworks sight unseen using a “click to buy” function
5. Inquire to buy: a variation of the online auction or online gallery that lists details and prices (and usually, but not always, images) that requires interested buyers to make an inquiry to the seller, rather than clicking to buy or bidding online
6. Peer-to-peer: any platform that connects buyers and sellers directly with each other, but usually still requires a fee for this service
In an article in the New York Times in March 2015, Scott Reyburn calculated, “There are now more than 40 specialist dot-com companies selling or facilitating the sale of artworks, primarily in the $1,000 to $50,000 range. And those sales are growing.”10 Appendix B lists all the online art selling channels I could locate in early 2015 that could conceivably offer contemporary art galleries some advantage in using them (several of them sell art far beyond the $50,000 price point), their areas of specialty, locations, and their current business model. I would expect some of these models to continue to evolve. As quickly as things are moving in this arena, I would also expect that Appendix B will be somewhat out of date by the time you read it.
Because this book is devoted to the primary market, the following discussion focuses on the “online gallery/marketplace” and “inquire to buy” models, but it should be noted that some online-only auctions do not exclude primary market consignments. Artnet, for example, regularly invites primary market gallery owners to consign artworks for their online auctions. The terms by which they solicit consignments include:
• No charge to register as a seller
• $25 listing fee per piece
• Artnet takes 10 percent commission of the selling price
• Seller is anonymous until the point of sale. Once there is a successful bid, the seller is put in contact with the buyer
• The auction results do not go into the Artnet database, so if something doesn’t sell, it doesn’t get “burnt”
• If something doesn’t sell, they relist it for free
• You can post artwork when you like
Galleries’ posting of primary market artwork to auction sites is currently a controversial practice, especially among artists, but even as many dealers strongly object to how the major auction houses are encroaching on the primary market, savvy use of online auctions to place work that is not selling out of the gallery or in fairs is very likely going to increase. I will note how curious it seems that Artnet, who sells data on brick-and-mortar auction results, whether the works were “burnt” or not, but does not enforce the same transparency for their own online auctions. I understand that appeal of that, but it remains a curious discrepancy.
We will examine the “peer-to-peer” model below as well. Even though it currently serves the secondary market, some of the most interesting and potentially game-changing innovations in the online realm are happening there. Finally, as we examine some example platforms, keep in mind that experimentation and evolution are simply part of how online channels do business, meaning these models are very likely to keep changing.
Online Gallery / Marketplace
Again, what distinguishes an “online gallery” from the other models is its “click to buy now” functionality. Given this is the quick and convenient online shopping experience in which tomorrow’s art collectors have been raised, I am grateful to those experimenting with it in the contemporary art market, not least because at least someone else is forced to sort through the trickier logistical issues for selling artworks in this model (such as specialized inventory storage needs, crating and shipping methods that meet online sales expectations, returns policies, level of demand for condition reports or certificates of authenticity, etc.). Below we’ll look at two platforms arguably at the opposite extremes within the online gallery model: Artfinder and ArtRank.
Based in the UK and led by CEO Jonas Almgren, one of the founders of the short-lived (but for my gallery, anyway, profitable) VIP online art fair, the current iteration of Artfinder (www.artfinder.com) was launched in 2013. It is among the newest players in the online gallery category and is indicative of an increasing blurring of hierarchy and silos within the online art market. Specifically, Artfinder features artworks presented by a range of commercial galleries, editions publishers, and nonprofit institutions, plus work presented directly by artists themselves. In early 2015, they had yet to convince many of what would be considered the world’s top galleries to sign on, with a total of 123 gallery and nonprofit spaces listed as partners compared with nearly 5,700 individual artists on the site, suggesting that artists were finding the platform more productive that art dealers were, or perhaps that dealers preferred a context without individual artists selling their work alongside them. Artfinder also has a “Sale” page, with works discounted as much as 75 percent, another contextual situation that many art dealers would likely prefer not to be associated with.
The Artfinder platform does assure uniqueness, one of the strong preferences held by online art buyers, according to the Hiscox report. While more-established art selling platforms may argue that of course they only showcase unique works of art, by addressing this directly, Artfinder seems to be targeting the wider potential market of new art buyers, who likely gain confidence by having that spelled out clearly on the site. Artfinder highlights their “14 day no risk money back guarantee” as well, another factor that Hiscox noted “ranks highly in establishing buyer confidence.”2 Other features on the site, including pages titled “Start your art collection,” “Hang art like a pro,” and “Buy art on an art fair,” confirm that they view leading new art buyers by the hand as a central part of their business strategy.
While other online channels will say they are interested in developing new markets for their partners, most of their energies and the tone of their sites seems focused on maintaining credibility within the top sector of the established contemporary art market. Artfinder may have room to grow in its gallery partner list, but if they can truly deliver on converting art lovers into art buyers, they may have the ultimate advantage over the long haul. In late 2014, Almgren told Bloomberg Business that in less than two years Artfinder had “sold art to about 10,000 customers from 55 countries.”11
Based in California and very briefly called “Sell You Later,” ArtRank (www.artrank.com) changed its name shortly after being launched in February 2014. To say it made a splash is an understatement. News outlets around the world have done major feature articles about it, and art world insiders have all but put pictures of its founder, former art dealer Carlos Rivera, on their dartboards. The platform’s initial service—providing algorithmic-based forecasts on the markets of hot emerging artists within a structure much more associated with the stock market and using categories ranging from “Buy Now <$10,000” to “Sell Now/ Peaking” to “Liquidate”—continues to be highly controversial. According to an article in the London newspaper The Guardian, “ArtRank isn’t the first service to offer market insight (the pricing database Artnet Worldwide springs to mind, alongside ArtTactic, the market trends firm that recently estimated the art market is controlled by 150 people with resources to spend $20m on a single work of art); it’s just the first to rank artists as starkly as a stock-pick.”12
Limited to ten subscribers at a time, who pay $3,500 a quarter, ArtRank’s premium service (that is, access to each quarter’s analysis weeks before everyone else gets it) has a long waiting list. In early 2015, however, ArtRank unveiled an online “instant private sales” component, open to anyone with an Internet connection, that smartly capitalized on the self-contained ecosystem its ranking reports permitted. Called “#buytoday,” and promoting only one work of art three times a week from the list of artists it tracks, its online sales pitch includes the type of information other online sales channels provide—concise bios of the artists, quality images and essential details, and the retail price—but ArtRank does two things no other online gallery/marketplace model has yet found a way to do. First, it gives potential buyers, through its archive of forecasts, a good sense of how much demand there is for each listed artist’s work, but it doesn’t make them outbid other interested buyers on the secondary market the way auctions do, driving the price up and muddying the true market value. Second, it reveals information that many potential online art buyers say in the Hiscox report that they wish they had easy access to: comparable pricing. Each listing includes the primary market price for the work, the #buytoday price (which has always been lower), as well as, again, a sense of where this artist’s overall market is heading, so buyers can make a much more informed decision about the price.
Much of the controversy surrounding ArtRank centers on its highlighting the commodity value rather than the cultural value of the art. I feel the rancor Carlos Rivera incurred by launching ArtRank is misplaced. While he is indeed earning money by contextualizing emerging art in this way, Rivera’s much more of a true believer than his critics seem to give him credit for. Having been what he admits was “a pretty terrible gallerist,” he understands full well the frustration of watching nonstop headlines about inexplicable record auction prices, particularly in the emerging sector of the contemporary art market, taint an art dealer’s ability to focus more attention on the cultural value of an artwork.
I interviewed Rivera in early 2014 and then followed up with him again in 2015. When we first talked, a year before ArtRank launched #buytoday, he told me, “I think the ideal art market model online is actually allowing people to buy good works of art, democratizing what’s available. But you can’t go online and buy a good [redacted hot-selling artist’s name]. Those are held or on reserve, and they’re on reserve for better collectors than you and I. And I don’t know how to properly democratize that in responsible ways that would disallow flippers from buying it, but there’s got to be a way, and that just hasn’t been figured out yet.” With #buytoday, I believe ArtRank sorted out a fair bit of that challenge, and may be one of the sites leading the entire online market toward greater transparency. It is a much smaller operation than many other online channels, so whether its size becomes a factor in its longevity remains to be seen.
Inquire to Buy
Unlike channels using the online gallery/marketplace model, an “inquire to buy” channel doesn’t have a “buy now” option, but rather some online means of letting interested buyers inquire about the artwork. The advantage for potential partners with the channel is they don’t have to split their sales commissions, but usually they need to pay some subscription fee to have a presence on the platform. Below we’ll look at one “inquire to buy” channel that serves galleries (Artsy). Appendix B includes only one other “inquire to buy” channel (Barnebys), but it serves auction houses and it’s difficult to imagine just how it might influence any individual art dealer’s online decisions.
In early 2015, Artsy (www.artsy.net) was getting perhaps the lion’s share of attention in this category, at least among US galleries. There is a level of prestige associated with being on Artsy for galleries because, initially at least, a presence on the platform was by invitation only. Also, they threw legendarily glitzy parties, stocked with high-profile art world celebrities, which received plenty of coverage in the arts press.
They also had an interesting story behind what made them different from other online art selling channels, which also brought lots of mainstream press. The Artsy platform’s integrated Art Genome Project has been compared to the online music listening platform Pandora, which recommends new songs you might like based on what you tell it you currently like. As arts journalist Dan Duray described it in a thorough review of online platforms in early 2014, “If a user tells Artsy he likes ‘irregular curvilinear forms,’ Artsy would then find other artworks that offer them, by the likes of John Bock and Alexander Calder.”13 With over a thousand categories, including “art historical movements,” “subject matter,” and “formal qualities,” the Art Genome Project is designed to encourage new discoveries among visitors, which is particularly appealing for dealers with emerging artists.
Like many online channels, Artsy also has editorial coverage of the art world, and particularly of the art fairs, many of which they have partnered with to create online digital fair catalogs. In full disclosure, Moving Image, the art fair I co-founded with Murat Orozobekov, has partnered with Artsy for our online catalog for many years now. Artsy is also heavily involved in art education, permitting instructors to download tens of thousands of select images from their site for educational purposes, among other initiatives.
Artsy provides its gallery partners with an online interface where they can add images and data for each artwork, post information about their exhibitions, and edit any of their gallery information as they need when works sell or they move, and so on. In mid-2013, Artsy stopped charging a commission for sales made via inquiries from their site (something they had to rely on galleries to report) and switched to a gallery subscription model that they have said is finally bringing them steady revenue. There are three levels in the subscription model (prices current as of March 2015):
1. Artsy Standard (about US$400/month), which includes a gallery profile page that partners maintain themselves, unlimited artwork listings, ten genomes added to your artwork inventory per month, email alerts, and use of their iPad app, Artsy Folio
2. Artsy Preferred (US$600/month), which includes the full standard package, plus four editorial features a year, an increase to thirty genomes per month, preferred placement of partners’ exhibitions or art fair booths across the platform, and monthly analytics reports
3. Artsy Premium ($1400/month), which includes the full standard and preferred packages and “guaranteed promotion on the site’s highest-traffic pages, extensive editorial coverage, and private sales services via Artsy’s team of Specialists,” but is available by invitation only
Converting grandfathered galleries who previously paid Artsy only if they sold artwork via their site to monthly subscribers has reportedly gone well, although not every such dealer I have spoken with said they would sign up. In New York, where many arts platforms are born, there has been a strong tendency among dealers who initially received free promotions or listings on websites not to agree to pay when such platforms later decided to start charging, as many a former arts channel entrepreneur can attest. Often the dealers’ rationale is a lack of evidence that the free promotions they were happy to try had actually led to sales. They also knew there was no shortage of other start-ups willing to promote them for free, as well. As of this writing, though, Artsy does seem to have done a good job convincing a large number of galleries of the value of their paid services.
Artsy’s promised editorial coverage for higher-level subscribers is a bit controversial, though. While they are not considered a “news” channel, per se, Artsy’s articles do read like the objective journalism you find elsewhere, and so some people have grumbled that they represent a conflict of interest. Artsy doesn’t deny that their coverage favors certain subscribers, however, which seems ample disclosure for the context.
Peer-to-Peer
The basic idea behind the “peer-to-peer” model is cutting out the middleman. While this could mean cutting out the art dealer and connecting buyers with artists or other collectors, with most of the online platforms introducing an additional intermediary into the mix, it can also means simply that the channel exists to connect any buyer to any seller and stay out of their way as much as possible, as well as protect their identities as much as possible. Indeed, Kenneth Schlenker, co-founder and CEO at ArtList—one of the peer-to-peer channels we’ll look at in this section—explained the principles behind his site’s innovative approach to privacy in the comments section of a story about the platform:
[M]any of the existing art start-ups treat art as a public consumer market. In fact, fine art is a private market—where information is not transparent, and access and reputation matter. Technology is making the art market more transparent, but won’t make it a public market. We’re building technology that makes transactions on this private market faster, more secure and fair.14
ArtList (www.artlist.co) reportedly grew out of conversations emerging from another online initiative, Gertrude (www.gertrude.co), the goal of which was to facilitate international salon-style events designed to educate fledging collectors and introduce them to the mysterious ways and hard-to-approach people deep inside the opaque contemporary art world. In an article in the New York Times in June 2014, Gertrude curator Astrid de Maismont noted, “We’re not selling artwork; we’re selling the experience.”15 About six months later, however, their online art selling channel launched and the salons were, temporarily at least, put on hold.
ArtList seems to be for secondary market sales of contemporary artwork (1940 to today) only. Anyone wishing to sell on their platform must guarantee they have clear title to each work posted (meaning that they must legally own the art, and not merely have it on consignment from the artist). There’s nothing stopping an art dealer who focuses on the primary market from using ArtList for their secondary sideline sales, but unlike Artsy or Artnet or other platforms that facilitate primary market sales, ArtList specifies in their terms of service that “sellers” list artwork “from a recognizable artist in the secondary market.” That said, the exact wording suggests there may be circumstances under which primary market work is accepted:
The artist should either: (a) have a traceable secondary market, with several artworks already presented at a major auction house or (b) be represented by an established art gallery (view our list) or (c) have a strong demand on primary market (for example—with waiting lists, or no available work on the primary market).
There are some innovations in the ArtList model that look poised to influence how other online art sales will happen moving forward. First is how, despite being a true “peer to peer” selling model, it presents a combination of public (or “click to buy”) and private (or “inquire to buy”) listings. Any registered, verified visitor can make a “click to buy” purchase, but only interested buyers approved by the seller will receive more information about an “inquire to buy” transaction. Sellers choose which method they prefer for each listing, based on how public they wish their desire to sell that artwork to be. Potential buyers given more information on “inquire to buy” listings must agree to the terms of the website, confirming they will not publicize that a work is for sale.
Next, ArtList encourages buyers to supply as much verification information as they’re comfortable doing, because “Completing your profile will make sellers more likely to deal with you (that is especially true for access to private artworks).” As on eBay and other online channels, your ArtList public profile becomes more reassuring the more you’re validated by the site and its other visitors. They have a range of initial verification methods, including one that many people think may become universal in the not too distant future: In addition to submitting a copy of your driver’s license or supplying information such as your phone number or email address, ArtList also asks you to verify yourself via your Facebook or other social network accounts. Social network accounts may increasingly prove to be the most trusted verification method moving forward, even possibly replacing government-issued passports (or so the speculation goes), because of the number of other verifiable people agreeing that your account does belong to you and are who you say you are, which is more difficult to quickly produce than a fake document.
Also innovative is how they try to enforce privacy. In addition to the terms each registered visitor must agree to, “inquire to buy” images sent to approved inquirers are watermarked with that requester’s name. This is designed to discourage a dealer from forwarding the image to countless potential buyers just to test the waters and possibly burn the piece in the process. As standard as this method of discouraging fishing expeditions is likely to become, I suspect there are so many images of any given artwork online these days that this method may not prove as effective as it’s designed to be. ArtList also puts front and center answers to several of the primary concerns potential online art buyers said make them hesitant in the Hiscox report, including guarantees on delivery, provenance, condition, and authenticity. Holding the buyer’s payment in escrow until the work has been received and confirmed in good condition, ArtList goes out of its way to ensure buyers will be “fully satisfied.”
Finally, ArtList has seamlessly built artist resale rights into their business model, making their inclusion much less discouraging than any other online channel I know. While all online channels will enforce regional resale rights where they exist, ArtList splits every 10 percent commission they earn on sales with the artist, sending the artist checks for works sold via their channel twice a year. The seller collects the full amount they agreed to sell the work for. While this is another example of online businesses reflecting millennial values, several insiders I’ve spoken with believe this is a potential detriment for ArtList, as some sellers may not wish artists to be informed they had resold their work. As I believe every artist has a right to know where each work in their oeuvre is located (if only so they can request a loan for exhibitions), I would agree that artists’ interests here outweigh those of any particularly private collectors.
Another peer-to-peer channel worth looking at is ArtViatic (www.artviatic.com). Based in Monaco and launched in 2013 by former Wildenstein Gallery vice-president Antoine Van De Beuque, ArtViatic focuses on more expensive works, including high-end contemporary art, but also including Impressionist and Modern artwork. Only works that are priced at €150,000 or above and that are included in the artist’s catalogue raisonné or have a valid certificate of authenticity are accepted. At this price point, it is not surprising that ArtViatic offers a higher level of service options, including the opportunity to have a private viewing of the artwork in various locations convenient to the potential collector, including Monaco, Paris, London, New York, Geneva, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It’s also not surprising that payment options on ArtViatic do not include credit card transactions. Wire transfer or ArtViatic’s private escrow account are the only options.
ArtViatic also has its team of experts evaluate and approve any work submitted for a listing, which they note will only last four months for any given work. At these higher price points, letting any artwork sit online for too long can create and perpetuate impressions that it’s overpriced or perhaps not a great example of this artist’s work. Free estimations for sellers unsure what their artwork’s current market value is are also available.
Any seller can try ArtViatic at no charge for four months—again, the maximum duration of any listing—so long as their experts agree the work being listed meets their criteria. After that initial “First Access” offer, all sellers or any buyers must subscribe to the “Premium” offer priced at €3,500/year. In addition to the guarantee of private negotiations among a very exclusive clientele, ArtViatic has partnered with an insurance company offering its paid subscribers bespoke solutions for artwork sold via the site, an arts storage company offering state-of-the-art warehousing, and “discreet” art handling services so that word will not get out about what the sellers are unloading.
Cutting Out the Art Dealer Altogether
All the channels discussed above are open to contemporary art dealers, but many new online channels (and by “many” I mean over 250 and counting) have popped up that let artists sell their work directly to buyers. This may not pose the immediate threat to the profession some reports suggest it does, but it makes sense for any art dealer to understand how these channels work and what it could mean for their business. The 2014 Hiscox report notes that the “reputation” of the art seller remains very important to online art buyers. In the brick-and-mortar gallery world, this is as true today, if not more so, as it’s ever been. While auction houses may be nibbling away at the mega-galleries’ primary market dominance, the artist-to-collector sites we will look at below are hardly a concern for the top dealers. What is likely to emerge with them are requests from artists who have had some success on these sites for different representation models with emerging or mid-level galleries that wish to work with them. Dealers are likely to respond with changes in their consignment or representation contracts that enable a different representation model but bring other assurances to the gallery (an issue we’ll explore in more detail in Part III of this book). In that way, even the existence of these sites may begin to change the artist-dealer relationship.
There are dozens of approaches among websites that exist to let artists sell direct to collectors (despite the number in its URL, this link lists over 250 such sites: www.artsyshark.com/125-places-to-sell/). Some are devoted to genres or media, others are geographical in focus, and many of them combine listing and social networking functionalities. Some of them are open to both art dealers and unrepresented artists. Far too many of them make claims of being “a leading destination” for “important collectors” for that to be true of all them, or at least for that to be understood the way it generally is in the commercial gallery world.
Virtually every conceivable combination of the word “art” with another word is represented among their brand names, including ArtBomb, ArtCollectorMall, ArtPharmacy, Artplode, Artsicle and ArtZolo. The names without “art” in them are just as varied and often just as reassuring. We’ll discuss strategies for building your own proprietary online channel, but my point in listing some of these names here is that the time to decide on and buy a domain name (or two) may be now, should you choose to use something other than your current business domain name to brand and promote such an effort.
Aside from those many channels, one much more effective and potentially game-changing online platform is increasingly cutting the gallery system out of contemporary art transactions: Instagram. As noted in Chapter 5, Vogue magazine published an article in 2014 titled “Why the World’s Most Talked-About New Art Dealer is Instagram,”16 but many art dealers were even then still unsure how sales were happening there or what kind of threat to them it really posed. In April 2015, Artsy published part of a survey they conducted on who was buying artwork from Instagram. Their results suggest the channel’s potential should not be ignored:
According to a recent survey of collectors on Instagram, an incredible 51.5 percent have purchased works from artists they originally discovered through Instagram. More importantly, this discovery led to an average of 5 purchased works by artists originally found on the app! Although respondents are all active on Instagram, and nearly half have collections of 100+ works, these are significant findings. Collector and social media expert Karen Robinovitz . . . commented, “Collecting art is an addiction and Instagram is the dealer and pusher that enables it.”17
As noted in Chapter 2, unrepresented artists are not the only people who can maximize the capabilities of the addictive platform. The widely publicized news that actor Leonardo DiCaprio had purchased artwork that he saw on Instagram (in an installation view of a gallery’s booth at a satellite art fair), simply by calling the gallery, should encourage every dealer to see how the platform indiscriminately works for whoever makes it work for them. Experimenting with what kinds of images posted by galleries best motivate collector action would seem to be among the contemporary art market’s best responses to this potential.
STRATEGIES FOR NAVIGATING THIS CHANGE
Much the way many dealers will experiment with combinations of art fairs in different locations to find the right balance to match their promotion and selling goals, experimentation with various online art selling channels seems to make sense for most as well. Although online channels are nowhere near as expensive as the average art fair, they represent enough investment (including many hours spent posting data to them) that it makes sense to come to some basic business decisions about what you want from such channels before signing any contracts. Many online channel subscriptions are yearly, which may be more time than you wish to pay for or be associated with a platform that turns out to be counterproductive.
While it may chafe the neck of certain art dealers to frame their online art selling strategy this way, I’m going to work through the issues involved using the framework shared by Infopia vice-president of marketing Ralf VonSosen in an article on HammerTap, an eBay research website devoted to helping online sellers make more sales more often.18 I truly understand why being associated with contexts like eBay or similar commercial channels is anathema to many fine art dealers, but if you could sell as much art as you wanted without resorting to online options, you would not need to know anything about how online sales actually happen. If you do want to know, there are some universal concepts that seem to apply. VonSosen breaks them down into three admittedly vaguely phrased categories:
• How to utilize all e-marketplaces and online selling channels
• How to drive the acquisition and ownership of customers
• How to optimize profits through branded merchandising and sales
How to Utilize All e-Marketplaces and Online Selling Channels
Personally, I would rephrase that concept more as “How to decide which online selling channels to use,” because the basic questions VonSosen asks sellers to consider and then combine into single answers here are “Who is my target customer?” and “Where do they buy?” In short, in addition to focusing on certain categories of art within certain price ranges, most channels target specific types of collectors. Which channels are right for you, therefore, depends as much on who you wish to sell to as it does on how that channel’s business model works for you.
As mentioned above, for example, Artfinder seems to target buyers with little to no experience in buying contemporary art, who are looking for lower price points. Artspace, on the other hand, promoted its platform for a while by noting that it specifically targeted regional collectors associated with regional contemporary museums. These are well-informed patrons who may not be among the top 200 collectors in the world, but who actively support contemporary art and, being in places without many galleries sometimes, very likely spend a good deal of time keeping up with what is happening in the art market via online sources. Artspace’s collectors also are likely comfortable with medium-range price points. ArtViatic, on the other hand, targets international high-net-worth collectors and would not make sense, or even be available, for anyone selling artwork for less than $200,000.
So among the first questions to ask any online channel would be:
• Who are the collectors who buy from your site?
• Where do they live?
• What is the average price of the artwork that actually sells on your site?
• What’s the most expensive artwork ever sold via your site?
• Which mediums do your visitors buy the most/the least?
• What requests for additional services and/or information do your visitors make most often?
• What are your plans to address those concerns?
All online channels have (or should have) detailed analytical data they can share with you. If they won’t answer these questions in ways that help you decide whether to use them, the odds are they know their answer won’t persuade you. (You can verify one basic metric they will likely report to you via the website Compete [www.compete.com], where you can see the number of unique visitors any website receives per month.) As the HammerTap article notes, though, most online shoppers use a combination of websites to find what they’re looking for or to compare prices. You may need to post your inventory to a mix of channels or post certain types of art to certain websites, based on price range or medium. If you post the same art to different channels (something some channels permit, while others require exclusivity for any listing), remember that potential buyers may be comparing prices across multiple channels, so it is important to maintain consistent pricing in order to build trust.
How to Drive the Acquisition and Ownership of Customers
Both the Hiscox report and VonSosen insist that the more time collectors spend on an online art selling channel, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Sites that have means of keeping customers engaged, therefore, are more likely to lead to eventual sales. As VonSosen also notes, “It is much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing customer.” In general, this means the same thing online that it does offline: your overarching goal, as VonSosen phrases it, is “transforming transactions into relationships.” This can get tricky with some online channels, as they may be invested in keeping any buyers as “their clients,” even though things they do can reflect on you in the minds of buyers unclear on the delineation of roles or responsibilities on the channel.
Therefore it is important to know how much information an online channel is willing to give you about any buyer or what they let that buyer know about you. We all address or talk with new clients differently at first compared to how we communicate with our loyal, valued clients. While it is not always a big deal, treating a return client like a new client can be a make-or-break issue in your relationship. In political campaigns, for example, it is understood that a candidate never says “Nice to meet you” to anyone in a crowd of voters or potential supporters. The phrase they are trained to use is “Nice to see you,” just in case they had previously met that person but simply couldn’t remember with so much going on. Feeling forgotten is a lasting negative impression for many people online as much as it is offline.
So, among the next questions to ask a prospective online channel representative, particularly ones who consider the buyers their clients and wish to keep it that way, include:
• What information will I receive about a buyer?
• How will I tell returning clients from new clients?
• How do you/can I communicate with someone who has bought work from me about new work available?
• If the channel handles shipping and handling, what information will you provide me about any issues that come up? (In short, they’re representing you . . . how do they separate out issues that originated with you from issues that you had no control over?)
• Does this channel require exclusivity for any listing or are you free to list artwork on other channels?
If their answers suggest you will not easily be able to transform transactions into personal relationships, tell them directly that’s a concern of yours. Art selling is a very relationship-driven business. Part of the increasing interest in “peer-to-peer” or “inquire to buy” channels is how they facilitate a direct relationship between the buyer and the dealer. Tell any channel who insists the online clients are their clients that that helps you make your decision to go elsewhere.
How to Optimize Profits through Branded Merchandising and Sales
Getting your inventory up on an online art selling channel is all about having new clients see it there. In other words, it is about increasing your business’s visibility. Sure, every art selling channel will boast hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, but there are likely hundreds of other art dealers on the same site, sometimes offering works by the same artists you are, or even the same artwork in the case of editions. Within the context of any retail environment, sellers still need strategies to stand out or gain attention. Standing out among your competition in retail environments in a way that encourages visitors to buy from you and remember you is the realm of merchandising, which, when done well, as the header above promises, optimizes your profit potential. This is not the same as “branding” an artist, but rather a matter of grabbing more attention in a context where other sellers are also working to gain attention.
Some online channels offer ongoing merchandising opportunities, for additional fees. Artsy, for example, promises their Preferred and Premium level subscribers additional attention via editorial coverage and priority placement. Any of the online channels will also advise dealers that continually adding new content increases their visibility as well, but be sure to ask them how that leads to more visibility. Do they offer a filter for users to discover newly added content themselves, or do they promote it in a special section of the site? Does your level of service include such promotion? For channels that allow unlimited content, continually updating your listings is simply a best practice, but for those that will charge you for additional content, you may need to delete existing content to stay within your allotted amount. Make sure you understand how to delete existing content on a given site (not all of them make it easy).
Themed exhibitions or auctions are another merchandising option many online art selling channels offer. Beyond another excuse to send yet another email out to their list, branded online art sales have a good track record of generating buzz. Even among the brick-and-mortar auction house sales, there has been an increase in events with concise and carefully crafted branding. In short, themed sales give the channel something new to talk about and arts publications something new to write about. Themed sales timed to correspond (some might say, to exploit the promotions of) prestigious events at museums or biennials are also fairly common, as are the time-tested, attention-grabbing claims of something being “new [and improved].” Asking any online seller you are considering using how they select works for themed sales is therefore smart research.
In every online merchandising opportunity, the main message you are promoting is that this artwork (and perhaps particular pricing offer) is worth the visitor’s attention, but you are also promoting the message that you are a trustworthy art seller with other important, interesting art for sale. As VonSosen puts it, your goal is to “help customers identify and find additional value in your offer.” In short, you’re selling art, but you’re also always selling yourself. Making sure the channel’s merchandising options permit you to highlight both messages is therefore critical. It does you more good if a themed exhibition is designed to encourage visitors to learn more about other art you are selling. Some channels may argue that they have chosen to downplay which gallery is offering an included artwork to help brand the overall themed sale or exhibition or lend it credibility. This is not a very convincing argument to my mind; content providers should be fully acknowledged (and linked back to) at every possible opportunity, otherwise they are working to promote the channel and not the other way around.
Toward maximizing your merchandising opportunities via any online channel then, here are some additional questions to ask a potential partner:
• How much content does my subscription permit me to add?
• What’s involved in deleting content, if I want to stay within my allotted amount?
• Do you highlight newly added content? If so, how?
• What opportunities will I have to be included in themed exhibitions or sales?
• How will my business be represented in any themed exhibitions or sales?
• Can I propose/curate a themed exhibition or sale?
• Can I contribute or propose editorial content?
Beyond what the channel offers, there are some best practices any online art selling subscriber can follow to ensure they are maximizing their profit potential, including matching your product to the right channel, imposing consistency of message across all channels, and coordinating what you are promoting on your business website or at art fairs with what you are promoting online. If you are featuring new work at an art fair that has partnered with an online channel for their art fair catalog, they will likely request you forward images for that catalog presence. The most compelling images the online channel receives are often the ones they choose for their catalog home page or in their own promotional efforts, with full credits of course. Sending multiple versions of very high quality images—some of just the art, perhaps some of humans looking at the art—can increase the likelihood the online catalog will advance your goals over those of the other dealers participating in the fair.
Proprietary eCommerce Channels for Art Dealers
Another frontier I expect more intrepid art dealers to venture into as online sales increase is trying their hand at hosting their own private eCommerce site. A good example of a dealer who had a brick-and-mortar gallery before launching a successful eCommerce “gallery” is Jen Bekman, whose site 20x200.com has had some ups and downs since launching in 2007 with the slogan “It’s Art for Everyone,” but in general is the prototype any new eCommerce sites by dealers will be measured against. It is a sophisticated online shopping experience, and frequently hosts sales with philanthropic objectives.
There are potential downsides to galleries launching eCommerce sites, including possibly discouraging collectors from feeling they need to visit your physical space; entering into a more complex sales tax situation; costs associated with setting up and maintaining the site; and possible legal or security issues around private information, especially for international customers. Still, dealers have most of the data required to populate an eCommerce site on their websites already, or in their inventory management system. Moreover, with so many dealers reporting decreasing foot traffic and there being only so many art fairs a year you can do before your dog forgets you, I do expect a few dealers sitting in empty galleries to give it a go.
A basic decision to make about setting up a private eCommerce platform includes whether to use a self-hosted solution (that is, you buy an eCommerce application, but put it up on a web server you choose and pay for separately) or a hosted solution (that is, the application you pay for is hosted by that company on their server). One advantage to having an eCommerce company host your site for you is not needing to rely on your own IT team (meaning, often, your gallery assistant) to maintain or diagnose problems with it. A key disadvantage may be a lack of flexibility in how certain pages look (many of them use a generic final payment page, which may not fit your business’s brand or identity). The advantage of a self-hosted solution is of course that you know where your data reside, and you have access to the code, meaning you have more control over customizing it (assuming you know how to do that).
Popular examples of self-hosted eCommerce solutions include WooCommerce (www.woothemes.com/woocommerce) and Magento (www.magento.com). Popular examples of hosted eCommerce solutions include Shopify (www.shopify.com), Volusion (www.volusion.com), and Bigcommerce (www.bigcommerce.com). Pricing for hosted solutions start as low as $20–$30 per month for their standard plan; about $80 per month for their premium; and the sky is the limit for their “enterprise” solutions, which are customized to fit your business, but designed for the kind of “high-volume” business no art dealer is ever likely to need. Examples of self-hosted solutions pricing include roughly $80 for a standard package and $150 for a “developer” package. WooCommerce’s designer package comes with layered Photoshop files, making it easier to customize the look and feel of the site.
No major art gallery I know has yet launched their own publicly accessible eCommerce platform. There still remains a certain stigma to it in the genteel gallery world, not to mention it is time consuming. Moreover, online shopping experiences are designed to maximize the number of items sold, which may make sense across hundreds of galleries (or in the case of sites focused on multiples, like 20x200.com), but it may not make as much sense for an individual gallery selling mostly unique works of art to build one for their inventory alone. If nothing else, an eCommerce site might be a much less expensive way than art fairs to customize a unique experience in your quest to reach a more global audience.
SUMMARY
While still a fraction of the overall contemporary art market, sales from online platforms are rising every year and represent enough potential that every dealer should begin to consider where their business can benefit from their proliferation. Secondary market dealers currently have a wider array of options online, but some of the online auctions are more actively courting primary market work, usually for themed presentations. Any dealer considering using an online platform should carefully match the art they post there with the visitors who buy there and the price points at which they spend. Asking online channels questions about their users’ demographics, what information they will receive (and when) about interested buyers, the logistics of putting work up (and taking it down) from their site, and merchandising opportunities should help dealers make those choices.
Surveys, like those informing the Hiscox reports, suggest that the longer collectors spend on any online art selling channel, the more likely they become to purchase artwork there. The surveys also indicate that having a good experience buying art online increases how much collectors are willing to spend on subsequent online purchase, meaning that sites with “sticky” features (that is, features that keep visitors on their site or keep them coming back) stand to increase their subscribers’ success in selling there.
The surveys also indicate that condition reports, certificates of authenticity, and considerate return policies all increase collectors’ confidence in buying art online. If a platform does not automatically offer such reassurances, ask them how you can do so on your pages. Making sure your online presence is carefully coordinated to supplement and reinforce your offline efforts, whether in your gallery or at an art fair, is smart as well. Finally, online channels can help expand your global reach at a cost much lower than international art fairs.