Etsy is a good sale site. You pay a couple cents per listing you have up, but it’s for the month or several months. They can help calculate shipping, though I believe that for smaller shipments it’s actually better to work with your local post office for a better deal. Etsy also uses paypal so that your customers can pay with any credit card of their choice and it goes into your Etsy financial account. From that account you can either pay for the costs of the listings or pull out the funds and transfer it to your own bank account.

I’ve got a shop there for my paintings, and have a friend that sells her artwork (differing mediums) there as well.
I believe it’s against forum policy for me to post what my shop is, but I can always PM you if you’d like to see for reference. It’s pretty basic at the moment.

I’d start with instagram since it’s artwork (: use hashtags to gain audience, and you can post more about progress to keep postings showing up to gain new followers. Facebook severely limits who sees a post and it’s not worth it anymore really. People can comment with their PayPal address and you can email them an invoice and ship that way, no cost to you at all.

I don’t have any experience with selling anything on Etsy or Facebook, but I do have experience with social media marketing. I would start off using Etsy as the main base and then post consistently on Facebook and Instagram. I believe there’s a way to hook up Etsy with Facebook, and I agree with tori rose that Instagram is great because of the hashtags. Have you also looked at sites like DeviantArt? DeviantArt is the only one I know of and is mostly fanart, but posting somewhere like that may be a good way to connect with other artists and build an audience, since the users who go there are specifically looking for art. Definitely PM me if your husband puts his art online…I would love to see it!

Right now, this conversation is okay since you’re just asking if anyone has had experience. I will post the rules though just so everyone knows.

Members cannot use the board to sell products or promote a business, product or service. This also means if the product or money making venture is from a blog, personal or social site, you cannot post about the site or link to it.
You can put a link in your profile only, as long as the products you sell are not competitive with the BinkyBunny store (products for rabbits). If the products you sell are competitive, posting the link in your profile is at the descretion of BinkyBunny. Please message BinkyBunny first.

**If you are an affiliate or receive a benefit (store credit, cash, etc,) you cannot promote the site, products or services from the associated site.

Brunosmama – I only have experience with ebay, but Etsy is similar in that it charges fees. Sometimes the fees aren’t worth it in the end (if your profit margin is small to begin with). I like the idea of promoting on social media.

I agree with starting out on Instagram…Insta-sales have become HUGE lately. You can always build an audience there and open an etsy store in the future. I sell things on Instagram and Facebook. I used to do a lot of eBay sales, but the fees killed it.

I have an Etsy shop and I think the biggest challenge is trying to get yourself noticed. There are millions of listings so you need to be prepared to do lots of advertising to get people to your shop. I’m also having a hard time understanding the fees. I get the basic listing and sale % fees but they keep telling me I owe like 20 cents here, 40 cents there and I haven’t been able to figure out what’s up with that. Their sneaking in some charges somewhere.

The great thing about Etsy is that it’s really user-friendly and you can quickly set up a shop.

The place I’ve gotten the most from sales of my artwork on is cafepress.

When my son was a baby I did it full time. The company I was a partner in collapsed while I was on an extended maternity leave and getting a new outside the house job with a new baby seemed complicated, so I liked that I could do cafepress completely from home. I also did zazzle and threadless, but niether of them paid off like cafepress. After a couple of years I was making enough to pay for all the Christmas gifts. I was doing well enough that I was actually paying for advertising on other sites.

Then one day cafepress got greedy and started screwing over the artists. First they stopped paying commissions on traffic brought to cafepress. Then they took away quantity bonuses. Then they stopped letting designers set their own prices in the market place, which was my final straw. I pulled all my good things and left up a few basic thing that had taken me just seconds to make on illustrator. I have been making a wee bit from those.

Lately, I’ve been too sick to really work again, so I have been going back to it, even though I am not at all happy with cafepresses policies.