MY EXPERIENCE OF SELLING PAINTINGS THROUGH JOSE ART GALLERY
Some of my colleagues treat online sale of paintings with great care preferring the old-fashioned way of selling art. I will try to dispel their doubts.
Now the community of the online Jose Art Gallery includes 365 artists fr om different countries of the world. Their paintings can also be viewed 365 days per year, day and night. That is the difference from a conventional gallery which has an address and visiting hours. An artist doesn’t have to make efforts to find a buyer of their artworks as it is done by the gallery curators. After all an artist must create art rather than bother about promotion and marketing of their artworks. There are several reasons why I cooperate with Jose Art Gallery: - The gallery website is accessible in English, Russian and Chinese. Therefore the geography of potential buyers is not limited to Ukraine and neighboring countries. - Each artist has a page on this website wh ere they tell about them, their artworks, etc. It also allows them to announce forthcoming exhibitions, other art events, in which they participate. The opportunity to post articles and receive feedback makes the gallery into a professional social media platform. - Artist’s private account has a convenient and very functional user interface. - Artist’s page has an individual online gallery with paintings available for sale. - Artists may make prints of their own artworks. - Since there are not very many artists in the gallery, their artworks are always in plain view, i.e. they can be easily found and viewed. - Every artist cooperating with the gallery can add paintings on their page or remove them. - The gallery website also allows to see the statistics of views of artworks and artist’s profile. - There is a customer/artist 24-hour support service. - There is a convenient form of payments for customers. Payments around Ukraine are performed through Privatbank, payments around the world - through Visa, MasterCard, PayPal systems. After the seven-day money-back period provided for buyers, the artist is paid money for the painting sold. - For buyers from Ukraine there is free delivery of artworks around Ukraine.
Despite the abovementioned advantages, the website, in my opinion, has several drawbacks: - When a buyer purchases my artwork, I, as the artist, receive no information about them. The client remains unknown for me. I don’t understand how they came to the website, whether they had used a search engine or had seen my artworks in the general list. When selling an artwork I can only track the delivery without the final information. - Gallery curators allow some artists to appear in the top of the “All Artworks” section more often than to others. Is it necessary to ask online galleries for help? Of course, you can ask why an artist should cooperate with a gallery and pay commission if you can make your own website. The question is reasonable, but only at first glance. Yes, if you have a website, you can sell your artworks on it. But in this case you have to spend a lot of time and money on its support and promotion. After all, the problems are not limited to technical issues related to its creation and filling, connection of payment systems. There is also need for website promotion, because there are hundreds and thousands of artists websites there. And the chances that a buyer, unless they personally know you and your artworks, will find your website are very small. In our case, the JAG online gallery takes care of all these matters. At the same time, the gallery gives artists the right and opportunity to link from their individual page in JAG to their websites.
My advice to counterparts I’d like to give some tips to those who are only starting to work with Jose Art Gallery. Consider making your personal page on this website as seriously as you would a social media page. Upload more information about yourself, tell about your participation in exhibitions, your achievements, add links to your social media sites and your website if available. Regularly upload your new artworks to this resource. It will let them retain the top positions of the artworks exhibited by the gallery, which will increase views and thus increase chances to sell the artworks. Another way to increase views is to share artworks from the gallery website in social media and to leave links to your page. To promote work of artists, guys from JAG came up with an idea to hold the contest The Best Painting of the Week. It is a perfect opportunity for many artists to raise the status of their artworks. To become participants of the contest artists must increase views of their artworks. The contest is held every week and every artist of the gallery can nominate themselves. In my opinion Jose Art Gallery is only beginning to win the market of online art trade. It won’t be easy for them to compete with such monsters as Saatchi, Fine Art America, Artspace, Artsy. However their potential is significant and they have introduced many new functions, which other galleries don’t have. After all, their platform was designed and is maintained by an IT company, and, as I know, is supported by a team of skillful programmers. I can safely say that Jose Art Gallery is the best online gallery in selling art in Eastern Europe including Europe. Several months of our cooperation have made me successful in selling art. So I am very happy to cooperate with the online Jose Art Gallery and I hope for more fruitful work in future.
