Business Matters - Marketplaces - Art Fire

This week's artisan marketplace for review is Art Fire. Art Fire is a new marketplace and has taken off with great popularity.

There are two sellers accounts you can try - basic and verified. Basic is free - free to list and free to sell. No commission - nothing. No monthly fee. Just a place to sell your items and keep the money for yourself! Surely that is worth a try? And it can be free forever! Maximum 10 items for sale at any one time. Includes google analytics and many other features. It may be called "basic" but it actually does alot.


The second account is a verified account. Here there is a monthly fee of $12 (it was $7 and has just gone up - and will soon go up to $20 - it is their incentive price to get artists to join). Apart from the monthly fee, there is nothing else to pay - no listing charges, no commission - just your monthly. Take a look at what you spend on Etsy a month and see how it compares. For your monthly fee you can list as many items as you want.

They have lots of little extras - for example, if you look at my sidebar on the blog - just scroll down a little way - you can see that they have a Rapidcart that you can add to your blog or facebook. You choose which items you want in it - or let them be random from your store and then people can buy directly from your blog without haven't to go into ArtFire or any other store.


ArtFire automatically submits your items to google base, and has "share this" buttons so you can bookmark a store on your own computer, email it to someone else, or bookmark on Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Twitter and many more.

Another feature is "markethub". This is a place on your store where you can link through to all your other stores and social networks. You can even link through to your Etsy Store. I've linked to Etsy, my own website, my blog, Facebook, Twitter.....etc etc. It's a great hub so someone can see the other places you sell and frequent! Below you can see the buttons to the links (sorry, not active in this snapshot)...


I haven't actually spent much time on Art Fire yet but have started a store there........and I think, like all these marketplaces, you need to put in the time to get noticed initially - so that is on my to do list!! It is very similar to Etsy but with a few added features and not as large (yet!).

If you look at the traffic rankings of marketplaces, ( RANKINGS ) ArtFire is pretty high up considering it only started a few months ago. It's definitely one to watch I think.