Artistic.ly Revenue Share Model
One of the questions that comes up SURPRISINGLY INFREQUENTLY is: “What will I actually earn from an Artistic.ly sale?”Now, most people would typically ask this kind of question before getting involved with a fledgling venture like ours. But as we know, artists tend to think a bit differently!Speculating, I don’t think this absence of enquiry can just be dismissed by commercial naivete. Perhaps artists are so used to having their work undervalued and underappreciated; or realise that finding an audience is the most difficult challenge they have to overcome; or are simply used to being ripped off that any additional income is a bonus? Either way, I thought it would be useful to outline in blog post what you can expect to earn from any Artistic.ly sales if you were to make it through the submissions process. We try to work in as transparent a way as possible and the following table outlines the numbers we are currently working with:
| Retail price of framed print (including VAT / sales tax) |
£125.00 |
$198.00 |
- |
| VAT / sales tax |
£20.83 |
$33.00 |
- |
| Retail price of framed print (excluding VAT / sales tax) |
£104.17 |
$165.00 |
100% |
| Cost of framed product |
£38.00 |
$60.00 |
36% |
| Cost of UK delivery |
£10.00 |
$16.00 |
10% |
| Total profit available |
£56.17 |
$89.00 |
- |
| Artist commission (guaranteed) |
£30.00 |
$47.50 |
29% |
| PayPal merchant fees (to process payment) |
£4.45 |
$7.00 |
4% |
| Our profit (potential) |
£21.72 |
$34.50 |
21% |
Now, there are a few things to highlight with these figures:
- Our current consumer offer includes free, worldwide delivery, shipped to any country in the world without any additional charge.
- Due to the vagaries of volumetric shipping pricing it’s VERY expensive to send large framed prints to any country outside of the UK. In reality, it typically costs an additional £22 to deliver our framed prints to the US and an additional £45+ to send to places like Australia (where, as luck would have it, quite a few prints have ended up being purchased).
- This means we are heavily subsidising all International sales and selling at a loss. Even we realise that this isn’t a sustainable model in its current form.
- You might ask yourself “Why we are they doing this?”. Well, it’s a good question and there is some method to the madness. It comes down to a few things, such as running pricing experiments to see how price sensitive our consumers are, determining whether free shipping makes a difference, determining how much of a difference free shipping makes to conversions, etc - all with the aim of establishing the *best* price point for the product. Our original aim was also to try and create a new niche product-type: to ensure our artists’ work actually got consumed, despite unframed prints being a FAR more lucrative option.
- We also wanted to give our first customers (i.e. the people buying your artworks) an absolutely fantastic deal; offering the highest quality framed prints at an unbeatable, affordable price. We know we could easily lower the quality of materials we use to produce the products in order to maximise profit per sale but this isn’t one of our current objectives.
- NB If it were, then we really should be retailing the framed prints for a minimum of £250 ($400) and there is no doubt we will either need to increase prices in the future or charge for delivery. If we do, the artist guaranteed share will also increase inline.
- Oh, and PayPal is a disgraceful rip off.
Finally, to finish off this post, there are a few other questions that also occasionally come up:
- How does the artist get paid? Via Paypal, so you will need a PayPal email.
- How often does the artist get paid? Truthfully, our intention is to pay monthly but things have been a little sporadic to date due to our focus on other projects. We promise to get better.
- How can I track my sales? You’ll have an admin ... when we build it ...
