Your Site Is Your Marketplace: Techniques to Sell Your Arts and Crafts

Your website is your very own space to promote your creations, no matter what medium you work in. These artists and builders use their sites to sell handmade merchandise, paintings, books, and even instruction manuals for LEGO masterpieces! Here’s how they do it.

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Promote an online shop with CTA buttons and clickable images

ARCHd is the small business of two sisters, Kristen and Lindsey Archer, in Memphis, Tennessee. They combine skills in photography, graphic design, and woodworking to create unique handmade pieces to sell at festival booths and retail locations.

WordPress.com Premium or Business customers can make their own buttons with custom CSS.

Kristen and Lindsey make it easy to browse and buy their items: visit their website, and you’ll immediately see a “Shop” button front and center, which directs visitors to their Etsy store. This handy call-to-action (CTA) button is built into their theme, Port, but you can display CTA buttons on other themes, too.

Aside from CTA buttons, there are other ways to direct potential customers to your online shop. Simply link to your Etsy store in your main menu — you can add a custom link to an external site so readers can go directly to the shop.

New to Image Widgets? Here’s a tutorial on how to create your own.

If you’d like a more prominent or visual link, consider an Image Widget. Artist Sarah Goodreau leads readers to her Society6 page with a custom image — a black triangle with a “Buy Prints” message — displayed as an Image Widget in her sidebar.

Or, create a page with clickable banners that direct readers to your multiple shops, as Rebecca Barkley demonstrates on her site, B.Inspired Art. Visit the Shop tab in her main menu to see how she leads visitors to her Etsy and Redbubble stores.

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Transform a portfolio into an online store with payment buttons

If you haven’t heard, there’s a new option for selling goods and offering services on your site: the Simple Payments button. The current top sellers on WordPress.com are using this button in creative ways.

On her sketching blog, artist Georgina Potter posts her oil, pastel, and charcoal artwork and places a payment button at the bottom of every post — and removes the button when the piece has sold.

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Showcase books and creative projects in eye-catching galleries

Take note of the techniques used on Amador and Ramón’s well-designed site, Arvo Brothers. With a background in LEGO design and video games, they now work on LEGO building projects and high-quality instruction books — and they promote and sell this work in a variety of ways.

On their Shop page, the Arvo brothers use payment buttons to sell both hardcover books and instruction PDFs, which are displayed in two- and three-image tiled mosaic galleries to give readers a sample of what the items look like. They also have separate pages for their books and instruction PDFs — both accessible in the main menu — and child pages detailing these items, like a hardcover book for a model alien and the manual for a 911 Targa.

Don’t use the Avid theme? Consider another photography theme or experiment with galleries and slideshows on your current theme.

Amador and Ramón also take advantage of the Avid theme’s Gallery page, which displays their gallery-formatted posts in a special view, further promoting their work to potential buyers.

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