Why I like selling on Artfire

Artfire is having a contest and they are going to randomly pick a winner from the blog posts that are made.  They want to know the 5 things I like best about selling on Artfire.  I think my number 1 reason is that I pay a flat fee per month, no matter how many items I list, or how many items I sell.  There's no additional fee for either of those.  I had a shop at another online venue before where I had to pay a fee to list an item and it was only good for a few months, then if I wanted to list it again I had to pay again.  And if someone bought my item then I had to pay a percentage on that.  None of that happens at Artfire.

Another thing I like about Artfire is how helpful the staff and the other sellers are.  There is a 45-day guide to help you set up your studio and get started on the right foot.  There are help guides on photographing your items.  Recently Artfire sponsored a social media boot camp. I learned more about Facebook fan page, learned about Twitter and got started tweeting, learned about writing a blog and got started on here.  Artfire staff want all of us to succeed. 

The other sellers are so friendly and genuinely concerned about each other. I've made several new friends in the forums.  Again the 45-day guide was helpful in getting started here.  With the other venue I mentioned I tried chatting in the forums but no one ever replied.  At Artfire I can ask other people to critique my shop and help me make it better.

I have an Artfire Pro account, which is what I was describing above with the fixed monthly fee.  It is also possible to have  a Basic account where there is no fee what so ever.  It's free!  But there are several advantages to the Pro account.  With the Artfire Pro account I can customize the look of my shop.  There are a number of tools I can use for promoting or making changes to my shop.  I can make coupons that apply to certain items or categories of items.  I can select the amount off for the coupon, and the date it expires. There is a 'vacation mode' which lets me decide whether to have my shop show all my items with a message that I'm away until a certain date, or to close the shop until that date.  This is extremely handy when I go out of town to visit my grandchildren!  I can keep the shop open, but not worry about being away and unable to ship an item as quickly as usual.

I can select to have my items automatically fed into the Goggle Merchant Center.  So that they will be more readily found in searches.  The majority of customers on Artfire come from the outside web, and not just from other Artfire sellers.  And anyone can purchase an item from any Artfire store without having to join Artfire.  Artfire provides a 'Rapid Cart' that I can drop into my website.  I don't have to figure out how to code or purchase some other method for selling from my website.  There's also an Artfire Kiosk that I can have on my Facebook Fan page to promote my items.

There is also a referral program going on now.  if you click on this link, Become an ArtFire Pro with this link and get your 3rd month free! as it says you'll get your 3rd month for free.