It is not really selling direct, but I thought you might find it interesting:

http://fineartamerica.com/newsletters/retail-website-partners.html

I just signed up. Never tried the print market before, let�s see what happens.

Thanks! An innovation with no mention of payment cut for us!

Not exactly. We get half of our normal cut on these sales and the retail partners get the other half. In other words if you set your prices so that you get $100 for a particular size print you will only get $50 for one of these sales (retailer also gets $50).
That said, you can opt out of this altogether or opt out of individual retailers. This has been going for some time -I stayed opted in but haven't seen any sales through it yet. Regards, David.

Sales are way slow at faa..

and if you think sales are bad just wait until you need support...


J

"Designer Prints" is all about cutting your markup by 90% for any buyer calling himself a "designer".  And Sean Broihier (FAA owner) is all about making new deals like "Deck The Walls"  to sell your work while slashing your markup.   The thing that really gags me is the posts in the FAA forum that greet each new scheme with "Thanks Sean for this great new opportunity!".  If you express negative opinions, they lock the threads or ban you from the forum.

My sales have not been very impressive in the past few months, although I had good sales history with FAA.

I am disappointed that FAA is trying very hard to become another "print stock image agency" which is not the reason I joined. The reason I signed up is to sell fine art prints which I can control the quantity, and not just for a few bucks to put my images on shower curtains and beddings.

I have opted out the retail option. But FAA's direction really worries me, I mean, from Fine Art to Pixels, literally. Hopefully it will not go too far.

I appreciate all the opinions and info above.  Every time I consider joining FAA the experience of current members changes my mind.

The other common thread is "please add mugs, beach blankets and key chains".  People are so desperate for sales they think that adding Dollar Store crap will make the difference.

There already is CafePress and Zazzle.  What is stopping them from selling there?

After years of uploading and marketing I sell regularly when the site is working.  But there can be big swings.  When ever a new product or new feature is added or the image servers fail, sales tank.

And each new vendor they add has their own quality issues.  Around the holidays there were a lot of complaints about quality on the products.  Adding vendors who just produce poor quality or slow to ship makes the flagship products - prints from pictureframes.com look bad.

Competition? RedBubble, Zazzle, Crated, Society6,CafePress, Displate, Saatchiart, DeviantArt etc.