Selling fine art prints online-profitable?

[fabthi]

Hi everybody
I am new at this forum, I am a pro photographer based in Italy mostly focused on fashion and advertising (Professional Photographer).
Besides my main commercial activity, I have a good portfolio of italian landscapes and cityscapes and I have been thinking a long time of starting selling fine art prints online with this stuff through a dedicated website.
I know most of the customers are from USA and from the other british language countries (AUS, CAN, UK, NZ, etc). Possibly, in a near future, countries like China, India and other emerging nations will also become good markets.
I would like to understand though what is the real "size" of this market; I'd like to hear experiencies about this opportunity, especially from those of you who are already involved in such business or have heard about it.
Thanks everybody
Fabio

 

[KmH]

With your own web site, you'll have to devote considerable effort to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), promoting, advertising, and marketing the site. You'll be joining hundreds of thousands of others.

An alternative is to minimize your time involvement and just upload your images to an already established site like Art.com, Imagekind.com, Artist-Rising.com, Posters.com. You're still competing directly with thousands of other artists, but many more eyes may well look at your work.

 

[fabthi]

Hi
yes, I do understand what you mean but that's not odd to me; in fact what we all need to do in the "conventional" business (offline) is promoting ourselves as much as possible with as many potential customers as we can. For me, this means a huge amount of time and money to find, contact, visit and mantain clients by phisically meeting them driving some 30.000 miles a year, spending thousands of $ at the phone, having a studio facility with all the costs you can figure about.
I would be quite surprised that I don't need to do so in the web market, although the cost of promoting yourself on the internet is way less expensive (in terms of money and time) compared to the traditional marketing.
For what I could understand till now from various sources, the problem with selling online seems to be precisely what you underlined: the lack of a proper web marketing.
Adwords, SEO and all the other means of marketing a website are surely time consuming but you get decent results for a fraction of the money you have to put on the offline marketing.