Selling paintings through online galleries or through your website, you need to calculate the operating costs of packaging, obtaining permits for export from the country, the cost of sending, and so on. You also need to evaluate the time that you spend on packaging and sending the picture. I made this calculation for myself:
- To pack a medium-sized picture on a stretcher costs about 80-100$. You can pack cheaper if you buy a lot of packaging materials at once, but for this you need a place and a sales flow. Packing time: 1 hour.
- Obtaining permits for the picture: within 15$. Time: 1 hour.
- Meeting with the courier and filling out documents for sending (+ if the sale is through a gallery like saatchiart, then filling out tax forms): 2 hours.
Taking into account the percentage that intermediary sites usually take, operating expenses for the sale of a painting are $ 270-500, depending on the size of the painting and delivery conditions. That is, to the cost of the picture itself, we need to add the resulting figure, it is this total price that is indicated on the site. Beginning artists do not always think about operating expenses in advance, and only after the sale they sadly realize that they received a lot less money than they expected. So be careful, do not hesitate to include all your expenses in the price. It is important to give the fruits of your labor into the hands of those people who are ready to appreciate not only the work of art itself, but also our time.