Recently I found a new venue for selling my digital art. Founded in 2008, ArtFire.com is a new alternative for Etsy, Zazzle^R, CafePress^R, Imagekind^R and other places for selling handmade art and crafts online. The founders of ArtFire studied the competition, decided what features worked best and what needed to be improved and the result was ArtFire. Personally, I agree with their choices.

ArtFire strives to be not only an online e-commerce marketplace for selling unique gifts and handmade crafts but an interactive craft community as well. There are many ways to participate at ArtFire besides building a store. You can join the many craft guilds and post in the ChatterBox forums. You can even submit articles to Art Daily, the craft news blog.

The Basic account is free or you can upgrade to the Verified Member account for $12 per month. As you would expect, the upgrade gives you more e-commerce and social networking features. ArtFire has a "Free Ride" referral policy that gives you a free upgrade to the Verified account for life, if you get 12 other sellers to open Verified accounts. With these two accounts, Basic and Verified, you get a lot of features.

Helping your potential customers to find your products are the ArtFire's tags feature and the integration with Google^R Base, a shopping search engine. Unless you turn off this option, ArtFire automatically submits your product's information to Google Base. ArtFire's email feature gives you the basics such as In/Out boxes and the ability to send email from your ArtFire account. You also have the basic email notification options, similar to Yahoo!^R Mail, allowing you to set how often you are notified of incoming mail and message types. As on other marketplace sites, ArtFire has a feedback system, called Karma/Kudos which allows the buyer and seller to rank transactions. ArtFire also has the familiar bookmark links such as a HotList for building a shopping/wish list, RSS feeds for your store and email referral links. One very nice feature is ArtFire's direct links from your store to websites such as Kaboodle and ThisNext, where your customers can easily add your products to their shopping or wish lists.

These are the features that ArtFire has in common with other online marketplaces. In the next article, we will discuss why ArtFire surpasses those other sites.

ArtFire screenshots used by permission of Art Fire inc.