Why your POD store is doomed to fail

Let’s begin by stating that the main service we provide is a POD site builder for artists, designers, and photographers. When it comes to failed POD stores, we have seen our fair share.

It might seem counterproductive for us to be writing this post, but the whole point of us starting Olasty was to help artists sell, if your project is doomed to fail, it is not in our interest to watch it crumble.

There is possibly an infinite number of reasons as to why most POD stores fail, but one in particular stands out to me personally; Expecting your online store to generate sales. Spoiler alert! it wont.

The reality is, demand for your photographs / artworks won’t suddenly spike just because you now have a website. In fact, it won’t be affected at all. If it is currently non-existent, it will continue to be non-existent even long after you launch your online store.

Expecting your website to generate sales is like expecting your card machine to generate sales, it makes very little sense.

You should view your website as a POS. A place your clients go to to make payments. Nothing more, nothing less.

A website solves portfolio and payment problems, not sales and marketing problems. Building a site to solve a marketing problem is like using a hammer to cock your breakfast. It is the absolute wrong tool for the job.

And yet, artists seem to go down this rabbit hole again and again. When the site doesn’t drive the expected results, the next step is usually doubling down and working even harder on it, adding useless features here and there, change this or that button’s color because someone said changing their CTA button color have increased their conversion rate by 413%.

I cringe every time I see similar posts on Reddit; an artist share their website that’s not making any sales and asks for advise. Replies are usually somewhere along these lines:

• CTA font is too small,
• Close button on X popup isn’t prominent enough
• …etc

I can’t think of single business that failed because they made the fatal mistake of choosing the wrong font size! can you?

Why building an audience matter

I have been in the industry for long enough to notice the following pattern; Artists with an audience sell, artists without an audience don’t.

If you have an audience that like your art and want to buy it, your online store will streamline that process, if you don’t, your online store is it irrelevant.

There is really no magic behind it, to be able to sell, you need traffic, having an established audience is the cheapest and possibly the only way to get that traffic.

I say the only way because, in the art world, paid advertisement doesn’t really work, and the only source of traffic that’s actually worth it is organic.

The reason paid advertisement doesn’t work is because conversion rates in the art industry are typically really bad. A lot of people like to look at art, a lot less are willing to take out their wallets and pay for it. That’s just the reality of things unfortunately.

In fact, conversion rates are so bad they effectively take paid adds off the table.

I can’t give precise numbers, but for the average POD store out there selling cute dog prints, you can expect the conversion rate to be somewhere below 0.2%. That’s about 1 customer in each 500 “qualified” visitor.

An no, the 1000 site visitors you got from google display ads that ended up showing on some random spammy Android app with 96% bounce rate don’t count as “qualified” visitors.

So unless your margin in each item you sell is something above 500 USD, paid ads won’t take you anywhere.

Again, that takes us back to building an audience. I honestly can’t stress this enough, building an audience is the single most important thing you can do if your goal is commercialize you arts.

I am not going to sit here and pretend I know how to do that, I don’t. That’s something you will need to figure out yourself.

If you are serious about your art business, and I haven’t said it enough times already, BUILD AN AUDIENCE.

Remember, your art deserves to be seen, and building an audience is the bridge to that visibility.