How I made $560,039 Selling Art With These Sites (Zero Tech Skills)

I'm sharing exactly how I made $560,000 in 2024 selling my products online using these super simple platforms. If you've been holding back from selling online because you think it's too complicated or technical, this video is especially for you. I'm going to show you the easiest, most beginner-friendly places to sell your work in 2025, including one platform where you can literally set up your entire store in just 20 minutes. That's platform number two on our list, and it is a total game changer. What makes this video different is that I'm focusing exclusively on platforms that require zero coding skills and minimal tech know-how. Plus I'll show you exactly why I chose these specific platforms after 19 years of selling online and stand till the end because I'm also sharing which platforms to avoid if you want to keep more of your profits. But first I need to share something really important that will help you make the right choice. There are two main ways to sell online marketplace sites where you're one of thousands, hundreds of thousands of shops like Etsy or having your own website where it's just you. And yes, you can absolutely do both, but here's the thing. Trying to master multiple platforms at once, especially when you're just starting out, usually leads to mediocre results everywhere. I learned this the hard way, so here's my advice. Just pick one platform to start with, master it, turn it into a sales machine, and then you can expand later. So this focused approach is what helped me reach $560,000 in sales, and I'll help you choose the right platform for you in this video. So let's start with having your own website because this is where I've seen the most consistent success. The big advantage, there's no direct competition. Unlike marketplace sites where someone can undercut your price in seconds, your own website lets you stand out on your own terms. Like you everyone's complaining about the market being too saturated. There's so much competition and all of that. You don't have to worry about that as much with your own website. Plus, and this is huge, you get nearly total control over your shop. You can design it exactly how you want. You can set your own pricing strategy and not have to worry about how to undercut your competitors to get the sale. You can create more advanced types of coupon codes. You can build your own loyal customer base of repeat customers. You can collect customer emails so you can do email marketing. This is so, so important for future repeat sales. Like more than 20% of my sales came from email marketing, but here's the catch that most people won't tell you. All of this freedom can actually be overwhelming. I have seen beautiful websites where people have paid like $20,000 to build out, fail because they were too complicated for customers to actually buy anything, or if you're not a website designer or user interface expert, you may end up designing a site that looks really unprofessional and that doesn't help people trust in your shop and therefore you get no sales. The key is finding that sweet spot between how much you customize your website and simplicity. Also, unlike marketplace sites, the responsibility is more on you to bring your own traffic to your store. A marketplace site has a lot of built-in traffic of customers who are already looking for products like yours to buy, but here's why learning how to get your own traffic is actually a good thing. When you can crack the code on how to do this, those visitors are way more likely to buy than marketplace browsers. Why? Because they're there specifically for you. They're not just window shopping across thousands of stores and just buying the cheapest option out there. Having said that, if you build up your website in the right way where you make it easy for customers to buy and you have a high sales conversion rate, which means a lot of your traffic are turning into paying customers, your traffic generation efforts like doing social media or getting the word out there about your business will go a lot further than just relying on the built-in traffic that marketplace sites have, which I want to highlight is completely out of your control. While there are some things you can do to get more of the traffic pie from a marketplace site like Etsy, it's highly unlikely you'll ever get more than what they can give you because marketplace sites are powered by algorithms that are constantly changing and one day your shop may be in favor and getting tons of traffic and sales and the next it's totally quiet. That is normal and to be expected from a marketplace site. If I had to choose, I would focus on having my own website first because either way if I want to make a living from selling my work online, I have to do the work to get enough traffic to make a lot of sales, right? And I would rather that effort go towards an asset that I own and have control over like my own website than a shop on a marketplace site that can be shut down at any moment without notice and I have zero control over. I'm coaching a client right now who started selling on Etsy and actually hit the ground running with dozens of sales but then Etsy shut down her store without any notice and the worst part yet is they didn't pay her for the sales she made and fulfilled. That kind of stuff happens all the time with Etsy and after almost two decades of being an online business owner, I say with confidence that the key to building a long-term business that lasts for years and where you can quit your job and do your biz full-time is to focus on investing in things you have control over. Let me say it again for the people in the back. If you are feeling like this entrepreneurship thing is such a wacky roller coaster and you want more stability in your business, stop investing so much of your resources like time, money, and energy into things you have very little control over. So let's talk about the first option you have for building your own website which is Shopify. Shopify makes it so easy for you to make sales online because that is all they do. It is their bread and butter. They are the pioneers for online commerce. You just choose one of their free themes, customize it with your shop colors, create your product listings, set up your store pages like your about page, contact page, policies page, and so on. Configure the settings and that's pretty much it. You'd be set up to sell your products. I've been using Shopify for many years now and when I first moved on there, I wish I'd done it sooner. They have really fast site speed and because so many people use them, it's pretty easy to get support if you're ever stuck. However, as much as I love Shopify, it has one big drawback. It is expensive to use and that's a major deterrent for most people who are just starting out or if you're looking for a more budget-friendly option as you slowly build out your business. Shopify at this recording is $39 per month and I really wish it was more affordable for us smaller shops because I want to recommend it to more people but it's hard to when the price point is out of reach for a lot of us. Like my Shopify bill in the last few months has been like three to five hundred dollars per month. It's a lot and if your business isn't making any money yet, I understand that it's hard to invest $39 into it because it's a risk, right? It takes time to learn how to get traffic and I know how painful it feels to pay that monthly fee when you're barely making any sales. It just feels scary and I've seen shops close down because they can't keep carrying that monthly cost while they're figuring out and learning how to get traffic to their store. So this brings us to platform number two, Hostinger and full disclosure, they are sponsoring this video but here is why I am genuinely excited to share this with you. This is actually the first sponsored video I've ever done on this channel. I turn down sponsorship offers all the time because most of them just aren't worth your time for not being good products. But Hostinger, they're doing something really different that I think is going to change the game for artists selling online and if I wouldn't use it myself or if the product isn't good, I would never recommend it. So I did my research and I tested it out myself and here is where Hostinger shines and why you should really consider using them. Firstly, their pricing is super affordable. I have never seen pricing like this before for website builders. So this makes me really excited to share with those of you who have smaller budgets and the barriers for selling your work online are just getting lower and lower and Hostinger is just making it so much easier for anyone to get their shop started online. Remember how expensive Shopify can be? $39 a month. Hostinger's pricing literally made me do a double take. I was like, are you sure you're charging that much? Like what's going on here? We're talking a fraction of what you would pay elsewhere. They are running a really good deal right now. It may not last for very long depending on when you're watching this, but you can sign up for as little as a few dollars per month. And here's what really blew my mind. Zero transaction fees. This is completely unheard of. Okay? So when you sell on a marketplace site, there is always, always a transaction fee of 6.5% or more for every sale you make. Even on Shopify, if you use a third party payment processor like PayPal on your store, Shopify charges you 1% of the sale if a customer uses PayPal to check out. Hostinger takes 0%. Hostinger takes no cut of the sales you make if you use their AI builder to make your shop and you are only paying them for their low monthly fee. And that's the real game changer, their AI builder. You can create your entire store in literal minutes. I know a lot of people struggle to set up their store on Shopify because it can be so overwhelming, especially if you're new to it. And to be fair, setting up a new shop can be a lot of work. I have been building online stores for 19 years. Even with all of my experience, setting up a new Shopify store takes me a week minimum. Most people spend months, months before they can start selling anything online and make a single penny. But with Hostinger's AI builder, I set up an almost complete working store in 20 minutes. And I'm not exaggerating. Let me show you exactly how it works. So I've just created my Hostinger account and we are going to create our website. I want to try out the AI builder, so I'm going to click on this one. And I don't have a domain name yet, so let's just use their temporary domain name, which is super handy. And here is where the magic happens. Type in my shop name and I'll write up a little description here for my jewelry shop. I'm keeping this online store checked, so we have shopping cart and checkout features. And let's create website. And here's what the site looks like right off the bat without any customizations yet. It's obviously using AI generated photos, which will be easy to change here. But I love that the overall structure and skeleton of the site with these different sections is all there and built out. And it looks great in mobile. More than 50% of your buyers are going to come from mobile. So it's important and it's amazing that you don't have to worry about tinkering with this separately. Okay, so let's go into the back end of the site. You can even add products using AI. Getting your product listings up is super time consuming normally, so this feature is going to help a ton with that. And you can upload multiple listings at once. So I'll upload my photos. Since we're setting up multiple listings, I'll select just one photo for five different products. And let's create products. And just like that, we've got the individual listings set up for us. Of course, it's using dummy information for now, but isn't it cool that it can read your images and give these listings product titles already? So we'll go into this one and add more photos. And let's check out this product description that the AI builder wrote for us. It's already really good, but if you want, you can use their AI writer to write something different based on a prompt that you give it. I think this will be better to use because you can be more specific in directing the AI and produce a more accurate description. So let's keep going here. So they have inventory tracking, which is amazing. That's generally a more advanced feature, so it's cool to see this here. And of course, let's update the price. You can add a SKU and give it a weight for shipping. You can add store policies here, and you can also add variants to your products. I sell different necklace chain options, so let's add that here. And you can give the different options different prices too. And that's it. We finished updating that one product listing, and it took just a few minutes to do because the AI builder did so much of the heavy lifting for us. And here are the different payment methods you can set up. PayPal and Stripe are the most popular, so you're covered there. And now let's see what you can do for customizing look and feel of your site. You can use their AI to design a logo for you so you don't have to hire a designer or tinker forever in Canva. I mean, both are valid alternatives, but our goal here is speed. I would actually use these for my own branding. They're that good. They're a bit generic, but again, we're not trying to aim for perfection here. We just want to launch our store as fast as possible so we can start selling, and we can always make changes and upgrades later. So pick the logo you like, and you can make edits to it. The way that they format their logos is exactly how I teach my students how to do it in my Azalea day course too. So this is perfect. It's so easy to get lost though and playing around with this, but remember progress over perfection. And then you can download your logo, which is great because then you can make things like business cards with them too. So let's upload the logo to our site, and you can make very flexible changes to your navigation bar, change the colors, links, and so on. You can change the fonts here. And if you click on this sparkle icon, you can see all the other AI tools Holstinger has to speed things up even more. Now let's look at editing these sections. You can upload your own photos, you can add elements into the section, and they have this really nice snap to grid feature that will tell you when something is centered or lined up to really help you keep everything neat. It is so flexible. Let's go live and see what everything looks like. And it is literally already 90% of the way there to the finish line. This looks like a proper professional functional website to shop from. It doesn't look janky or poor quality. And for setting up shipping settings, it acts almost like Shopify or Etsy. It's very intuitive and simple while still being flexible. And you can set shipping based on weight or order price, which is what most people need. And of course there's a good system as well for setting up discounts too. I am just so impressed with what they're doing and how easy and smart the AI builder is. I am actually moving one of my sites over to Holstinger because it is that good. It's super affordable, monthly pricing, there's zero transaction fees, and you can literally set up your website in 20 minutes and have a professional looking storefront, which is what helps build trust and turns window shoppers into paying customers. It's exactly what I wish existed when I was starting out. And for anyone who has been waiting to start selling online because of technical barriers or costs, this removes both of those obstacles completely. So definitely check out Holstinger. I have a special code here that you can use for a discount. Now in making this video, I also looked into other popular website builders like Wix, Squarespace, Big Cartel, and WordPress. And honestly for selling physical products in 2025, they just don't hold a candle to what we've covered today. Let me break it down for you very quickly. Wix, sure they make pretty websites, but their e-commerce features feel like an afterthought. The checkout process is super clunky and that's the most important part of your website. And you're going to end up paying for a bunch of apps just to get like a really basic storefront set up. Plus their pricing for e-commerce actually starts at $27 per month, which if you can already pay that much, you should just find a few extra dollars and straight up use Shopify. Squarespace, again, they make beautiful websites, but as we've mentioned, beautiful websites aren't what makes you sales. If you're serious about selling products, you will quickly run into a lot of problems with their platform. Their inventory management is basic. Their product variant options are very limited. Customizing your checkout page. Good luck with that. You're paying premium prices for beautiful templates, but then getting mediocre e-commerce features. I have worked on client sites that use Squarespace before, so I know firsthand. Big cartel. It's affordable. It's artist focused, which is great, but it's also incredibly basic. You will outgrow it fast if you're serious about scaling your business, product variations, advanced shipping options, and running more complex promotions where you get to make more money. Super limiting. Plus it's also more expensive than Hostinger. So if I were you, just use Hostinger. Seriously, I keep going back to this because it's just so stinking cheap. And from my tests, they actually have a great product that makes it so easy for you to create your website. It's just such a no brainer decision. And then there's WordPress with WooCommerce. Yes, it is flexible and it can be cheaper kind of, but let's be real. Unless you love tinkering with technical stuff or you have money to hire a developer, you are going to spend more time managing your website than actually selling your art. Every time there's an update, something breaks. If you get a virus or malware attack, you're kind of on your own. I've been there and it's not fun. I have cried literal tears over my WordPress website before. This is exactly why I get excited about solutions like Hostinger that are specifically built for selling, but don't require an entire computer science degree to use. You get all the essential e-commerce features without the technical headaches and at a price point that actually makes sense for artists who are just starting out. Now let's talk about marketplace sites. The elephant in the room here is Etsy. And look, I have made over a million dollars in Etsy between the three shops that I own. So I know it can work, but I need to be really honest about what selling on Etsy looks like in 2025. Here's the thing about Etsy. It's like being a small shop in a massive mall where the mall owners keep changing the rules. Yes, you get access to their foot traffic, which is huge, but, and this is really important. You're competing with literally millions of other sellers, including mass manufactured products, digital products, AI generated products, and print on demand products. Now it's not the handmade only marketplace it used to be. And let me give you a real example. Last year for one of my smaller shops, I had $659 in sales for one month. And then the next month I did $340 sales dropped almost by half. The fluctuations like these are even worse when you take a bigger snapshot in time and compare year over year numbers. It's just a downhill trajectory from here. And it doesn't look good. Same products, same effort, same everything. But Etsy's algorithm decided to show our products to fewer people. This is the reality of marketplace selling. It is incredibly unpredictable and there's very little you can do about it. And sure, you know, you can do your own marketing and promotions to drive more traffic to even out the ups and downs. But if you're already going through that effort, you might as well send that traffic to a website you own and have more control over. Every minute and dollar you invest goes further and pays you back more when you put that towards your own site and your own assets. And then there's fees. Let's break down the fees for Etsy, 20 cent listing fee per item, 6.5% transaction fee, payment processing fee of 3% plus 25 cents offsite ads fee for 12 to 15% if they advertise your product for you. Plus they're pushing sellers to offer free shipping, which means you're absorbing that cost too. So it's just a lot. You can safely assume that 25% of your sales end up being fees that you pay to Etsy. That's a lot of money. And that cuts into your profit margins. So when should you consider Etsy? I would say Etsy is perfect for you. If you're just testing the waters with selling online, you don't need consistent monthly income from it. And you're okay with treating it as bonus income rather than your main revenue stream. Now, what about Etsy alternatives? I have researched dozens of marketplace sites, and I need to be really honest with you. Most of them just aren't worth your time in 2025. A lot of these sites either have very low traffic, poor maintenance, or they're flooded with mass produced items that make it hard for handmade sellers to compete. Maker Place by Michaels, however, is one platform that shows promise. This is one I've personally had success with. We've made over $10,000 in sales here so far. The key is that it's backed by Michaels, which is a huge corporation. And if there's anyone that can come close to beating Etsy at its own game, it might be Michaels. Their audience is specifically looking for unique handmade items, and again, far less competition for now. It's free to list products on Maker Place, and their fees are a lot less compared to Etsy's. And also, check out Go Imagine. They're much more focused on keeping everything handmade or vintage, and you can sell craft supplies on there. So basically what Etsy used to be like in the early days. And 2% of all sales go towards children of need. Go Imagine is pretty small right now, but I've been tracking them over the last few years, and they seem to be doing okay. If you want to sell more than 12 listings, you do have to pay a $5 to $15 monthly fee. So there are some startup costs required here, and if you have some budget, maybe check them out. Or maybe just count on putting up only 12 of your best-selling items on there and use their free plan. A quick tip about these alternative sites. Use them as additional sales channels, not entire replacements for your main platform. Think of them like fishing lines. The more you have out there, the better the chances of catching a sale. And after 19 years of selling online, here is what I recommend for most artists starting out in 2025. One, start with your own website. Use Hostinger. The combination of low costs and easy setup means you can get started without risking too much money. And use that AI builder. It is seriously so good and fast, and it gets your store up and running in literally one afternoon. Two, once your website is running smoothly, then maybe consider adding one marketplace platform. A lot of the assets you've built out from your website, like product photos, pricing, product details, like sizing information, all of that can be reused on your marketplace sites. So you don't have to go figuring all of that information out from scratch. Number three, most importantly, focus on building your own audience. Whether you're on your own website or a marketplace, having your own audience is like having insurance against algorithm changes. It's a learning curve at first, for sure, but once you learn how to build your own audience, you will be so glad you did.