How to sell art prints online without wrecking them in the post

You've had the file sitting there for a year. Someone asked whether they could buy a print of it, you said "let me look into that", and looking into it turned out to mean choosing between four paper weights, six sizes and a decision about editions that felt oddly permanent.

The short answer. Sell open editions until you have a reason not to, print at sizes that fit a frame someone can buy in a shop, and ship flat between two sheets of board rather than rolled in a tube. An A3 giclée costs you $6 to $12 to print and sells for $45 to $65, which is a good margin right up until you spend $6 on a mailer and $7 on postage for a single print.

Editions are the part people get wrong first, and it's the one you can't undo.

Editions are a promise, so make one you can keep

A limited edition means a fixed number of prints exist and no more will ever be made. That's the entire value. Break it once and the promise is worth nothing, including on everything you've sold before.

So think about it as a commitment rather than a marketing device.

Open edition means you'll print as many as people want. Perfectly honest, perfectly normal, and the right choice for a $35 A4 print. Nobody is buying an A4 print as an investment. They're buying it because it'll look good above a desk.

Limited edition means you've named a number, you sign and number each one in pencil, and when they're gone they're gone. Do this when the work genuinely warrants it and when you're prepared to say no to money in three years' time.

If you go limited, decide these before the first sale:

• The number. 25, 50 and 100 are common. Smaller editions justify higher prices and sell out sooner, which is a nicer problem than a shelf of unsold 500ths.
• Artist's proofs. Usually a small number on top of the edition, often around 10%, marked AP rather than numbered. Say how many exist. Quietly printing eleven APs on a 50 edition is the sort of thing that gets discussed.
• Whether a different size is a different edition. It can be, and it's the standard way to do it, but you have to say so. "Edition of 50 at A3, edition of 25 at A2" is clear. Reprinting a sold-out A3 edition at A2 without saying anything is not.
• What happens when it sells out. Nothing happens. That's the point. Leave the listing up marked sold out, because it's proof for the next edition.

A certificate of authenticity is worth including above roughly $150. It doesn't need to be elaborate: title, size, paper, edition number, date, your signature. A card the same size as the print, in the same sleeve.

Signing in pencil, bottom edge, is the convention. Title on the left, edition number in the middle, signature and year on the right. Sign after you've checked the print, not before, because a signed reject is a wasted sheet.

Print to a frame people can actually buy

This is the most common practical mistake and it costs sales silently, because nobody messages you to say they didn't buy your print because framing it would cost $180.

Frames are cheap at standard sizes and expensive at every other size. Standard means different things in different places, which matters enormously if you sell internationally:

Market	Common frame sizes	Where it breaks
US and Canada	8x10, 11x14, 16x20, 18x24 inches	A-sizes need custom framing
UK, Europe, India, much of Africa	A5, A4, A3, A2, plus 30x40cm and 50x70cm	Inch sizes need custom framing

An A3 print does not fit an 11x14 frame. It's close enough that people assume it will and far enough that it won't. If you sell to both markets, offer both size families and label them plainly, or pick one and say so in the listing.

There's a trick that solves a lot of this. Print the image smaller than the sheet, with a generous white border. An 8x10 image on an 11x14 sheet slides straight into an 11x14 frame with the border acting as a mount, or a buyer can put it in a mount and use a bigger frame. Borders also give you somewhere to sign without touching the image, and they make the print look more like a print and less like a poster.

Two more sizing notes:

Don't price by area. An A2 is four times the area of an A3 and it should not cost four times as much. Your fixed costs, your time and your packing don't quadruple. A2 at 1.5x the A3 price is closer to right and it converts far better.

Offer three sizes, not six. A4 or 8x10, A3 or 11x14, and one large. More than that and people don't choose, they leave.

Paper, proofs and the fact that your screen is lying

Two broad categories, and the price gap between them is bigger than the quality gap for most work.

A giclée on 300 to 320 gsm cotton rag is the archival option: matte, textured, deep blacks, and it feels expensive because it is. Expect $6 to $12 for A3 from a decent lab in small quantities. A poster-quality print on 200 gsm satin runs $2 to $4 for the same size and looks completely fine on a wall.

Which you need depends on what you sell. Fine art photography and painting reproductions want the rag. Bold graphic work often looks better on satin, and the buyer paying $30 doesn't want to pay for archival paper they'll never test.

Whichever you pick, order a proof of every single image before you list it. Not one proof to check the paper. One proof per image.

What you'll find, reliably: deep blues shift towards purple, subtle gradients band, dark areas lose the detail you could see on a bright screen, and anything with a lot of saturation prints duller than you expected. Matte paper in particular eats about a stop of contrast. Fixing that is a small brightness and contrast adjustment on an export version of the file, and once you've done it for one image you'll do it for all of them.

Then photograph the actual print for the listing. A photo of a real print, on a wall, in a frame, in daylight, outsells a flat digital file every time, because it answers the question the buyer is actually asking, which is what will this look like in my house. Include one shot with something for scale. A hand, a plant, a chair. How to photograph what you sell covers the lighting; the print-specific part is shooting at a slight angle so the paper texture reads.

Ship flat, and understand which corner fails

Every damaged print I've ever seen or sent was damaged at a corner. Not the middle, not the surface. A corner, bent or creased, usually the bottom right.

That happens because the print slid inside its packaging during transit and the corner met the edge of the mailer a few hundred times. So the whole packing method is about stopping the print from moving.

For anything up to A3, ship flat. Here's the method that works:

1. Print goes in a clear cellophane sleeve, sealed. This protects the surface from moisture and fingerprints and lets the buyer handle it.
2. Sleeve goes between two sheets of greyboard or thick corrugated card, cut slightly larger than the print.
3. Tape the sandwich together on all four edges so it becomes one rigid object.
4. Rigid object goes into a stay-flat mailer that fits it closely. If it rattles, add another sheet of board.
5. Fragile stickers if you like, but treat them as decoration rather than protection.

Cost: about $1.20 for the sleeve and board, $1.00 to $2.50 for the mailer. Postage for a flat A3 package is meaningfully more than a letter rate, usually $5 to $9 domestically depending on the service.

For A2 and above, a tube is usually the only practical option. If you must roll:

• Use a tube with a wall thick enough that you can't squash it between finger and thumb.
• Roll the print around a smaller inner tube rather than rolling it tight on itself. A tightly rolled print keeps its curl for weeks.
• Solid end caps, taped on. Crushed end caps are the standard tube failure.
• Include a note telling the buyer to lay it flat under a couple of books for two days, because otherwise they'll try to frame it curled and blame the print.

Writing DO NOT BEND on a mailer has never prevented a single bend. The board is the only thing that works.

Originals are a different business. A framed original with glass in it is a genuine shipping risk and an expensive one, and most artists sell originals locally, hand-delivered, or unframed and flat with the framing left to the buyer. If you do post a framed piece, the glass needs taping in a grid so a break doesn't slice the work, and you need to price the insurance in. Shipping fragile things has the general method.

Charging for all this without losing money on multi-print orders is its own small puzzle. Two A3 prints in one mailer cost barely more to send than one, which is exactly why a "any 2 prints for $80" bundle is worth more to you than it looks. How to work out delivery charges covers setting a flat rate that survives the second item.

Worked example: June, Philadelphia, three sizes and one bundle

June paints small landscapes and sells prints of nine of them. Three sizes: 8x10 at $32, 11x14 at $52, and 16x20 at $95. All open editions. Two of her originals sold locally for $600 and $850, which she treats as separate income.

Her costs on an 11x14 giclée: $7.40 to print in batches of ten from a lab, $0.85 for the sleeve and boards, $1.90 for the mailer, and $6.80 postage. So $16.95 of hard cost against $52 plus $7 shipping charged, netting about $42. She also has around eight minutes per order in packing and label printing, which she costs at $3.

She sells 35 to 50 prints a month, weighted heavily towards the 11x14. Most of it comes from Instagram, where she posts painting process videos that do far better than photos of finished work.

Two decisions that moved her numbers.

She added a two-print bundle at $90, saving the buyer $14 and saving her nothing on printing but almost all of the postage on the second print. Her average order went from $52 to $71 and her shipping cost per dollar of revenue dropped by about a third.

And she stopped offering custom sizes. She used to say yes when someone asked for a print to fit a specific frame, and each one meant a separate lab order, a bespoke mailer, and an average of nine messages. She now offers three sizes and points people at mounts. She lost a handful of sales and got her Tuesdays back.

The thing she got wrong first: she launched with 27 listings, nine images across three sizes, and the shop was overwhelming. She cut to her best five images and sales went up, which is the opposite of what she expected.

That last point is worth sitting with, and it connects to the honest limitation. The Sailo free plan caps at 10 products, and an artist with nine images in three sizes is already over it if each size is listed separately. Pro at $19 a month takes it to 100 and Business at $49 makes it unlimited. But the cap did June a favour before she paid for anything, because a smaller shop with the best work in it sold better than a complete catalogue did.

Pricing, and what actually justifies the number

Cost gives you a floor and it's a low one. A print that costs $17 to make and post could sell for $28 and make money, which is why the print market is so crowded at the bottom.

What lifts you off the floor:

• The work itself, obviously, and there's nothing to be done about that here.
• Paper and presentation. Cotton rag, a signature in pencil, a sleeve, a card. The unboxing is 40% of what people tell their friends about.
• Scarcity, if it's real. A numbered edition of 50 supports a higher price than an open edition of the same image. Faking it doesn't.
• Proof of the original. A print of a painting that exists, photographed on a wall in your studio, is worth more than a print of a file.

The full costing method, including your time and the failure rate, is in how to price what you make. The print-specific line item people forget is the reject rate: about one sheet in fifteen comes back with a mark, a roller line or a colour problem, and that's a real 7% on your paper cost.

On getting paid, most print buyers expect to pay by card, because they're buying from a stranger on the internet and there's no relationship yet. Card is 1–3% of the goods on Sailo, taken after any discount and excluding delivery and tax, which is 52 cents to $1.56 on a $52 print depending on your plan, and it needs a Stripe account cleared for charges and nothing else — the free plan settles cards too. Bank transfer, cash at a market stall, and orders that come in by WhatsApp, Instagram DM, Telegram, email or phone cost you nothing at all, because Sailo never touches that money. If you sell mostly at fairs and to people you've met, that's your whole payment system and you don't need the subscription yet.

What to do next

Order a proof of your best image at your intended size, on the paper you're considering, and put it in a $15 frame from a shop. Look at it for a week. That week tells you whether the file is ready, whether the paper is right and whether the size makes sense, and it costs about $25.

While you're waiting, decide your edition policy in one sentence and write it into the listing template you'll use for everything. Open or limited, how many, what counts as a separate edition. Deciding it once now is much easier than deciding it under pressure when something sells out.

Then pick three sizes that fit shop-bought frames in the market you actually sell to, list your best five images and nothing else, and buy a pack of stay-flat mailers and a sheet of greyboard before the first order rather than after it.

If people start asking you to draw them something rather than sell them a print, that's a different business with different rules, and how to sell art commissions online covers the briefs, the revisions and the staged payments that keep it from eating you alive.