Services For Artists

We have focused on providing a core set of features that allows practicing, professional artists to sell tangible works of art to anyone in the world, regardless of distance, language barriers and currency differences.

We offer each artist their own website, with its own custom design and url. We do this because we recognize that it's important for an artist to market themselves without having concerns that the people they are dealing with will be distracted by other peoples work and spend their money elsewhere.

You can see an example at http://www.carmglass.com

We also put every artist into our patronizetheartist.com system so shoppers can browse the entire collection and make purchases.

We have integrated ourselves with WorldPay. Each artist will have their own WorldPay account which we will use to handle payment processing.

WorldPay allows us to extend their interface with extra languages that they do not already support, which is essential to our "usable by anybody, of any language, anywhere in the world" policy.

They are also very easy to get an account with, regardless of credit ratings, because they remit funds after they have cleared rather than immediately, and thus assume very limited risk. This makes our service very accessible.

We have also integrated ourselves with UPS. We can do real time address checks to ensure delivery will be possible, and do real time price quotes to which you can apply a price adjustment if you wish.

In the administrative interface, you can get a price quote, book the shipment with UPS and print bar code label to stick on your package.

Meanwhile, your patrons can log in, review their order history, reuse existing personal details for easier repeat purchases and track the movement of their packages through the UPS tracking system.

The other aspect of our system that we consider novel is our multilingualization system.

We have designed our system in such a way that any text or prose is stored in a way that it can have multiple additional translated versions stored against it, and the website will show the version that the end user prefers if it can, and the original language version if it cannot.

After you edit your pages, add artwork and journal entries, you can then access our direct translation system, which will allow you to enter translated versions yourself if you are capable.

Additionally, we have built a site for translation service representatives into our system.

You can create a scope for translation work, add any pages, art pieces or journal entries you would like translated to the scope, and publish the scope.

After you do, representatives of translation services, who will be offered free accounts with us when we go live, will be able to see these scopes. They can log in and offer you a quote, with a dollar value, a completion time and expiration date. If you wish to accept a quote, you just push a button, and the translation service is notified.

They can then download an XML file, fill in the details and upload it back to the site, and your site is instantly updated.

We will, however, translate all core system text for you.

This means that a visitor to your site who doesn't understand your language will not be able to understand what the name of your art piece means, and they won't be able to understand the description unless you have them translated.

However, they will know that this text is the name, that this text is the description. They will know how much it weighs, how big it is, what artistic medium you are using, how much it costs, how to pay for it with their credit card, how long it will take to arrive, and they will see a picture of it, so they will know if they like it or not.

What this means is that the choice to commission additional translation is really more about making yourself accessible to particular markets that you are already seeing enough activity from to justify the expense. It's not necessary to commission any translation whatsoever for you use the site to sell your work worldwide.

We are still finalizing our operating costs, but our anticipated pricing will be as follows.

Basic Hosting Service:

500.00 CAD for initial sign-up and custom design of your website

20.00 CAD / month for hosting fees

20.00 CAD / year for a domain name, if you need one

Additional Fees for Full Commercial Package (Payment/Shipping):

20.00 CAD / month for your static IP address

2% of sales, payable monthly for the previous months transactions

A yet to be determined annual fee for an SSL certificate, if you need one

Once we go live, you will be able to use the Artist Signup link on the left to begin. In the meantime, if you are interested in becoming involved, please use the Contact Us link on the left to send us a message.