PicFair Review

I am always on the lookout for companies which provide me with a way to market my art.  That eventually led me to a product called PicFair.  PicFair, is essentially a hosting site where you can market your images for print products or as stock.  In fact that is what sets PicFair apart from others services. You get both stock and print sales.

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking, "yet another site to host my images and offers no help on the marketing side of things."  If you thought that, you are kinda right, at least for the moment.  At the time of this writing, they do provide several documents, which will help you to get started in marketing, but there is no marketing plan to get your work in front of others.  Therein lies the rub, so they say.

I have been in contact with PicFair about this very thing and I hope soon to get some feedback on possibilities for marketing.  Anyone can create a web site to show off your images and there are even some very good ones that are cheap.  Does Fine Art America ring a bell?  But what these lack are marketing plans.  This is something that has always baffled me. Art Storefronts seems to be the only company trying marketing, and with them you about have to give them your right arm to play.

This review is after a day and half of testing and working with the product.  I hope to get more info soon and will update this when info becomes available.

Setting Up Your Site

Setting up the site is easy as pie.  It is simply a matter of paying (if you want the pay version) and configuring.  You can configure the site to use either  a dark or light theme.  In my case, I went with the dark theme.  I also chose a splash screen to snag the buyer as he comes in.  

Here is what my splash screen looks like.

    

   Your home screen is next to configure, and you can set it up to be either a list of images or use albums as I did below. Note how small the header is.  I found this to look just a tad unprofessional.

Overall the interface of the home screen is very clean and easy to follow for the buyer.  Navigation is in the top left of the screen and is basically the hamburger menu we are getting more familiar with over the last several years. You can add additional links and link to anything you want.  I linked to my main website and blog.

Hamburger Menu Showing Custom Links (Main Site and Blog)

Again, a super clean interface on the menuing system and it works without any weird JavaScript bugs that I seem to encounter on  other sites.  Overall, the image quality is quite good.  I did notice, however, that in some cases, there was a little blurring in images.  Perhaps this was due to resizing algorithms for various devices and desktops, but It gave me pause.

On my phone, I found the header to be pitifully small and almost of no use.  However, the images did look great on the phone and navigation was easy.  I did notice a bit of lag loading one of my albums on my iPhone X.  They need to tweak just a couple small issues here and we are good.  I am in communication with them on this as well and hope to get some answers.

Adding to the Cart and Checking Out

This is a crucial part of any system.  It has to be quick, easy and provide the artist with a way to follow up with the customer for future work.  

After clicking on the thumbnail image, the customer is presented very quickly with a "full size" image.  At this point he has two options.  He can either buy a commercial license for publishing or he can order prints for his wall.  Those two options together are what PicFair is known for and why they believe they stand apart.  

The Add to Cart Screen

At this point, if you choose the printing option, it takes you to a myriad of options for printing.  I won't go into all that here, but it is very typical.  You can choose wraps, prints and framed prints.  One thing I thought was odd was that I chose United States when checking out, but it still showed centimetres as sizing options.  I had to click a separate button to show them in inches.

I did not actually submit an order at this point, but I may do so and do a print giveaway at some point.  I found the prices to be quite reasonable, but I have no idea at this point how good the prints actually look.  Let me know in the comments below if you have used their printing service.

I hope you enjoyed this quick tour/review of PicFair and I hope you will at least give it a try.  If you would like to try it, click on the link below.

https://www.picfair.com/?rcs=BEgxPl8

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