What are the best places for selling icons? Well, to be honest, there are plenty of them! But in a few words, you can sell your artworks on marketplaces (we’ll observe top-rated stock marketplaces further), as well as on your own website! So let’s dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
Top Marketplaces for Icons
We keep track of all the marketplaces, but we would highly recommend to give it a try with any of these:
- IconFinder — you get 70%.
- Noun Project — you get $1.20 for each icon sold individually, 40% from subscriptions.
- Graphic River — you prepare an icon pack, and they set price, somewhere around $7–12. The pricing structure is leery and depends on if you decide to sell exclusively with them or somewhere else too (or if they catch you or not). From their examples, you get $37–60 from a $100 sale.
- CreativeMarket — you define the price; they pay 70% from each sale.
- Canva — unlike all the services above where you buy only an icon file, Canva is a graphic editor that allows embedding your icons. To use a single icon in a single artwork costs $1 (so you get 30 cents), a single icon for the unlimited number of artworks is $10. You get 30% from each sale.
- Your store. No matter where you sell your icons, we suggest opening your store.
Opening Your Store
Resellers charge hefty commissions which may be justified when they market your product and find a customer.
However, that’s not always the case:
- You probably have your own friends and customers
- Someone may come from your portfolio and social media
- Someone may have heard about you and google you.
So, open your own store and make sure it appears first in Google searching by your name or the name of your icon pack. That shouldn’t be difficult:
- Make a single landing page (great example)
- Add some payment solution: PayPal may be enough for a start
- Process the orders manually, sending a Dropbox link to the zip archive with icons.
Icons8 Experience
We’re making our icons since 2002; it’s our core business. The team of 20 depends on how well we market and sell our icons, so we invest into a great deal of time into the research.
As for us, we don’t resell the icons.
As of May 2016, we didn’t find any reseller that was worth their commission.
We used to sell something with Graphic River, earning some meager $150/mo. That was nothing compared to what we did independently.
We didn’t try large websites, but we feel that we can earn and reinvest much without intermediaries. We prefer to give away the icons for free over paying 30–65% to intermediaries.
What Resellers Don’t Focus On
Selling independently, you can provide the best possible experience to your clients. Resellers care about selling more and charging you more fees. They work on the tools for:
- Resellers focus on uploading the icons
- Resellers focus on navigation in their catalog: search, browsing, etc.
- Resellers focus on selling the icons
Instead, we like speaking to our customers, designers and developers, ask them about their challenges, and provide the tools to solve their problems.
- We care about our icons being pixel perfect — resellers don’t care
- We care about generating all the formats our users need — resellers don’t care
- We care about our icons looking great in various sizes, providing responsive icons
Summing up, we advise you to use all of the resellers listed above. Also meantime speak to your customers, make your own website, and try to solve their problems. Without intermediaries.
This article originally appeared at Icons8 blog
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