Comparing Sales Channels Honestly
Selling the same work through several channels is normal, and each channel takes a different cut in a different way. Comparing them properly is a matter of reducing them all to one number: what you keep.
Everything is a commission, whatever it is called
A gallery takes a commission. A marketplace takes a fee. A print-on-demand service takes a margin. A shop takes a wholesale discount. Different words, same structure: a percentage of the retail price that does not reach you.
The split calculator handles all of them, because the arithmetic does not care what the deduction is called.
Reduce each to take-home per sale
On a 1,200 piece with 200 of materials:
- Direct, no fee → 1,200 take-home, 1,000 profit
- 20% platform → 960 take-home, 760 profit
- 40% gallery → 720 take-home, 520 profit
- 50% gallery → 600 take-home, 400 profit
Materials come out of your share in every case, which is why profit falls faster than take-home does. At a 50% split the profit is a third of the sticker price.
Volume is the other half of the comparison
Take-home per sale on its own would say sell direct and never work with anyone. The reason galleries and platforms exist is that they sell things you would not sell.
The honest comparison is take-home per sale times sales per year. A gallery keeping half but selling six pieces beats direct sales keeping everything and selling two, and no amount of arithmetic about percentages changes that.
Direct is not free
Selling direct still carries costs: payment processing, a website, photography, packing, shipping, and the time spent on marketing that a gallery would otherwise do. Treating direct as a 0% channel overstates it.
Payment processing alone is a percentage plus a fixed fee, which bites hardest on small sales. It is a commission by another name.
One retail price everywhere
Whatever the mix of channels, hold the price constant and let each channel absorb its own cut. Undercutting a gallery on your own site is prohibited by most consignment agreements and, more practically, damages the work's perceived value with the collectors you already have.
Set the price so the highest-commission channel still works. Everything else then works better.
Read the terms, not the headline
A 40% commission that deducts framing, shipping and a promotion contribution before splitting can leave less than a 50% commission on the gross. Ask what is deducted, in what order, and when you get paid.
Payment timing is the one people forget. A channel that pays 90 days after sale is a channel you are financing.
One $1,200.00 piece, five channels
| Channel | Commission | You take home | After $200.00 materials | Retail to net $800.00 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct from the studio | 0% | $1,200.00 | $1,000.00 | $800.00 |
| Own website (card fees) | 4% | $1,152.00 | $952.00 | $833.33 |
| Print/marketplace platform | 20% | $960.00 | $760.00 | $1,000.00 |
| Shop or fair | 30% | $840.00 | $640.00 | $1,142.86 |
| Gallery | 50% | $600.00 | $400.00 | $1,600.00 |
Direct selling keeps $1,000.00 and a gallery keeps $400.00 — a difference of $600.00 on a single sale.
What the commission is buying
The table makes direct selling look obviously correct, and it only is if the sale happens. A gallery's 50% buys footfall, a mailing list, framing, a physical wall, insurance, and somebody whose job is to sell the work.
The honest comparison is not commission against zero. It is $400.00 from a sale that happened against $1,000.00 from one that did not.
Which is why the volumes matter more than the rates
Two pieces a year through a gallery at 50% returns $800.00. One direct sale returns $1,000.00. The gallery wins if it sells more than 2.5 times as often, which for most artists it comfortably does.
The mistake to avoid
Pricing differently in different channels. A piece at $1,200.00 in a gallery and $800.00 direct undercuts the gallery that is selling for you, and galleries notice.
The workable approach is one retail price everywhere, set so that the worst-commission channel still nets what you need — which the split calculator gives you directly as the retail-to-target figure in the last column.
Your own time is a commission too
A direct sale takes photography, listing, answering questions, packing and posting. At $63.77 an hour, three hours of that is $191.31 — which on a $1,200.00 piece is an effective commission of 15.9% that never appears in the table.
It does not overturn the comparison, and it does narrow it. Direct selling is cheaper than a gallery and it is not free, and pretending otherwise is how artists end up doing a shop's job for a shop's margin.
The mix most people land on
Originals through a gallery, prints and small work direct, commissions privately. Each channel takes the work whose economics suit it, and the single retail price holds across all three.
Run your own numbers through the split calculator at each channel's real rate before deciding. The answer is frequently that one channel is doing nearly all the work and another is doing nearly none.
What to measure per channel
Three numbers, tracked for a year: how many pieces each channel sold, what you netted per piece, and how many hours it cost you. The third is the one nobody records and the one that reorders the list.
A channel selling four pieces a year at $400.00 each is worth $1,600.00 a year. One selling twelve at a lower rate may be worth more and cost far more of your time. Only the three numbers together answer it, and a year is the shortest period over which they mean anything — a single good month tells you nothing about a channel.
Changing channel is slower than it looks
A gallery relationship takes a year to produce sales and several to produce regular ones. A direct audience takes longer than that. Neither is a decision you can act on this quarter, which is the argument for running two or three in parallel rather than optimising for the best one on paper.
The table tells you what each is worth per sale. Only time tells you how often each sells, and that is the number the whole comparison turns on.