Meylah - Get a Free Shop to Sell Your Art Online

Have you ever wished you had your own online web store to sell your art directly to your customers? With Meylah, you can – and it’s completely free and surprisingly easy to setup! Meylah is a growing community of artisans, fine artists, photographers and creative people from around the world. All sorts of items can be sold here, including digital art, handmade items, ebooks, photography, paintings, sculptures, and more.

 

The site is structured like a blogging platform to encourage interaction, feedback, and sharing of artworks. A comments box, along with Facebook and Twitter buttons is included below every listing. To the right appears the sellers other artworks and a link where they can view more. Right at the bottom of each page is an About Me section, contact info., blogroll, testimonials, recent comments and recent posts. Subscription methods are by email and RSS - subscribers will be notified of new updates to the online store.

Meylah has all sorts of uses, from posting artworks for sale, to creating blog posts and tutorials for your fans. If you do not already have a blog or web-store, this is a great place to get one for free.

 

Here are a few of the great features of Meylah:

1. Integrate 4 social network profiles to your Meylah store, from a list of 11, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest, Ravelry, Myspace, Linkedin, Delicious, Bebo, Youtube and Vimeo. Also, use the Connect with Facebook and Connect with Twitter buttons to instantly share new posts with followers at these social networks.
   
   
2. Testimonials – Gather testimonials from satisfied customers and include them in the testimonial section. This appears at the bottom of all your store pages. Testimonials are a great way to build trust with your clientele by including the recommendations of others.
   
   
3. Artworks are easily searchable. A search bar appears at the top, along with categories for On Sale and Free Shipping. Items can be sorted by price, when it was posted and popularity.
   
   
4. Sell digital items in your store, which can be instantly downloaded, such as ebooks, clipart, icons, wallpapers and recipes. Go to Your Store – Content. Choose Products for items that you want others to download, such as ebooks. Meylah also has a way for users to create their own tutorials. Select Tutorials to write your own tutorial and publish it at Meylah – to be offered for free or sold at any price.
   
   
5. The Learning Center has plenty of tutorials and resources that will help you in all aspects of selling your art online – most of them are free. Some topics include blogging, community, business management, ebooks, art tutorials, selling art and social media.
   
   
6. Easily include exterior widgets such as Etsy store fronts, Flickr slideshows, Youtube Videos, Facebook integration, Twitter, and more. You may include 3 in your sidebar, along with titles for each one. Go to Your Store – Sidebar to set this up. These are displayed in pull-out tabs at the left of your storefront.
   
   
7. Build an email list for your store by integrating Mailchimp code. Please refer to our previous article on Mailchimp if you do not have an account there already - How to Create an Email List with Mailchimp.
   
   
8. Brand yourself by uploading a logo and banner. This distinguishes yourself from others and establishes yourself as a professional. You can create a logo or banner yourself, or find someone at Fiverr to do it for you for just $5 – which I think is an awesome deal for such a task.
   
   
9. Use a custom domain for your web store. A domain is what appears in your web browser. This is something I recommend for everyone who creates a web store at Meylah. It will make your shop appear like your own site, instead of belonging to Meylah. Setting up your domain is very easy. Go to Godaddy.com and buy a domain, and forward it to your Meylah free domain. Then share only the new custom domain wherever you network on the web.. and offline. Godaddy has full instructions on how to set this up, so please visit their instructions here for Forwarding or Masking Your Domain Name.
   
   
10. There are 3 different Meylah template themes to choose. These can be changed anytime by going to Your Store – Design.
    
    
    
    
11. A blogroll also appears at the bottom of your pages. This is a great place to either place links to your other sites, or websites and blogs that you love. Another way to use this is for link exchange with other popular Meylah stores.
    
    
12. Contact Me - Include a way for people to reach you, which will appear at the bottom of all your shop pages. You can include things such as address, phone number and email.
    
    
13. Use Feedburner to manage your RSS feed. The RSS feed button appears at the very top of your Meylah store. Feedburner makes it very easy to publish your feed anywhere. Check out the Recent Posts and Recent Comments at the bottom of this page to see what I mean. These were created using Feedburner. Using Feedburner, you can easily create a widget for your website, and always have updated items on that page.
    
    
14. All transactions are through Paypal. Meylah gives full use of all their tools for free, and only deducts a 2.75% transaction fee when an item is sold (Paypal has their own transaction fee). This is an amazing deal for all the wonderful tools they offer for artists.

When you create your store, I recommend going through each section one by one and get everything setup. Try to take advantage of all the features if possible. Take a look at other Meylah stores for inspiration - I am listing some here:

Marilyn Fenn
EarthPsalts
Helen Klebesadel
EvelynMcCPetersArt

Please visit and follow me at my Meylah store which I recently created: Graham Matthews Art (more artworks will be added there soon – I like this site so much, I plan to post there regularly)

Signup yourself by visiting Meylah and clicking the Sign Me Up button at the top-right.

What are your impressions of Meylah? If you have a Meylah store, you are very welcome to share it with us here.