My Store on Fine Art America / Pixels - Closing 08/31/24

 

 I will concentrate on my Redbubble store for now, and possibly open a second store in the future.

I have a lot of artwork from my "Girls From T.N.A." comic that's been running on Renderosity for 14 years. During that time my total sales from this site have amounted to a whopping $0.00. Yippee.

A large part of this, I believe is due to the confusing tendency of this site to apply ANY artwork I submit to ANY or ALL of the products there. 

To clarify what I mean; for instance a design targeted for a coffee mug isn't going to work well on a t-shirt. A design for a t-shirt isn't going to work on an IPhone case. And so on. It's like they just place your artworks on products in a very helter-skelter way. 

Then when a prospective customer checks out my store, and sees coffee mug artwork taking up 4 square inches in the middle of a blanket or beach towel, it looks like I don't have a clue about what I'm doing. "Jeeze, this guy just dumps his art on everything whether it fits or not. He's either an idiot, or just doesn't care. I'm not buying anything from him!"

I think you see my point. So......

After spending several nights stumbling around their extremely confusing Artist / Adminstrator site trying to figure out how to designate designs to the products I designed them for, I finally found their "Contact Us" link, and sent an email asking for some help. I never got a response.

I waited another week or so, and sent another request for help. Again, no response. After repeating this a couple more times, and stumbling around the site for another couple hours today, I tried their "Customer Service" phone number. I called, and was connected (to someone I could actually understand, amazingly) with a representative named "James."

I told him what my problem was, and asked why no one there had the courtesy to at least reply to me. He answered "We're actually the ones that take care of customer orders, billing, and stuff like that. That's something the tech support would have to help you with. They don't have a direct line, so you'll have to email them." This was approximately 20 seconds after I told him I'd tried emailing several times with no response at all. He simply repeated the company line once again. "Sorry. You'll have to email them. I can't help you."

I sarcastically thanked him for "All your GREAT help..." and hung up. I then sent one last email, and basically said if I hadn't had a response by next Friday, I'd pull my store there, and try someplace else.

Based on my experiences thus far, it will most likely be gone next weekend. I WILL be looking into other avenues, and I do presently have a store on Redbubble. I will be looking at a few other possibilities - maybe even Amazon - as I'd like to generate a little bit of income besides Social Security.

Stay tuned. I'll keep everyone abreast of new developments here. In addition to merch sites, I have a few other surprises in the works.