I am looking at making a website which allows people to upload artwork. Customers would then purchase the work and the artist would get a commission or royalty once sold.
I have looked at shopify and squarespace to host the website but don't know if they would allow for the potential mass uploading and storage of imagery. Any suggestions as i have 0 knowhow on this?
All the best
Alan

Neither of those two platforms are suitable.

this isn’t the sort of thing where you can use off the shelf applications. You need specialist software and almost certainly your own server. And big big pile of cash for marketing.

Yeah the infrastructure required to handle mass uploading of image files will be substantial, especially if you expect it to scale upto a large number of users.

I suggest you pair up with an engineer who has a good understanding of a platform such as AWS.  I hope you have deep pockets as to get such a system off the ground in a way that can scale won't come cheap.

I definitely won't go for any locally hosted server, you want a cloud based solution, like AWS as mentioned already, essentially you'd want images stored in an S3 bucket and a database (Dynamo) that holds associated information to the entries etc.

Edited July 27, 20206 yr by rbrtsmith

You basically need a platform that allows marketplace selling and payment distribution, neither Shopify or Squarespace offer that currently. The biggest question is how you're going to get both types of users required to make this work? This is the first step to work out, if you build something, there's no guarantee of getting even a single user without the right marketing strategy.

I would be looking to build a minimum viable product (https://www.productplan.com/glossary/minimum-viable-product/) to test your idea before committing too much. Speak to artists about selling their artwork through a simple store, with an agreed commission. This should give you an indication if you're heading in the right area, before having to invest in it heavily. The best way to validate your idea is through feedback as early as possible, you'll likely find things that need to be changed, or assumptions about your idea that didn't turn out to be correct and you'll be in a better position to adapt.

Selling artwork online can be incredibly hard, you're up against numerous existing platforms for starters. That's not to say it can't be done if you can find an attractive USP and provide a better service.

I'd recommend creating a solid business plan, once you have nailed that you may be able to get some startup funding to start building your platform.

As Blue Dreamer says  - existing platforms. There are a number of places photographers can upload images and users can download and buy rights. Is that what you mean? And there are ready made, off the shelf, even free thumbnail gallery systems you could experiment with, contrary to what fisicx says although they may be a bit old, made for porn sites when naughty jpegs was half the internet.

Or Do users get the framed canvas delivered to their door? in which case it's just a shop really.

Either way - don't even begin to think about reinventing the wheel. A bit more research and adapting existing structures will get you started. I looked briefly at ways of monetising archives of old photographs a year or two ago and that was my conclusion

Edited July 28, 20206 yr by TimW