Creative Market was founded by Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams, and Darius A. Monsef IV in 2012. They were inspired by a mission to enable designers and creators to sell digital design products online. The platform hosts a variety of fonts, graphics, illustrations, stock photography, themes, and more created by sellers.
What is Creative Market?
Creative Market is a popular digital design marketplace featuring over 3 million products. They currently have a customer base of 11 million members whom sellers can create and sell designs to.
How does Creative Market work?
Creative Market works by only allowing handpicked sellers on the platform. There’s an application process required to be accepted into their marketplace. In your application, you need to include unique, useful designs with excellent fine details.
You will need to select a product type from the product type dropdown for the types of products you’ll primarily sell on the platform. Then, it’s time to share your Dribbble, Behance portfolio, or portfolio site.
Completing the application form isn’t enough to guarantee acceptance onto the platform, as Creative Market will assess whether your designs align with their aesthetic and quality standards.
Once you’re on the platform, you’ll be selling your products among a sea of other sellers. The platform has curated collections you can be part of to increase your visibility, including aesthetic styles, categories, holiday collections, and more. You can set any price for your products. Typically, sellers charge between $15 and $50 for a bundle set or design product offering.
Buyers on the platform can typically search via the search bar or collection pages to find the design styles they like. That means sellers will need to optimize their product titles for search to ensure better visibility and sales. However, many sellers give unique names for their designs, such as custom fonts and more to help build brand recognition for their products.
What you need to know about selling on Creative Market
One positive aspect of Creative Market is that they don’t lock you into an exclusivity agreement with them. If you’re selling products on the platform, you can also sell products on your own website. If you want to create a website to sell your designs and access another marketplace, you can check out Payhip.
Creative Market also doesn’t have a per-product approval process. While it can be tricky to find your way into the platform, once you’re in, you’re in. Your products will go live on the marketplace as soon as you start uploading them.
One downside to selling on Creative Market is that they have minimum pricing requirements. So while they let you set your own prices, you can’t set a price below their minimums. While this can allow you to earn more money, some sellers on other marketplaces find that lower price points lead to massive sales, even if the per-sale amount is low. You can find details on Creative Market’s minimum prices. This may be why sellers tend to create many bundled assets on this platform.
Another challenge with Creative Market is that they take a 50% commission on every sale you make. If you refer a customer through your own link, you’ll get an extra 5% to 15%. Overall, this marketplace can be an expensive choice for sellers. There are other platforms that take only a 5% cut per sale, like Payhip, which might be a better Creative Market alternative for you.
On top of that, sellers in forums have noted that their sales revenue from the platform has been declining in recent years. Whether it’s the steep competition on the platform or the general lack of customer purchases is unclear.
You can sell a variety of license types to customers on this platform: personal, commercial, and extended. These license agreements allow you to charge more and earn more revenue per sale. However, to the average customer, it may be confusing to them. Some may unknowingly purchase the wrong license agreement, preventing lost sales.
Creative Market also charges a 30% tax on international sellers when no tax treaty exists in the United States.
Is Creative Market the best platform to sell products?
No, Creative Market isn’t the best platform to sell products due to its high commission fees, minimum pricing requirements, and difficult approval process. If you’re looking to sell digital products similar to Creative Market, you should try Payhip instead, a platform with a marketplace, low fees, no price minimums, and easy sign-up. If you want to start selling digital products, sign up today.