Analyzing Sales on Fine Art America

Facts help us make decisions, but facts about our aggregate sales on Fine Art America are pretty hard to come by. We get good information on each sale as it happens, you can see a list of all sales in the “Behind the Scenes” area under “Sales”, but how about answering the question – what is my most successful image in terms of print sales? How about which image does best on products other than prints? Where do my sales come from – is there an area of the country (or world) which dominates my sales and perhaps I can do some focused marketing in those areas. In my case, do my Morgantown images sell to local people? How have I being doing over time – selling more, or just coasting along? If these questions are intriguing, then this article is for you!

There is an “Export to Excel” spreadsheet available on the FAA site that lists all the transactions on your account from day one. You can find it here in the Behind the Scenes area in the Balance area of Accounting:

But when you open it (assuming you can, because it is in such an old Excel format that my system refused because of security settings!), you will find it almost impossible to analyze because all the details of a sale are combined in one free text field such as these:

Clever Excel users can perhaps do “SumIf” type commands and perhaps VLookUp formulae, but that is not for the faint hearted, and so I decided that if I really wanted to understand my sales, I needed a more professional approach and so I have spent the past two weeks developing a flexible database approach in Access that can import that spreadsheet and spit out a standard set of reports in both PDF and Excel format that answers all those questions above and more…

I wish it was just as simple as import the spreadsheet and print the results, but it is getting a little closer to that! In reality, dealing with the different formats of each of the product sales and trying to match these product sales to categories is a continuing challenge.

Available Reports

The output you get includes the following reports, which, as I mentioned are in both PDF and Excel format:

The idea behind this report is that if you saw that buyers in a certain state were particularly interested in one image or type of image, then any advertising that you chose to do on Facebook or Pinterest could be focused on potential buyers in that state and using the type of image that they had traditionally been buying.

This report above is also available just for Print sales so that you can see which is your most valuable image in terms of collectors looking for prints.

Finally, I thought it would be interesting to see what people actually bought for each of the images you have online. This one looks like this:

Next Steps

So far I have tested this system with my own sales and also with the spreadsheet from a colleague at FAA who sells around 30 products a month and whose spreadsheet had over 1300 rows when first opened. My plan is to offer this as a service – if you are interested in analyzing your own spreadsheet, you would send it to me (in confidence of course) and I will return all the outputs as PDFs and XLS files. I don’t think most people would want to do that more than once a year, but it could give you a lot of actionable information about your results. As we all know, images don’t just sell on FAA – you need to market them and this analysis will help focus that.

I wanted to get the idea in front of you and would really welcome feedback on the approach and also on what additional reports you would like to see. I’ll then put this together as a fully developed service. I’m thinking that this would be a service with two price points – $29.99 for smaller scale sellers and $49.99 for larger sellers. How to tell which group you fit into? If the excel spreadsheet you download from the FAA site (called Test.xls) is less than 100KB on your hard drive then you are in the smaller scale category. Above 100KB then you are in the larger scale category. Hope that makes sense.

So, comments please…