Creative Market is an online marketplace with a focus on digital artists. Here, you can find downloadable products made by creatives for creatives. It may sound limited, but with over four million listings, there are plenty of products to inspire you to sell, or to pique your interest as a customer.
In this article, we’ll give you an outline of Creative Market, including who can list, what you can sell, how to buy, as well as other features and benefits.
What Is Creative Market?
If you’re looking for a marketplace that doesn't treat digital products as an afterthought, Creative Market is the place to be. Here, your customers can easily browse and locate what they’re looking to buy. In fact, both the menus and the search bar are extremely intuitive.
The site also helps you promote your work in various ways, including a weekly freebie roundup. Each week, the site curates and features a variety of products to help bring different creators into the spotlight—which you can pick up yourself with a free account.
Within the marketplace, you’ll find a blog that’s centered around topics in design. Creators from 190 countries can also discuss topics related to Creative Market or simply mingle in the forum.
Best of all, you don’t need to be a seller, designer, or artist to sign up. Anyone interested is welcome to make a Creative Market account to simply use the site.
Who Can Sell on Creative Market?
You’re unable to sign up for a Creative Market shop and start selling right away, like you can on eBay or Etsy. The site asks that you request an invitation by way of application.
While this may sound intimidating, it simply looks for examples of your work through your current shops and your portfolio. Creative Market looks for 10-20 unique, high-quality pieces within a portfolio you submit.
The site wants to ensure you’re an individual creator, a real person, and the work presented is yours. While not everyone gets approved the first time, that doesn’t mean you can’t try again later once you have more samples.
Another item worth noting is that there seem to be no location limitations with Creative Market. While you may want to check out their FAQ section to see how taxes and payment would work in your country, shops are not only for US citizens.
Additionally, if you’re a Dribbble Pro member, you can open up a shop without applying.
What Can You Sell on Creative Market?
You won’t find any physical products on Creative Market. If you want to sell clothes, jewelry, and decor, Etsy is the place to be. People turn to Creative Market for unique design assets they can add their own work.
Think fonts, templates, vector images, photos, and web themes. These are just some of the products sold on Creative Market. You can create and list these assets for Adobe Creative Suite, Canva, Shopify, Instagram, and more.
Technically, when someone purchases an item from your store, they’re buying a license to use it. These licenses allow your customer to use the asset as much as they want for Personal Use, one time for Commercial Use, or up to 500 times for End Product Use—meaning they’re selling something they’ve created using your asset. That way, there's no mistaking who owns it.
To give you an idea of what that looks like, the end user of your products would mainly be other creatives providing services or making physical products. However, business owners and hobbyists may also be interested in purchasing your products for presentations, crafting, and DIY projects at home or around the office.
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You’ll also find a Print on Demand section that opens even more doors. Here you can sell anything from books and planners to posters and printable decor.
While you can list almost anything, Creative Market restricts any NSFW content.
How to Buy Products on Creative Market
To buy on Creative Market, you need to create a free account. As mentioned above, one you've purchased an item, you'll receive both the download of the digital product and the license to use it.
From a listing, you can buy the product you want for the purchase price, plus a small Platform Fee, using your credit card or PayPal. Additionally, you can use credits.
You can purchase credits in bulk from Creative Market. They’re much like gift cards you buy for yourself. You can use credits to download multiple items at once and minimize the number of transactions on your credit card statement.
Where this would come in handy is if you have a monthly budget for purchasing stock assets. You can add the funds to your account and easily keep track of them. Creative Market also offers deals if you pick up a large number of credits at once, stretching those funds a little further.
More Benefits and Features of Selling on Creative Market
Creative Market allows you to set your own prices, and it invites you to jump onboard their promotions to offer limited discounts to customers. Despite needing to apply to start a shop, there’s no per post product approval.
Like Etsy, Creative Market gives you a suite of marketing tools such as an analytics dashboard and instant messaging to answer questions and provide customer support. The site also provides plenty of resources, tutorials, and an online community to help if you get stuck.
What's more is the marketplace may decide to promote your products via email, the homepage, staff picks, and other avenues.
Comparing Creative Market to Etsy
While Creative Market focuses on digital downloads, you can also list them on Etsy. The main drawback is that Etsy has no specific category for items like fonts, vector images, and photos.
Digital downloads are seemingly an afterthought on Etsy. However, it's important to note there are still shops that do incredibly well selling them.
Etsy allows you to create a shop and start selling the same day, which is more welcoming. The downside to this is giving anyone the ability to list does create a more saturated environment and in which competition may take a quantity over quality approach.
In terms of visibility, Etsy also works to promote your products with Offsite Ads. To distribute ads Etsy essentially gives all listing information to a third-party site that uses an algorithm to match listings to a potential customer’s search and profile information.
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The key thing to remember when listing with any online marketplace is that most of the marketing effort comes down to the shop owner.
If you already have an Etsy shop and want to start selling your digital assets on Creative Market, why not check it out? Even if you’re not currently selling but would like to, why not try both and complete a comparison? Neither site locks you in exclusively.
The Possibilities Are Unlimited With Creative Market
Creative Market is an excellent platform for designers, developers, artists, and photographers to sell digital assets and meet other designers. Since downloadable products are the main focus, it’s the more intuitive marketplace for it.
However, which shop environment is best for you may come down to personal experience—and there are plenty to choose from alongside Creative Market and Etsy. So get out there and give them a try.
