Selling on Creative Market: Designer Review
Today I’m sharing my thoughts on selling on Creative Market. I have a previous post on selling on Design Bundles and Creative Fabrica if you’re interested in learning more about those platforms.
Related: Where to Sell Fonts and SVGs
As a digital designer, knowing where to sell your products is a common questions. Every designer will have a different opinion based on their personal experiences. I’ve been selling on Creative Market for 5+ years, so I hope I can share some unbiased opinions with you today.
You need to be approved to sell on Creative Market. When I applied I was selling fonts on Font Bundles, and I was approved once I had 2-3 fonts. I recommend getting approved on a site like Font Bundles or Design Bundles first, and then applying to Creative Market. If you’re an SVG designer, then I would include some clipart or patterns in your portfolio. Creative Market doesn’t seem to approve SVG-only shops, from what I’ve heard from other designers.
Uploading Process
Creative Market has a fairly simple uploading process. You can drag and drop your images and your files. Add a title, write out a description, add some tags, and you’re pretty much good to go!
Creative Market has product pricing minimums. This is sometimes annoying. Some fonts should only be $5-8 but you have to price them at $12 or higher. With the limited amount of product categories, some products have minimums that I think are far too high. But that’s just how it works on Creative Market.
Fees & Payouts
Creative Market used to have a really terrible payout system. You would have to request the monthly payout manually each month, and if you forget by a certain date then you wouldn’t be able to request until the following month. Meaning: if you forgot to request your payout in March, you wouldn’t be able to be paid out until April.
However, I am SO happy to say that they have set up auto-payouts. You no longer have to go in and request the payout. As long as you hit the $20 threshold, you will get paid out. The payouts are still a one-time monthly payout, but that’s fine with me.
As for fees, you will earn 50% of the sale with the other 50% going to Creative Market.
License
Oof. Where to begin. I’m just going to say that the Creative Market license is good in some regards and terrible in others. I suggest reading through it for yourself and seeing what types of licensing gets offered for your design categories. I do like that you can charge higher for the commercial and enterprise licenses, but I don’t like that the personal use license has to be so expensive. Some products shouldn’t have a minimum $12 for personal use. But Creative Market is a more professional site and buyers are typically willing to spend more money there.
Related: 20 Digital Products to Start Selling
Affiliate Program
The affiliate program on Creative Market is pretty lacking. It’s easy enough to use, but it’s hard to know if the “share this product” link actually adds your affiliate link or not.
I just copied the link from one of my products by using the “copy link” button below, and this is the link that showed up: https://crmrkt.com/Rgx8V8. I would assume by the messaging in this banner that it would have my affiliate code in there, but I’m not entirely sure if it does.
After 4,000 clicks I finally have made 3 sales ($1.80) using their affiliate program. I’m not sure where the sales generated from as the information given in the affiliate panel is pretty lacking. I really do wish there were better analytics for affiliates, to know where the sales are coming from. Even as simple as something like “Pinterest” would be helpful.
Final Thoughts
I do recommend selling on Creative Market. It’s not a huge income stream for me at the moment but I plan on adding more of my work to CM this year to see if that helps make a difference. They have a different audience than some of the other sites I sell on, so I don’t put all of my work there.