Creative Market Hack

[Keri Gamrath]

Thishad everyone shaken up a couple of years back. Creative Market raised their commission rate that they take from each sale. At the time a lot of big sellers left the platform and went elsewhere. Unfortunately for the smaller businesses, where the big names go buyers tend to follow.

In 2020, Creative Market was acquired by Dribbble, and while Dribbble assured us that nothing would change for long-standing CM users, inevitably there were changes. A few of those changes were considerable, too, in my opinion:

Creative Fabrica: Creative Fabrica has been based in the heart of Amsterdam since June 2016. Having a design background, the founders realized how difficult it was to find the perfect assets for a design. Creative Fabrica was created to improve and change the way people consume digital assets.

Design / Font Bundles: Launched in 2015 and formed from a combined experience of 40+ years in design, programming and online innovation, the FontBundles.net team identified a huge gap in the market for premium design products at affordable consumer friendly prices.

Envato Market: Envato Market offers a wide range of digital assets, including graphics, themes, templates, audio and video. It consists of different platforms like ThemeForest, GraphicRiver, and AudioJungle, catering to various design and creative needs.

As I mentioned before, one of the things that really makes Creative Market stand out to me is the level of quality of the products. Other marketplaces, not even Etsy, are as strict about quality control as Creative Market. As you will see below, some of the prerequisites of being able to open a shop on Creative Market is your expertise and the quality of your digital products. For that reason, it helps if you already have a shop elsewhere (on your website or another marketplace) as well as a digital portfolio to showcase your work.

As I mentioned above, one of the reasons I sell on Creative Market is because other than spending time adding products, I do not spend any additional time on this platform. I do not promote my Creative Market shop.

Another tip for setting your prices is that you should think about who your audience is. Price your products keeping your audience in mind. If your ideal audience cannot afford 10 graphics for 100 bucks, but only 20, then price your products 20. It works the other way too. If your audience can afford 20 bucks for 10 graphics, then sell your products for 20 bucks. Do not sell them for $5.

If you have the basic non-commercial use price set at $10, and 1st level commercial use set at $25, do you get a higher commission off of the commercial use sales? Or is it always just commission off the base price?

Before you get too excited thinking you have complete freedom to sell whatever you want, let me be clear: you will not make money unless you cater to the trends. For example, vintage logos, hand-drawn fonts, and all the other typical front-page Dribbble shots are likely to sell best right now. As time goes on, trends change and so should your Creative Market files.

Another bubble-bursting truth is you will not generate a decent amount of sales until 1) you get featured or 2) your files are included in a Creative Market bundle sale. Without exposure from either of these, your files quickly get buried and forgotten.

Perhaps the best approach to selling files on a marketplace is to create resources rather than finished products. If a designer is the carpenter, be the lumber mill that provides tools and materials. A few examples are Photoshop brushes and actions, product mockups, and fonts, all of which are very useful assets.

When the Photo category first launched, I was invited to be an early contributor and added a handful of images. I think had a couple sales but it never picked up and I finally removed all of my photos. Since then, I gave the category a second chance by creating a separate Creative Market shop and uploaded my best photos. This generated a total of 11 sales in the last year. To give you an idea of how poor that is, my main graphics related shop has 1100+ sales.

The other reason I believe the acquisition is positive is because Creative Market has, in my opinion, been struggling to roll out new features. As a shop owner, it was disheartening to see Creative Market Pro and the Certified by Creative Market come and go so quickly. More recently, shop owner commissions were decreased as well.

I always circle back to this question for anyone considering selling digital goods: should you make a Creative Market shop? Despite the recent drop, I still have to say yes, though I would recommend checking out Envato Elements first. Each have been great experiences overall and since neither requires exclusivity, you could easily upload to both marketplace. Doing so effectively doubled my passive income as soon as I joined Elements.

Below is the current state of my Creative Market shop income. See that tiny dot in June, 2022? Yep, one sale (as of June 18th). After having years of relatively steady passive income, this drop felt unnatural.

The main draw to selling on Creative Market, in my opinion, is the no-approval upload process. That is incredibly useful for experimenting rapidly as you carve out your niche in a crowded landscape. Just keep your revenue expectations reined in.

Creative Market is an online marketplace for user-generated design assets. The company sells fonts, graphics, illustrations, mockups, icons, templates, web themes, stock photography, and other digital goods for use by web creatives. Creative Market has over 10 million users and more than 10 million purchasable items, available both as single purchases and as part of a monthly subscription offering.[citation needed] It was founded in 2012 by Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams, and Darius A. Monsef IV in San Francisco, California.[2]

Initially, Creative Market went through three investment rounds, raising funds from notable Silicon Valley investors including 500 Startups, Y Combinator, CrunchFund, SV Angel, and Alexis Ohanian.[3] In February 2014, the company was acquired by American multinational software corporation Autodesk for an undisclosed amount.[4]

In 2017, Creative Market raised $7 million in a Series A financing round to spin out from Autodesk.[5] In 2020, Creative Market was acquired by Dribbble Holdings, directly owned by Tiny.[6] As of 2023, Creative Market Labs Inc. runs an independent operation that includes creativemarket.com, fontspring.com, and associated properties.[citation needed]

Creative Market first began in 2011 as a venture between Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams, and Darius A. Monsef IV.[2] Epstein, Williams, and Monsef were the co-founders of COLOURlovers, a Y Combinator-backed social network service that provides color inspiration for both personal and professional creative projects.[3] The co-founders recognized that COLOURlovers was in need of a marketplace to help its community members exchange the digital goods they were creating, and hence created Creative Market.[3]

In April 2014, the team launched a Photoshop extension that allowed designers to preview and purchase Creative Market's digital assets directly within Photoshop itself. This made it easier for designers to find and integrate third-party digital assets within the workflow of their existing graphic design environments.[7][8][9]

In February 2014, Creative Market was acquired by Autodesk. The amount of the acquisition was not publicly announced.[4] The entirety of the Creative Market team stayed with the company through the acquisition.[10]

In May 2020, it was acquired by the online design community Dribbble.[12] Shortly after, the team released Creative Market's Membership, a subscription offering that includes sitewide discounts and exclusive free assets.[citation needed]

Creative Market has continued to expand its catalogue consistently since launch, rolling out new categories like photos and 3D assets as well as emerging subcategories like Procreate brushes and Canva templates. In 2022, the site partnered with Shutterstock to expand its photo supply.[citation needed]

Creative Market's community members buy and sell creative assets for use in design and marketing projects. Assets include fonts, templates, illustrations, mockups, vector graphics, website templates, stock photography, and a wide range of ready-to-license creative goods. As of 2023, over 10 million products were available for purchase on Creative Market.[citation needed]

Creative Market's content is submitted by their users through "shops." On behalf of their shop owners, Creative Market handles the distribution, payment processing, support, and assisted marketing for its products. Sellers retain a cut of the sale price on their goods, are not bound to exclusivity agreements with Creative Market, and set their own prices on goods they sell through the platform. The platform also provides sales statistics[13] and a customer-seller messaging system.[14]

Thank you for this article. I am already a seller on etsy and I just found out about Clevermarket. I think I will start selling there too. But you should mention that Etsy has other fees too. Except from the 3,5% comm. and the 0.20 for listings, they charge the transaction fees $0.25 (from each order you sell, not for a total amount) plus the tax.

As I red in CM support, they do not have transaction fees. Please correct me if I m wrong.

Quarterly pop up Kentucky made market. 50 artists and makers under one roof at Greyline Station. Enjoy desserts, drinks, free samples and lots of locally made goodness. Shop apparel, pottery, wood, KY themed, glass and much more. Free admission & free parking. Family friendly.

In the past month, Creative Market has launched 5 new promo coupons for shopper discounts. This indicates that Creative Market provides regular opportunities for customers to save money on their purchases.

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