Nine Months Gestation for Oz FineArt to Launch
The Long and Winding Road
We've had 9 months of gestation to launch ozfineart.au and are almost ready. I honestly never imagined it would take this long. Here is a brief summary of a few of the lessons along the way.
Pricing Model Revamp
Our pricing structure ended up being revamped several times.
The model became more business focused and realistic to expense and market analysis.
We did a lot of research in fact, and this was captured in our new Collector's Prospectus published as a PDF book under our own ISBN. To get a copy go to the For Collector page link in footer.
We did a lot of research in fact, and this was captured in our new Collector's Prospectus published as a PDF book under our own ISBN. To get a copy go to the For Collector page link in footer.
Our curated collected works mostly range from $2400 to $50k and a few outliers over 100K. Under those prices are original studies or small size boards, and then prints on paper and canvas.
AI Assistance Essential
We've engaged many of the new AI resources to assist research and analysis.
Chat GBT was essential and a valuable companion. More advanced, capable and thoughtful than Gemini. And also helpful to sort basic coding issues in site set up that Gemini was unable to accomplish.
Shopify AI was extremely helpful (and supportive) while teaching me so many parts of the set up process, but also for quality review and dealing with complex industry questions.
Website Migration - Before Launch!
Strange as it sounds, we even had to migrate the website from Squarespace over to Shopify during our pre-launch window. This failture of Squarespace cost us over four months of frustration and several thousands of dollars.
The failure of Squarespace was in retrospect an historical reality that was doomed to happen this particular year. Like many companies with a bit of success from our view they appear to have become complacent. The proof is when you visit the community forums and help pages all you see are frustrated customers asking for fixes and upgrades to the most simply functionalities. Squarespace do not appear to speak in these settings and do not appear to invest in upgrades and requests suggested by users. Their forums are failures for both marketing and customer confidence. We decided to save our company's future and vote with our feet.
Also frustrating was the fact of so many artists and gallery leaders suggested Squarespace as the preferred provider. That led us down a dark dank rabbit hole.
Squarespace vs Shopify
Well during 2025, the experts were proven wrong.
The Squarespace platform is starting to look outdated when we compare across providers. While this outdated look may appeal to older galleries and artistic perspectives, we think this generational phenomena does not hold water when dealing with reality in business and younger generations of collectors.
But the critical problems we faced were more about functionality in commerce, adaptability to different product types, and dealing with any level of inventory that is beyond a dozen or so items.
Payment processing is a problem, and allowing flexible innovations including cryptocurrency do not yet exist in Squarespace. The track record of the company to resist and appear to ignore customer's needs led us to drop the platform even before launch. It was simply not adequate to set up the gallery and trust that the system would scale.
Shopify Harder to Learn - But Worth It
Yes, Shopify is harder to learn up front but the onboard AI really helped. Having worked with AI for the past year or two made my awareness of framing prompts easier - how you put your questions leads to different outcomes. So you have to be pretty aware of how the words make different meanings.
Having many years of experience with Wordpress, then Squarespace, a bit of Wix, and now Shopify I had some skills to face the challenges. Overall Shopify can use some functionality upgrades and the platform has grown to be complicated and difficult to navigate. It reminds me of Wordpress, which is a scary thing to say in this era when systems are getting more elegant and intuitive. That said, elegant and intuitive are NOT words for the backend of Shopify.
Shopify Wins on All Counts
So far my impressions are that Shopify is more professional for fine art and business needs, more robust for taxes and other complexities, and more adaptable to shipping issues with necessary API functionality.
Shopify is in fact comparable for adapting fine art industry and artistic professional presentation standards. Upgrades they have made over the past 12 months to themes and liquid coding have assisted this transition.
That the industry leaders in online fine art platforms has shifted this dramatically in one year was bound to happen - the writing was in fact on the wall for some time. We thankfully caught this reality in spades at the right time - even if that delayed our launch by several months.
This is in spite of what many fine art leaders have said over the past five years. From our view, Shopify has been good to adapt to fine art cultural ad industry models and standards.
But take a look at our website and judge for yourself. What do you think? Did we cover the basics of artist presentation pages with artist statements and biographies etc? Is the layout functional and easy to navigate? Does the design fit the kind of minimalist clean gallery feel we were seeking?
Would love to hear your impressions and reflections in comments, thanks for sharing and being part of our adventure!
Dr Jorandi Kisiku Joseph Randolph Bowers, 2025