Where to Sell Your Zines & Art Books Online

Etsy’s pitch is the one thing you can’t build overnight: people already searching it for handmade, illustrated and printed things. Its search can put your zine in front of buyers who have never heard of you, which counts when you are starting cold.

You pay for that traffic in layers. Each listing costs $0.20, charged whether or not the item sells. Each sale carries a 6.5% transaction fee on the total order, shipping and gift wrap included, plus payment processing (3% + $0.25 in the United States; it varies by country). Then there are Offsite Ads: every shop is enrolled, an order that comes through one costs a 15% fee, capped at $100 per order, and once a shop has made $10,000 in any 365 days the fee drops to 12% but participation becomes mandatory for the life of the shop. Treat it as a discovery channel, not a home.

Shopify is the full commerce platform: a store of your own that can run anything from one sticker to a full catalogue of apparel and print. If you imagine this becoming a business with several product lines, it has the most room to grow.

That power is overkill for a few zine titles. You pay a monthly fee whether you sell anything or not (from France, Basic was €27 a month billed yearly or €36 monthly, after a three-day trial and three months at €1), plus card fees on every sale, which fall on the higher plans. There is no marketplace traffic: every visitor is one you brought yourself through social, email or ads. Right once you have an audience and volume; heavy before then.

Big Cartel is built for artists, bands and makers selling a modest number of things. There is a free Gold plan with limited features; Platinum, at $15 a month after a seven-day trial, adds custom domains, shipping labels and order tracking, and Diamond, at $30, adds abandoned-cart recovery, scheduled product drops and password-protected products. You can sell physical and digital products, sell in person from your phone, and let its sales-tax autopilot handle tax.

It pays the Press nothing, and for a small print run its pricing is easier to justify than Shopify’s. The limits are the flip side of the simplicity: fewer features than Shopify, and no marketplace, so discovery is on you. It can import products from Etsy, Squarespace and Shopify, which makes it an easy second step after a marketplace.

Gumroad is the path of least resistance for digital work: PDFs, e-books, courses and memberships. You upload a file, set a price and share a link. There is no monthly fee; Gumroad takes 10% + $0.50 per sale through your profile or direct links, and 30% when a new customer finds you through its Discover marketplace. Since 1 January 2025 it acts as merchant of record, collecting and remitting sales tax and VAT for you.

Like Big Cartel, it sends no affiliate money the Press’s way and is here anyway. The trade-off is the per-sale cut: at steady volume, a flat subscription elsewhere gets cheaper. Its own pages describe it as a platform for digital products, so for shipped paper copies use one of the stores above.