Art.industries vs Shopify

Where Shopify fits

Shopify is the right tool when you only need self-serve e-commerce: edition prints, books, merchandise, and fixed-price multiples where the buyer decides on the page and pays without a negotiation thread. Checkout, tax, shipping apps, and a custom-domain storefront are mature. For a studio or gallery that already runs Shopify only for print drops and accepts the operational split, it can work.

Where art businesses pick Art.industries over Shopify alone

Teams on Shopify plus a spreadsheet for deals maintain two catalogues, and Shopify does not run print-on-demand from the same inventory record. Art.industries keeps commerce and deals on shared records, storefront checkout for self-serve sales (including print-on-demand on Advanced: configure once, automate purchase → print → ship), viewing rooms and Stripe invoicing for coordinated sales, with consignment splits and CRM on the same graph. Multi-location tracking marks each unique work at storage, a fair booth, or on loan, not warehouse qty per SKU. Advanced is $30/month per workspace, not a per-store subscription plus apps.

Four tools, or one record

Most art businesses run archival software for inventory, a site builder for their public face, a commerce platform for checkout, and Eventbrite (or similar) for opening RSVPs and ticket sales. Four systems means four copies of price, availability, edition counts, and guest lists.

Art.industries unifies archival depth, website publishing, storefront commerce, and events and ticketing on one live record—no Eventbrite embed or spreadsheet reconciliation after every opening. The sections below compare a specific product on deals, commerce, and collector experience, not which single dimension they happen to excel at.

Simple tiers: pay for what you use, subscription only

Art.industries has three workspace plans (Core, Advanced, and Max), not a stack of paid modules. Inventory, CRM, viewing rooms, pipeline, consignments, Website Studio, storefront checkout, email campaigns, and events are included in the tier you pick. You are not buying a Gallery Management module, a Marketing module, and a Website module separately, and you are not stacking Shopify-style apps so inventory talks to the cart.

You pay for what you use: start on free Core for the full deals stack; upgrade to Advanced when you need public commerce on your domain; choose Max when unlimited capacity is simpler than counting seats. Optional capacity applies only when you outgrow included works, workspace members, artists, or email sends, spelled out in the pricing simulator, not buried in a renewal call.

We do not take a percentage of your sales or add a platform fee on top of Stripe. Invoices and storefront checkout run on your Stripe account; funds settle to you. Your bill from us is the subscription fee for the tier you chose; nothing else on each transaction.

Deals and commerce: what each platform actually covers

Art businesses sell in two modes that most software conflates. Deals are coordinated private sales, viewing rooms, holds, negotiated offers, consignor splits, deposits, and invoices. Commerce is self-serve public checkout for editions, books, and multiples at fixed prices.

Art.industries runs both modes on shared inventory records: mark a work room-only, storefront-eligible, or both; either path updates availability when a sale closes. Many competitors skew toward one mode, deal-focused CRMs handle private sales but force a second catalogue for the website; Shopify-style tools handle commerce but miss holds, consignments, and confidential rooms.

Use the matrix below to see which side each product actually covers, not which checkout widget they advertise.

When Shopify is enough, and when it is not

Shopify alone is enough if every sale is commerce: fixed price, cart, ship, done. It is not enough when you also run private viewing rooms, holds with release dates, consignor settlements, fair-week deposits, or high-value offers that should never appear on a public product page.

Many art businesses do both. A studio might sell forty edition copies through commerce in a month while closing two paintings through deals. Shopify handles the first mode well; it has no native concept of the second.

Moving off Shopify to one catalogue

Export products from Shopify to CSV, import works into Art.industries with the validation preview, and mark storefront-eligible SKUs. Rebuild the public site in Website Studio reading the same catalogue, no nightly sync job. Keep Shopify live until one edition drop proves checkout, inventory, and consignment statements agree. Most teams cut over storefront first while deals were already on Core.

Multi-location: warehouses vs custody

Shopify tracks quantity per product variant per warehouse, strong for retail replenishment. It is not built for unique works that move from storage to a fair booth to a lender's museum and back, with availability, consignor context, and shipment records on the same graph.

Art.industries marks each move on the work's Status timeline: link Address records, filter `/works` by location for fair prep, and batch-update return dates without overwriting history.

Collector portals: one home instead of forwarded links

Collectors usually receive one-off links, a viewing room grant, an invoice payment email, a Stripe checkout URL, each minted and forwarded by staff. Art.industries gives every collector contact a branded client portal on one share link: open invoices with PDF download, pay balances and installments through your Stripe account, revisit shared viewing rooms, review owned works and shop orders, and open diligence documents, scoped to that contact only.

Many art-business CRMs stop at emailing payment links. Some sell a separate collector product (Artlogic Collector is a distinct module). The Collector client portal row in the matrix below shows who ships a persistent, self-service collector home inside the same workspace as invoicing and rooms.