Design career: best places to sell icons

Where are the best places to sell icons? Well, to be honest, there are plenty of them! Read on, and you’ll be able to sell your artwork on marketplaces (we’ll also take a look at top-rated stock marketplaces) as well as on your own website! Let’s dot those i’s and cross those t’s.

Top marketplaces for icons

We keep an eye on all of the marketplaces, but we would highly recommend any of these:

• IconFinder — you get 70%.
• Noun Project — you get $1.20 for each icon sold individually, 40% from subscriptions.
• Graphic River — you prepare an icon pack and they set the price, somewhere around $7-12. The pricing structure is uncertain and depends on whether you decide to sell exclusively with them or somewhere else, too (or if you get caught). From their examples, you get $37-60 from a $100 sale.
• CreativeMarket — you define the price; you get 70% from each sale.
• Canva — unlike all the services above where you buy only an icon file, Canva is a graphic editor that allows your icons to be embedded. To use a single icon in a single artwork costs $1 (so you get 30 cents). A single icon for an unlimited number of artworks is $10. You get 30% off each sale.
• TemplateMonster – you receive up to 70% from each sale.
• Your store. No matter how you sell your icons, we suggest opening your store.

Having your own website will help legitimize your brand and also lets you skip the payment fees typically included with selling on a marketplace. All it takes is a bit of setup and decent web-hosting. Not sure what hosting you need? You can find web-hosting reviews here.

Opening your store

Resellers charge hefty commissions which may be justified for marketing your product and finding customers.

However, that’s not always the case:

• You probably have your own friends and customers
• Someone may come from your portfolio and social media
• Someone may have heard about you and googled you.

So, go ahead and open your own store and make sure it appears first in Google by searching by your name or the name of your icon pack. That shouldn’t be difficult:

• Make a single landing page
• Add a payment solution: PayPal may be enough for a start
• Process the orders manually, sending a Dropbox link to the zip archive with icons

Icons8 experience

We’ve been making icons since 2002; it’s our core business. Our team of 20 depends on how well we market and sell our icons, so we invest a great deal of time into research.

As for us, we don’t resell our icons elsewhere.

As of May 2016, we haven’t found any reseller worth their commission.

We used to sell with Graphic River, earning a meager $150/mo. That was nothing compared to what we did independently.

We didn’t try large websites, but we feel that we can earn and reinvest more without intermediaries. We prefer to give away the icons for free over paying 30-65% to intermediaries.

What resellers don’t focus on

Selling independently, you can provide the best possible experience to your clients. Resellers care about selling more and charging you more fees. They work on the tools for:

• Resellers focus on uploading icons
• Resellers focus on navigation in their catalog: search, browsing, etc.
• Resellers focus on selling icons.

Instead, we like speaking to our customers, designers, and developers, asking them about their challenges, and providing tools to solve their problems.

• We care about our icons being pixel-perfect — resellers don’t care
• We care about generating all the formats our users need — resellers don’t care
• We care about our icons looking great in various sizes, providing responsive icons

To sum it up, we advise you to use all of the resellers listed above. In the meantime, speak to your customers, make your own website, and try to solve their problems. Without intermediaries.
We hope you enjoyed the article! Do you have another stock marketplace to recommend? Please feel free to tell us more in the comments.

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About the Author
Ivan Boyko is the founder of Icons8. He got his first job after drawing a banner with CTR of 43%. After years of creating icons, he specializes in rapid prototyping and backlog grooming.