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Commiss.io: Amazing tool for commissioners and artists
8 years ago
Commiss.io is an amazing piece of software that benefits both commissioners and the artists who take commissions. If you are a commissioner, tell artists about it. If you are an artist, use it.
I've been struggling through the secretarial process of commissions for over a decade. Trying to keep track of requests, projects, trades, payments, emails, webpages, commissioner profiles, TOS pages, notes, online forms, price sheets and art files. There have been tools available so far that have all been generally "just okay" at managing the work progress. The truth is not many artists take the time to learn managerial skills, even most professional artists don't because it's something you assume other artists do correctly so you copy what they do and their business practices. I know because I did the same for a long while before realizing that this was a mistake and things could be better.
I love to draw, I love to draw for others. I don't love being a secretary. I want to maximize the amount of time I spend drawing and minimize the amount of time I spend running a business.
It's perplexing how it has taken the fandom this long to come up with a solution that "properly" works.
I use "properly" in quotes because Commiss.io is an in progress website that a buddy of mine (Nanuk) is working on and I'm helping along. And while it properly works for me....
We want more input in order to make a better website that properly works for everyone. At the moment we can really only cover the basics of the commission process and we really want to hear your input on how you work and how to better the experience.
We would really appreciate your help on this project.
I've been struggling through the secretarial process of commissions for over a decade. Trying to keep track of requests, projects, trades, payments, emails, webpages, commissioner profiles, TOS pages, notes, online forms, price sheets and art files. There have been tools available so far that have all been generally "just okay" at managing the work progress. The truth is not many artists take the time to learn managerial skills, even most professional artists don't because it's something you assume other artists do correctly so you copy what they do and their business practices. I know because I did the same for a long while before realizing that this was a mistake and things could be better.
I love to draw, I love to draw for others. I don't love being a secretary. I want to maximize the amount of time I spend drawing and minimize the amount of time I spend running a business.
It's perplexing how it has taken the fandom this long to come up with a solution that "properly" works.
I use "properly" in quotes because Commiss.io is an in progress website that a buddy of mine (Nanuk) is working on and I'm helping along. And while it properly works for me....
We want more input in order to make a better website that properly works for everyone. At the moment we can really only cover the basics of the commission process and we really want to hear your input on how you work and how to better the experience.
We would really appreciate your help on this project.
Like, 3% isn't THAT much, but why would people use this over Trello? Or better yet, have their friend manage their Trello for them and pay them off by doing something for them every so often?
The fact that you're charging for what already exists in Trello or even just organising commissions in an FA journal already makes it doomed. I love you, Shiuk, and I hope you prove me wrong.
In the future it is likely that the fees will increase slightly to cover operational costs, but again our goal there is to be transparent and still provide a value-add for artists.
All I'm saying is I was/am a bit skeptical that it'll actually catch on since Trello exists and my friends who are artists don't seem to have any trouble with invoicing people.
I gotcha~ Which is why it's not just meant to be a new trello. We definitely understand the use case there. But our goal is to create an environment that can really enable artists to manage their online marketplace easily. Not just organization, but also back and forth communication with clients, delivery of the final product, an easy portal for clients to check on the progress of their commission, analytics tools so artists know what's driving traffic to their page, etc.
Was there any feature in particular you were hoping to see when it came to calculating taxes? It's something I could look into in the near future!
1) It needs better previews. At present (at least for me) the previews commissioners see are fairly small, and you have to download the image to view it and make any suggestions.
2) I recall being confused about which point in the process you pay during - I thought it varied from artists to artist but there's no clear explanation on the site that can be found easily. Overall I think there should juts be a slightly better explanation of how the site works for commissioners.
3) It is easily the best service I've seen for art or commissioners. It's made the process a LOT easier to keep track of, make communication with the artist a breeze, and I honestly wish more people used it. If the other two points were addressed, I think it'd be a perfect website for commissioners!
I'm working to address your first point right now and hope to have something out for that soon. We'll allow you to view preview images, audio, PDFs, and video for commissions in your browser instead of requiring a download. Though you'd still need to download some filetypes, such as zip files.
Your second point is something I hope to address as well. We currently have a brand new support site that I'm working on expanding with information for artists and buyers alike. I'll be sure that the appropriate articles are linked out from the project page to help with some of that confusion.
Don't hesitate to reach out at any point if you have any more feedback. The little chat window on every page will let you contact us directly, and we try to be around whenever we're awake. You can also reach out to me directly via email or Telegram. Just let me know if you'd like either!
On my second point I'm not sure a support site is the solution? I think it'd help - but you definitely need to state it when someone makes a commission request. I mean at the end of the day it's not even an issue, but it'd be nice to have a heads up on when payment is due beforehand ^^
I'll work to make that less ambiguous in the future, though artists do have the ability to change when they invoice clients before a project goes into the "active" phase, so that could always change.
In any case the idea looks good, but there are other free tools that are already pretty fitting for this type of bussiness, and as other people mentioned, paying a friend to handle the paperwork instead of giving a 3% of all your transactions to an automated system sounds like a more appealing option. But I'm sure lot of people will use it, specially if it gets full fledged and covers more countries. Good luck!
I imagine paying a friend to help you out would probably end up costing more than 3% though. And it's worth noting that that's our only fee, currently, which covers some of our payment processing fees. There's no separate PayPal or Stripe fee like on other sites like Patreon.
Like any new service that is in beta, it has things that could be streamlined or improved/added, but its current core functionality is still pretty convenient as an artist.