Lisa Auerbach makes one-of-a-kind cold wax and oil paintings from her studio in Ambler, Pennsylvania. She came to us because selling them online had become the hardest part of her work.
The challenge
Lisa was on an all-in-one platform built specifically for artists. In principle that should have been ideal. In practice it was restrictive and expensive: uploading new work was awkward, organizing her pieces into anything resembling a coherent collection was a fight, and the monthly cost was high enough to eat into the margin on every painting she sold.
For an artist selling originals, that’s the wrong trade. Every piece is unique, there’s no restocking, and the storefront has to make a single painting feel like the object it is. She needed a site she owned, at a cost that made sense, without becoming a part-time web administrator to run it.
What we did
A template, customized properly
Lisa wanted the most cost-effective route to a professional store, so we took one she chose to start from and reworked it around her brand. That decision shaped the whole project: a template is only a starting point, and most of the work was making it feel like hers rather than like the template.
The website puts her paintings first. Large imagery, room for each piece to breathe, and copy that explains her process — built up, scraped back, excavated — so a visitor understands what they’re looking at before they see a price.
WooCommerce and Stripe
We built the store on WooCommerce and connected Stripe for payments, so Lisa takes card payments directly with no platform taking a cut of each sale.
Selling originals has its own quirks. Every painting is a single unit that has to disappear from the store once it sells, categories have to work for browsing rather than filtering by size or colour, and the details that matter — medium, dimensions, whether it’s ready to hang — belong on the product page. We set the store up around how people actually buy art: one piece, once, because it spoke to them.
Inventory handled for her
The part Lisa values most isn’t visible on the site. Through our managed hosting and maintenance plan, she photographs new work and sends it to us, and our team uploads the images, writes up the product, and sets the inventory.
That’s deliberate. Lisa’s time is better spent painting than resizing images and filling in product fields. She gets new work online without touching the back end, and the store stays consistent because the same people set up every piece.
The results
Lisa is selling her originals through her own website and seeing more traffic and more purchases than she did on her old platform, without the monthly cost that came with it.
Just as importantly, she’s no longer working around someone else’s system. She owns the site, the store, and her customer relationships, and adding new work is now a message to us rather than an afternoon of admin.
You can see her paintings at auerbachart.com.
For artists on an all-in-one platform
Artist storefront platforms solve a real problem: they get you selling quickly without touching code. The trade-off arrives later, when the monthly fee keeps climbing, the layout won’t do what you want, and your work is sitting on a system you don’t control.
A WordPress and WooCommerce store is more work to set up and less work to live with. You own it, you choose what it costs, and you can hand the fiddly parts to someone else. If you’re weighing that up for your own work, get a proposal and we’ll be straight with you about what it would involve.
