In mid 2020 I tentatively signed up to be a designer for Thortful making cards, and I have to say it's been one of the best moves for the art side of my business. To date, I've sold over 37 thousand cards on Thortful alone, and I've since signed up to both Scribbler and Wuzci, uploading different exclusive designs for all three. Although I am still fairly new to Scribbler and Wuzci, I thought I'd talk about all three from a designer point of view. Whilst I think all three are well worth signing up for if you're a designer, they all offer very different experiences as a buyer as well as a designer, so I thought I'd share a little about my experiences so far and I'd love to hear what you think if you've ever designed cards for them too.
Thortful
When I signed up for Thortful, on reflection my card designs weren't great! Designing cards isn't as easy as it seems at first and neat layouts are not always my strong point, so it's definitely been a learning curve. I've learned which cards do well, which cards will be a flop and had a few surprises with cards I love selling at a snails pace and other designs that took minutes selling thousands, it's not always predictable! Algorithms come into play when it comes to showing your designs first over then thousands of others on there, so if your card happens to have a good streak it can really fly of the (virtual) shelves.
What I love about Thorful as a designer, is that I can see my sales each day to keep track, to see if a card is likely to sell or if it's time to remove it and make space for something new. You're given five slots to start with, which you can then email to ask for more spaces if your cards start selling. It's then down to their discretion whether they give you more slots and if so how many. They've always been pretty quick to respond by email and lovely, but I do wish there was an option on the website to quickly request extra slots to save admin for us and them, so hopefully that option will come one day. In terms of sales, these can be easily tracked as a whole and by individual designs, so it's really easy to keep track and this helps decide what things work for future designs. I love that you can update a design easily and delete cards you want to remove from sale with the click of a button, though they do take up space in the background once deleted, so you may have to email to sort that too. Payment is always quick and easy, though PayPal take a chunk so hopefully bank transfer will be an option at some point too. The negatives for me are the waiting times for having cards reviewed for the site. Currently I've had some cards sat there for 6 plus weeks, and sometimes they are set to profile only which means they will not show up on the main site for searches. This is fine, but sometimes you wait weeks to hear your design has been rejected and it really slows down the opportunity to design more and of course earn money for ourselves as well as them. The site is super busy and successful which is amazing, so I'm sure they will speed up over time too as they grow and invest more into the website. I often ucards from there and the quality is incredible, so it's highly recommended as a seller and designer. See my Thortful cards by clicking here.
What I love about Thorful as a designer, is that I can see my sales each day to keep track, to see if a card is likely to sell or if it's time to remove it and make space for something new. You're given five slots to start with, which you can then email to ask for more spaces if your cards start selling. It's then down to their discretion whether they give you more slots and if so how many. They've always been pretty quick to respond by email and lovely, but I do wish there was an option on the website to quickly request extra slots to save admin for us and them, so hopefully that option will come one day. In terms of sales, these can be easily tracked as a whole and by individual designs, so it's really easy to keep track and this helps decide what things work for future designs. I love that you can update a design easily and delete cards you want to remove from sale with the click of a button, though they do take up space in the background once deleted, so you may have to email to sort that too. Payment is always quick and easy, though PayPal take a chunk so hopefully bank transfer will be an option at some point too. The negatives for me are the waiting times for having cards reviewed for the site. Currently I've had some cards sat there for 6 plus weeks, and sometimes they are set to profile only which means they will not show up on the main site for searches. This is fine, but sometimes you wait weeks to hear your design has been rejected and it really slows down the opportunity to design more and of course earn money for ourselves as well as them. The site is super busy and successful which is amazing, so I'm sure they will speed up over time too as they grow and invest more into the website. I often ucards from there and the quality is incredible, so it's highly recommended as a seller and designer. See my Thortful cards by clicking here.
Scribbler
This was the second site I joined as a card designer and I have to say it's a really cool site, but a strange experience as a designer. The upload process is very quick and easy, but again the process in waiting for them to be accepted onto the site takes weeks and weeks, but you can request removal of cards with a button, so I like that. There is no view in the design section to see your sales, so it's always a mystery until you get an excel sheet at the end of the month and I really really hope this changes one day as I love being able to keep track of my sales. It seems they are making some changes like adding PayPal for quicker payments etc, so although my sales have been very poor so far, it's definitely one I hope will grow over time and well worth signing up for. See my Scribbler cards by clicking here.
Wuzci
I only signed up for Wuzci a few weeks ago, so I'm still counting sales on one hand! So far though, as a designer, it's a lovely site to use, easy to upload designs and very quick to authorize them which I love! Sales can be tracked easily and although I'm yet to be paid, I hear from other designers that they've never had issues. The site is very user friendly and shows me what I need to, so - so far so good. I really hope this is a successful site for my designs, as the cards are square as opposed to rectangular which I find a lot nicer to design for. As a buyer, this is a subscription based site, so I don't know if this will be good sales wise or not? I'll update soon with how things are going, but if you're a designer I'd recommend getting into Wuzci and giving it a try. See my Wuzci cards by clicking here.
