LiveArt
Creating LiveArt’s peer-to-peer marketplace for fine art and NFTs
Sales in first 2 weeks post-launch
$5m
Contemporary works of art, worth $120m
+1000
Average sale price range
$50k-$500k
Services
Development
Consultancy
Shopify Plus
Technology
Shopify Plus
Customer.io
Amazon Web Services
Challenge
Putting ‘the art world at your fingertips’, LiveArt earned its reputation as an AI-driven powerhouse that helps art collectors make the most informed buying and selling decisions. In 2021, they approached us to help them create and launch their very own LiveArt Market; a peer-to-peer marketplace for fine art and NFTs that puts collectors in control.
Selling NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and fine art isn’t the same as selling prints or furniture. The value of a piece can fluctuate, and the ability to sell ‘private’ products is sometimes required. For the latter, we were presented with the challenge of letting sellers promote their products without displaying images – a task that immediately takes us out of a traditional store set-up.
Other challenges included implementing a legally-compliant buying approval process, enabling users to buy and sell products on Shopify Plus, and turning the whole project around on an unusually short deadline.
Solution
At pace, we produced LiveArt Market: a seamless, easy-to-use, two-sided store complete with product management, user accounts and merchandising.
In order to work to a tight deadline, we combined bespoke development with pre-existing Shopify functionality, and leaned into third-party systems, for which our strong tech partner relationships were an asset.
Alongside clean and cohesive, gallery-style collection pages, we created ‘Drop’ pages, which display mini curated collections of fine art and NFTs in a visually-appealing editorial format.
To fulfil LiveArt’s needs for user approval, ‘private’ selling and a solution for high-demand pieces, our team set up a series of automated workflows that make managing the marketplace easy. These included an automation to allow LiveArt to update users on their membership status, and an ‘Add to Waitlist’ workflow for users who miss out on a piece.
Meanwhile, for artworks that needed to remain ‘private’, we created an automated ‘Similar Items’ feature to give collectors a feel for the style of the piece, without needing to see an image of the artwork they’re purchasing.
LiveArt Market launched to critical acclaim from the arts and general media, including the Wall Street Journal, The Art Newspaper and ARTFIX Daily. WSJ hailed it for letting “high-end collectors buy and sell without the middleman”, while LiveArt customers, new and old, have embraced its fresh take on peer-to-peer trading.
Story
LiveArt is well-known in the art world for empowering collectors with free, unlimited access to market data, so they can explore real-time price trends, evaluate past purchases and review auction results. In 2021, they felt ready to launch their very own marketplace: LiveArt Market.
This project demanded a range of unique customisations to the Shopify Plus platform. Firstly, LiveArt needed to be able to create barriers to entry to put users through a buying approval process. This restriction had to be KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) compliant, so that collectors could buy and sell their pieces lawfully and in complete confidence.
Then there was the matter of two-sided ecommerce on what is known as a one-sided platform. Shopify Plus makes purchases easy, but enabling collectors to sell their art presented a complex need. Custom development was required to effectively ‘hack’ the Plus system, alongside a single sign-on (SSO) that would keep them logged in when navigating from LiveArt to Market.
If that wasn’t challenging enough, LiveArt required a speedy turnaround, which meant creating a minimal viable product (MVP) that retained a high level of functionality. At pace, we needed to produce LiveArt Market with product management, user accounts and merchandising working seamlessly. Put simply, we were building our own masterpiece.
This minimal viable product was on the maximal side, with a host of custom features that make the LiveArt Market a user-friendly, two-sided ecommerce store. We implemented legally-compliant barriers of entry and found innovative ways to display LiveArt’s NFT collections in a way that maintains their value (copies cannot be made). We launched the site with high expectations.
The result? LiveArt made $5m in sales in the first 2 weeks post-launch, and the platform now showcases over 1000 contemporary works of art, worth a total of $120m.
