What sells a piece online, and the mistakes that cost you sales.
Photographs and descriptions are added by opening a listing with Edit, not while creating it. They are also the two things a buyer decides on: nobody buys a piece of work they cannot see properly or cannot tell apart from another.
Thumbnail is one image, and it is required. Photos is the gallery, up to ten, with at least three required. They are not the same picture in two sizes — they appear in different places:
Your thumbnail never appears on the item page. A buyer who arrives from a search sees it on the way in and then never again. So it cannot be the only good picture you have, and if it is a crop or an arrangement that appears nowhere in the gallery, the image people share is one they will not find when they get there.
Neither is shown whole, and neither is cropped the same way:
So the safe picture is a square original with the subject in the middle and some room on all four sides. Anything with the work pushed to one edge, or a tall photograph of a tall object, loses the ends when it is cropped.
The first photo becomes the one a buyer sees when the page opens. Drag any photo to move it, and the order you leave them in is the order they appear in.
A sequence that works for most things: the whole work, straight on and well lit; a detail close enough to show the surface or the making; the back, the signature or the edition mark; and something that gives its size — a hand, a wall, a room.
Adding a photo uploads it immediately, but the order and the removals are only kept when you press Save Changes. Leaving the page without saving loses the arrangement.
Optional, MP4, and shown first in the gallery when present. Worth it for anything whose appeal is hard to photograph — a surface that catches light, a piece that moves, the scale of something large.
The file you upload is the file buyers download, at the size you saved it. Artmire does not shrink your photographs or clean them up.
That cuts both ways. A picture that is too small looks soft as soon as it fills the main viewport, and one straight off a modern phone can be several megabytes — ten of those make an item page that is slow to open, which costs you the buyer who does not wait. Somewhere around 1,200 to 1,600 pixels square is comfortable for both.
Summary is the description shown on the item page under the heading Description.
It is worth taking seriously as your summary is very nearly the only thing that makes your page stand out from everyone else's.
Write what a buyer would ask if they were holding it: what it is, what it is made of, how big it is, when and how you made or found it, and what condition it is in. Length is not limited and nothing is cut short. And make sure you tell the real story, the full story.
Detail is shown further down the page as Item Detail and Material, and it is treated as a list rather than as prose. Whatever you type is broken at the commas and shown as a plain line — so paragraphs, headings and bold written here are lost.
Write it as a short list: "Oak, brass, linen thread". A paragraph written here reads as a comma-mangled run on the page, which is the most common mistake on this form.
Keywords describe the item for search purposes — and Artmire's own search box reads them, alongside your title, your summary and your detail. A word that appears only in Keywords can still bring a buyer to your listing.
They are still not a substitute for a good title. Put the words a buyer would actually type into the title and the description, where they also do the work of convincing whoever reads them, and use Keywords for the near-misses: other names for the technique, the period, the style, the spelling you would not want in your title.
Your description does not need translating. A buyer reading Artmire in another language gets a Translate this item button on your listing, and both your summary and your materials come back in theirs, marked as a machine translation.
This is not true of your shop policies, which reach every buyer exactly as you typed them. Descriptions are translated; policies are not.