Three Rooms, Three Commissions: Walking Through the Online Art Brokers

The girl at the desk is opening a crate with a boxcutter and doesn't look up.

Bubble wrap, then glassine, then a slip of paper stapled to the inside of the lid — a certificate, I assume, though from here it just reads as a rectangle of white against the brown. She counts staples before she counts anything else.

Outside it has started to rain in that half-hearted way that doesn't wet the pavement so much as darken it, and three people in wet coats are standing at the window doing the thing everyone does at a window: deciding whether to go in.

I go in.

Room One: Saatchi Art

Track lighting. Good track lighting, the kind that costs money and is meant to be invisible.

The walls are dense — more work per linear metre than a commercial gallery would risk, canvases hung close enough that you read them as a field before you read them as objects. A price tag under each, discreet, in four bands: under $500, $500 to $1,000, $1,000 to $2,000, $2,000 and up.

Somebody decided that buyers think in brackets rather than numbers. They are probably right, and I resent slightly how right they are.

A small oil near the door — thick paint, wet-look varnish, a woman's shoulder rendered in maybe six strokes that shouldn't cohere and do — carries a tag that says, in smaller type, artist retains 60%.

I have never seen a gallery print its own cut on the label before.

It is, structurally, an honest room. I want to be clear about that before I spend the rest of this article being difficult about the invoice.

Room Two: Artsy

Behind a velvet rope that isn't actually there but functions as one.

You don't walk up to the work; someone walks it toward you, or doesn't, depending on whether the consignor feels like naming a price. A card beside a bronze reads Inquire. A card beside a lithograph reads a number with four commas that I do the arithmetic on twice to be sure.

This room contains, by the wall text near the entrance, over a million objects and four thousand-odd galleries feeding it — though obviously not all at once, not in this room, which holds maybe forty pieces and the promise of the rest through a door I'm not shown.

The air here is cooler. Someone has turned the thermostat down for the art or for the clientele. Hard to say which.

Room Three: Etsy

Not a room so much as a market. Trestle tables — a hundred million of them if you believe the sign at the entrance — run by five and a half million separate hands.

A woman two tables over is stitching something while she sells something else.

Prices are chalk on slate, rubbed and rewritten: a small acrylic, seventy-five dollars; a stack of prints, twenty each, sixty for the frame.

And no two tables post their return terms the same way. One has a card that says all sales final, no exceptions, thank you for understanding — hand-lettered, underlined twice. The next table over takes anything back, no questions, and has a queue for it.

Three rooms, three ways of being paid, and none of them made the thing on the wall.

The Object I Actually Looked At Was the Invoice

I keep coming back to the paperwork from room one, which I did not buy anything to receive but was handed anyway — a specimen, the way a framer once handed me a scrap of gilt so I'd know what nineteenth-century composition gold actually looks like against the light.

It is a plain sheet. Sale price at the top. Then, in a column that takes up more of the page than the art description does: artist payout 60%, platform commission 40%.

Below that, in the smaller print reserved for the part nobody reads standing up: return window fourteen days from receipt; refund as store credit at full value, or to card minus a processing fee of twenty per cent.

I read that line three times.

Twenty per cent of a two-thousand-dollar painting is four hundred dollars for the privilege of having changed your mind and wanting cash rather than credit.

If the piece arrived broken, or wasn't what the photo showed, the fee disappears and the refund is whole — a separate clause, printed the same size as everything else, easy to miss, the kind of clause that only matters to the two per cent of buyers who need it and matters enormously to them.

Commissions are carved out entirely: fifty per cent down before the brush touches canvas, non-refundable, the balance on delivery, no returns at all on that route.

A painting made because you asked for it cannot, by the room's own logic, be unmade because you asked for it. There's a symmetry in that I find myself respecting more than I expected to.

The Artsy paperwork

Shorter and colder. All sales through Buy Now or Make Offer are final.

One line — and then two paragraphs of what final does not mean. If the piece is significantly different than described, there's a path back. If it turns out to be fake, you have a hundred and eighty days to say so, and the house will help you unwind it.

Shipping, packing, insurance: all buyer's, all itemised separately, the way a good tailor itemises the lining.

It is not a returns policy. It is an authenticity policy wearing a returns policy's clothes — and once you see that, you stop expecting it to behave like one.

The Etsy paperwork

There isn't any. No house paperwork at all, which is either the most honest position in the building or the least — I go back and forth.

What exists instead is a promise from the market, not any one stallholder: up to two hundred and fifty dollars covered if a piece never arrives or arrives as something other than what was shown. The rest of the exposure sits with whoever sold it to you.

A separate slip, EU and UK only, grants fourteen days to withdraw for any reason or none — though it excludes anything made to your specification, which in this room is most of it.

Head to Head: The Whole Building, and the Studios Next Door

Three brokers, three atelier retailers, and four studios that make their own work — because the fourth model doesn't appear anywhere in the three rooms above, and it's the one that changes the arithmetic.

Run your eye down the returns column, because that is the column that tells the truth about a business's own confidence in what it ships.

Final sale. Fourteen days minus twenty per cent. Per seller. Thirty days. Forty-five days.

The longest window on that entire list belongs to a studio that makes the thing itself. That is not a coincidence, and it isn't generosity either. A business that manufactures its own product knows exactly what turns up in the box, and can price the risk of taking it back at approximately zero. A broker never knows. A broker is standing between two strangers, holding a percentage.

A Drift

There was a stall in a market I used to walk through as a student — a man who restretched canvases for the framers on the same street — and he had a sign that said nothing about returns, because the idea hadn't occurred to anyone. You bought the stretching, the stretching happened, you left.

I think about that sign more than I should when I'm standing in rooms that have clearly thought about very little else.

It isn't nostalgia exactly. It's closer to noticing how much architecture gets built around the moment of doubt — after the fact of wanting something — and how little of that architecture has anything to do with the thing itself.

The Verdict

Room one sells you a person's labour and prices its own appetite honestly on the label.

Room two sells you access, and insures against the one catastrophe that actually matters at its price point.

Room three sells you chance, dressed as choice, with a safety net that ends at two hundred and fifty dollars regardless of how far you fall.

Three Questions I Keep Asking Myself, On the Way Out

Is Saatchi Art legit, and how much of my money reaches the person who painted it?

Yes, and sixty per cent. The platform takes a 40% commission; the artist keeps the rest. Buyers get 14 days to return: full value as store credit, or the card refund minus a 20% processing fee — unless the piece arrived damaged or wasn't as described, in which case the fee drops and the refund is whole. Commissions run differently: 50% non-refundable deposit up front, and final sale once finished.

Can I actually return something I bought on Artsy?

Not on a whim. Purchases through Buy Now or Make Offer are final sale. What you get instead is narrower and, at Artsy's price points, arguably worth more: a route back if the work arrives significantly different than described, and an authenticity claim window of 180 days on anything bought through secure checkout. You pay shipping, packing and insurance either way.

Is Etsy safe for buying art, or am I gambling?

Somewhere between the two, and it depends entirely on the stall. Every seller sets their own return policy — read it before you pay, not after. Etsy's own backstop, Purchase Protection, covers up to $250 on a qualifying not-as-described or never-arrived order, with the seller on the hook for anything past that. EU and UK buyers get a statutory 14-day right of withdrawal, which does not usually cover anything custom-made.

Leaving

The rain has stopped. The girl at the desk is still counting staples.

I take the plain sheet with me — the one with the twenty per cent written small — and fold it into a coat pocket I will forget about until it's laundered into pulp.

Further Reading

• Mus3ums.com — the studio model, where the margin is added rather than deducted.
• F.A.Q. Certificates of Authenticity — the rectangle of white stapled inside the lid.
• Deciphering Authenticity: Art Verification and Provenance Research

Sources

• Saatchi Art Help Center — commission rate, returns, promotional discounts, commission deposits.
• Artsy — Buy Now / Make Offer terms and the authenticity claim window.
• Etsy — Purchase Protection, seller-set return policies, and EU/UK right of withdrawal.
• Reproduction Gallery, TOPofART, Fabulous Masterpieces and MFA Images archival replicas — prices, shipping and returns as published, August 2026.
• Figures taken from each operator's own published policy and checked 8 August 2026.