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As an online store owner, designing a beautiful website with colorful images is a must. But if you’re like most entrepreneurs, you probably don’t have the necessary design skills in-house.

That’s where Creative Market comes in. You can purchase stunning designs, illustrations, and photos from their online marketplace and use them for your business.

But is Creative Market worth paying for, and how do they compare to alternatives like Canva or Envato Elements?

In this Creative Market review, I’ll explore the platform’s products and pricing, pros and cons, to help you decide if it’s the right tool for your business needs.

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What Is Creative Market?

Creative Market is an expansive online marketplace that provides a diverse array of design resources, encompassing photographs, graphics, templates, themes, fonts, and more, all meticulously created by independent artists. By perusing their offerings, you can swiftly acquire readily usable design elements to enhance your website.

Alternatively, you also have the option to procure design components such as fonts or icons, which can be customized to seamlessly integrate with your other design projects.

Visualize Creative Market as a comprehensive toolkit catered to fulfill your design requirements. Whether you require an image for a blog post, a sketch for a business card, or a template for a logo, they have a comprehensive selection. Moreover, they present pre-made design elements like logos, fonts, and graphics that can be promptly utilized as they are.

As a designer, you have the opportunity to directly vend your artwork on the platform, reaching an audience of over five million visitors per month. Sellers on Creative Market earn 50% of the listed price for their sold products.

In essence, Creative Market serves as an encompassing platform for professionally crafted designs, enabling buyers to browse and acquire high-quality branding assets, while affording sellers the means to promote and sell their digital offerings to a vast audience of over five million monthly visitors.

Why Use Creative Market As A Business?

Creative Market offers a wealth of premade design content that empowers business owners to elevate their websites and customize various aspects of their blog posts, advertisements, and other graphic designs. This expansive collection includes a diverse range of elements such as blog post images, fonts, icons, illustrations, logo templates, and business card templates.

For dropshippers who specialize in selling print-on-demand goods, Creative Market provides a valuable feature known as “Collections.” These Collections are accompanied by Extended Commercial licensing, enabling dropshippers to swiftly acquire designs and immediately utilize them for commercial purposes, without the need to wait for a designer to create them from scratch.

Moreover, Creative Market acknowledges the importance of budget considerations. For those operating on a tight budget, there are abundant opportunities to leverage the platform’s weekly bundle deals, discounts, and an array of free assets available on their dedicated “Free Downloads” page. This allows individuals to access high-quality resources without compromising their financial constraints.

Why Use Creative Market As A Designer?

Designers have the opportunity to establish their own online store directly on Creative Market, where they can sell their digital products to a vast audience of five million monthly visitors. What sets Creative Market apart is that there are no exclusivity lock-ins or product approvals required.

Selling on Creative Market offers several key benefits:

1. Expansive Marketplace: Creative Market serves as a dedicated platform for designers to showcase and sell their work to a targeted audience that is specifically interested in creative content. This presents a tremendous opportunity to reach a global customer base comprising millions of potential buyers.
2. Passive Income Potential: Once you create and upload your digital assets to Creative Market, they can be sold repeatedly, generating a consistent source of passive income. This allows you to earn revenue from your work without ongoing effort or time investment.
3. Engaging Community: Creative Market fosters a vibrant community of designers, illustrators, and creatives who actively interact, share insights, and provide valuable feedback. Being part of this community can help you enhance your skills, refine your work, and stay informed about current trends in the industry.
4. Free Promotion and Marketing: Creative Market actively promotes its sellers and their products through various channels such as weekly emails, social media platforms, and prominently featuring them on their website. This exposure provides valuable visibility and increases the chances of attracting potential customers.
5. Portfolio Development: Creative Market allows you to sell a wide range of digital assets, including fonts, graphics, templates, web themes, and more. This enables you to showcase your diverse skills and build a comprehensive portfolio that highlights your expertise in various design areas.
6. User-Friendly Platform: Creative Market is designed to be user-friendly and straightforward, making it easy for new sellers to set up their stores and start selling their digital products efficiently and effectively.
7. Intellectual Property Protection: Creative Market prioritizes secure transactions and ensures the protection of your intellectual property rights. This gives you peace of mind knowing that your work is safeguarded within the platform.

In summary, Creative Market offers designers an exceptional opportunity to sell their digital products in a large and targeted marketplace, with the potential for passive income, access to a supportive community, free promotion and marketing, portfolio development, ease of use, and intellectual property protection.

Creative Market Pricing

Creative Market offers four pricing plans for buyers ranging from $19.95 to $99.95 per month.

Although Creative Market has subscription plans, you can make direct purchases from their website. However, you won’t be able to take advantage of any discounts or free digital goods that come with a subscription.

Here’s a closer look at the features included with each plan:

All plans include:

• A monthly drop of curated design assets that includes premium graphics, templates, fonts, and other items worth up to $1000 –  all for free.
• A discount on ten million design pieces.
• Membership Credits. For example, if you’re paying $29.95 a month, you will receive a credit of $29.95 each month that you can use towards your purchases.

Who Shops On Creative Market?

Creative Market attracts individuals and business owners who want access to premium design assets without the expense of hiring a professional designer.

As an ecommerce store owner, you will eventually need design content for various purposes, such as ad campaigns, blog post images, email newsletters, product mockups, logos, website design, and social media.

If you own a print-on-demand business, you can also use or modify designs you purchase on Creative Market for your merchandise.

How Do You Make Money On Creative Market? 

As a designer, you can make money with Creative Market by selling your own designs on their marketplace. However, Creative Market will take a 50%-70% commission on every sale you make.

Here’s how to start selling on Creative Market: 

• Create Your Account: First, you need to sign up for a free account on Creative Market. Then,  apply to become a shop owner and await approval.
• Prepare Your Products: Once approved, you can start creating digital products. These can range from illustrations, graphics, and photos to fonts, templates, and themes. It’s important to ensure your products are high quality, original, and cater to the needs of your potential customers.
• Set Up Your Shop: After creating your products, you’ll need to set up your shop. This includes uploading your products, writing descriptions, setting prices, and showcasing previews of your products. Make sure your shop looks professional and enticing to potential buyers.
• Promote Your Shop: You must market your shop to drive traffic and increase sales from various sources such as social media, blogging, email marketing, or other promotional techniques.
• Earn money: Creative Market will pay you a 30%-50% commission for every item you sell.

What Are The Requirements To Sell On Creative Market?

To sell on Creative Market, you must fill out an application with 10 to 20 unique, professional-quality pieces within a portfolio you submit.

The platform has no location restrictions, and Dribbble Pro members can start selling without applying.

Creative Market Products

Creative Market’s marketplace includes photos, graphics, fonts, illustrations, icons, templates, themes, mockups, 3D models, and brushes. Let’s take a closer look at what’s available.

Graphics

Creative Market provides 500,000 graphics like icons, illustrations, patterns, product mockups, textures, and wallpapers.

You can use them to create mockups for a t-shirt business or content for social media pages and web pages.

Photos

Creative Market provides a diverse selection of ten million high-resolution photos in the categories like arts & entertainment, beauty and fashion, food and drink, and holidays.

Whether you need high-quality images for your blog posts, Facebook ads, or email campaigns, Creative Market has you covered.

Themes

Creative Market has thousands of available themes to help you build a visually appealing landing page for your BigCommerce, Shopify, WordPress, or Wix store.

Templates

Create eye-catching content for your infographics, flyers, logos, landing pages, slides, wireframes, and webpages using Creative Market’s templates.

The branding bundles in this category can also help you build an attractive and consistent brand that conveys reliability and professionalism to your audience across all your platforms.

You can use Creative Market’s social media templates for platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

Fonts

Creative Market sells over 75,000 fonts in categories like Serif, script, and handwriting to help you create the perfect tone for your brand.

Free Digital Goods

Creative Market offers a Free Downloads page if you’re in search of top-notch design assets at no cost. Note that you need to subscribe to a paid plan to unlock all the free assets.

Resources

The Creative Market website also offers free resources, such as how-to tutorials, design tips and tricks, inspirational articles, and roundups of their best design assets.

Their blog is a solid resource for those looking for inspiration for their website or brand.

How Does Licensing Work With Creative Market?

Creative Market offers three types of licensing: Personal, Commercial, and Extended Commercial.

With the Personal license, you can use the assets for non-commercial purposes and on one personal social media account. However, they cannot be used for business social media accounts, paid advertisements, or commercial end products.

A Commercial license permits you to use the designs you purchase in up to 5,000 end products for sale and digital ads with unlimited impressions. However, the license doesn’t extend to native apps, web apps, or games.

The Extended Commercial license allows for use in all scenarios of the Commercial license. It also permits use in up to 250,000 end products for sale and in one native app, web app, or game downloaded or sold up to 250,000 times.

To summarize, if you want to use Creative Market products for your business that involves an exchange of money or promotion, you need a Commercial license.

Before you purchase any product, make sure to check the description so you know which license type the creator allows and select the right license type accordingly.

Pros Of Using Creative Market

• Variety: Creative Market has a vast selection of graphic design assets, including ten million stock photos and over half a million graphic designs, providing a wide range of options for you.
• Professional designs: Creative Market offers professional quality designs starting from as low as $2, which makes it an affordable option to achieve a polished look for your website or marketing materials.
• Competitive pricing: Creative Market offers competitive and fair pricing starting as low as $2. Users can also use pricing filters to sort content by their budget.
• Flexible pricing: Creative Market allows creators to set their pricing, which provides flexibility for both the creators and the buyers.
• Regular updates: Creative Market provides regular updates with up-to-date blog tutorials, roundups of the best assets, and inspiration. In addition, new products are added regularly.

Cons Of Using Creative Market

• Unused credits: Users have reported losing their unused credits when downgrading their subscription or when they stop and start their subscription again.
• Licensing: Creative Market’s licensing terms can be restrictive and may limit how and when a product can be used and distributed.
• Monthly payouts: Creators on Creative Market receive a monthly payout instead of being paid after each sale, which may not be convenient for some sellers who prefer more frequent payouts.
• High commission: Creative Market charges a high commission rate of 50% to sellers, which has caused many creators to leave the platform.

Creative Market Reviews

Creative Market has gotten mixed reviews from buyers and sellers. Buyers have praised Creative Market for their affordable prices and user-friendly design, reflected by Trustpilot’s 4.3 out of 5 ratings.

On the other hand, creators have expressed dissatisfaction with the steep 50% commission rate, reflected in the 1.5 out of 5 rating on Sitejabber.

Creative Market Alternatives

Creative Market has millions of designs available in their marketplace, but before you commit to a subscription, you should compare them to other top platforms.

The top three alternatives to Creative Market are Envato Elements, Canva, and Icons8.

Envato Elements

Envato Elements offers unlimited subscription services to agencies, designers, marketers, and other professionals who frequently need digital products.

They offer many different types of designs, including graphic templates, stock photos, video templates, illustrations, and 3D templates.

Envato Elements has three pricing plans:

• Individual plan for $16.50 a month with simple commercial licensing.
• Teams plan for $10.75 a month per member.
• An Enterprise plan with custom pricing and licensing.

The main difference between Creative Market and Envato Elements is that Creative Market offers a pay-as-you-go format where users can buy individual digital assets, while Envato Elements provides unlimited downloads for a monthly fee.

Envato Elements offers a wider range of assets, including stock video templates and music, while Creative Market primarily focuses on graphics, fonts, and website themes.

Canva

Canva is a user-friendly graphic design tool that lets you easily create attractive graphics with its drag-and-drop editor.

Using Canva’s extensive collection of free photos, graphics, and social media templates, you can create professional-looking designs without any prior design experience.

Canva has three pricing plans:

• Free plan.
• Canva Pro plan for $12.99 a month.
• Canva for Teams plan for $14.99 a month per member.

If you need to create new designs from scratch or make modifications to existing designs, Canva’s drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for you to do so.

If you want to buy ready-made graphics, then Creative Market is the better option.

Icons8

Icons8 is a marketplace for premium icons, illustrations, photos, music, design tools, and AI tools.

Icons8 has two pricing plans: free and paid. Each asset type (icons, photos, illustrations, etc.) has its own subscription, but there is no expiry period, and you only need to pay for the next subscription if you finish the current one.

One advantage Icons8 has over Creative Market is that they allow you to pay only for the type of digital product you require. And if you exceed your monthly download limit, you would only need to pay a few cents per product.

Creative Market Review: Summary

Creative Market is a smart choice for entrepreneurs who want beautiful designs without the hefty cost of hiring a professional designer, but it has limitations.

Creative Market’s new subscription model has received some criticism,  but you don’t have to subscribe to their plans. You can create a free account and buy content directly a la carte. The downside is that you won’t be able to get a discount nor will you have access to their free resources and designs.

The bottom line? CreativeMarket is a solid resource for any business that wants to elevate their visual branding.

Creative Market FAQs

Can You Use Graphics From Creative Market To Create A New Design You Can Sell?

Yes, you can, with a Commercial or Extended Commercial license.

However, if you choose to use the Commercial License, your design must be significantly different from the original pattern. It should involve time, effort, and skill in its production and not primarily rely on the original design for its value.

Can You Use Graphics From Creative Market For Product Labeling Or Packaging?

You can use Creative Market graphics, product labeling, or packaging with a Commercial or Extended Commercial license. The Commercial license permits up to 5,000 lifetime packages, while the extended Commercial license allows 250,000.

However, if your graphic is under a Commercial license, your label or packaging must differ significantly from the original design.

Can You Use A Template To Create Marketing Materials For Your Company?

The Commercial or Extended Commercial licenses allow the use of a template for company marketing materials. Digital ads have no restrictions, but there are limitations on the use of physical ads.

For example, the Commercial license limits physical advertisements like billboards to local markets within a 200-mile radius, while the Extended Commercial license allows physical ads in local, national, or global markets.

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About Steve Chou

Steve Chou is a highly recognized influencer in the ecommerce space and has taught thousands of students how to effectively sell physical products online over at ProfitableOnlineStore.com.