How to Photograph and List Pottery and Ceramics for Sale

To sell pottery and ceramics online, you need three things to land: photographs that show glaze and form honestly, a listing that answers function and food-safety questions before a buyer asks, and packing that gets a fragile object across the country intact. Get those right and the price takes care of itself. This playbook walks through each one, in the order a potter actually works through them.

Pottery is unusually hard to sell from a screen. A buyer cannot pick up the mug, feel its weight, or run a thumb over the rim. Everything they would learn by holding the piece has to come through your photos and your words. That is the whole job.

How do you photograph glaze, texture and true color?

Photograph ceramics in soft, indirect daylight against a neutral background, and shoot the same piece from enough angles that a buyer can mentally rotate it. Glaze is the part most makers get wrong - a glossy surface either blows out into white glare or reads as a flat, dead color. Neither is what the buyer receives.

Set up near a north-facing window or shoot outside in open shade. Direct sun creates hard speckle and false hot spots on a glazed surface; an overcast sky is a giant softbox and one of the best lights a potter can ask for. If you must shoot indoors with poor light, a single sheet of tracing paper taped over a lamp will soften it enough to use.

Getting color right

A celadon that photographs as grey, or a tenmoku that loses its rust break, will generate returns and unhappy buyers. Two habits fix most color problems. First, set a custom white balance or shoot one frame with a plain white card in it so you have a true reference. Second, edit on a calibrated screen and resist the urge to saturate - a punchier photo that misrepresents the glaze costs you more in returns than it earns in clicks.

Showing texture and form

Texture needs a little raking light - a low, side-on angle that lets carving, throwing rings, or a wood-fired surface cast tiny shadows. Form needs angles: a straight-on elevation, a three-quarter view, a top-down shot into the vessel, and a close crop of the rim and foot. For mugs and cups, one photo in a hand gives instant scale. The same general approach to lighting and angles applies to any object - see our smartphone product photography guide for the fundamentals.

How do you describe form, function and food-safety?

A ceramics listing has to answer the practical questions a buyer would ask if they were holding the piece. Lead with what it is and what it does, then give the specifics that decide a purchase.

• Dimensions and capacity - height and width in inches, and volume in fluid ounces for anything that holds liquid. "Holds a generous 12 oz" prevents the most common mismatch of expectation.
• Food, microwave and dishwasher safety - state it plainly. If a glaze is not food-safe, or a piece is decorative only, say so in the first lines. If you used a commercial glaze rated food-safe, name it.
• Firing and clay body - stoneware, porcelain, earthenware; cone of firing; wood, gas, or electric. Collectors care, and it explains durability.
• Handmade variation - note that throwing marks, slight asymmetry, and glaze pooling are features of hand work, not flaws. This frames the variation a one-of-one piece always has.
• Care - hand-wash recommendations, whether the piece can take a thermal shock, how to treat a matte surface.

Write the description in your own voice. A short paragraph on how the piece was made - the clay, the kiln, what you were after with the glaze - does more for a sale than a wall of specs. For structure and tone, our guide to product descriptions that sell goes deeper.

How should you price wheel-thrown and hand-built work?

Price ceramics by adding up materials, kiln cost, and your time at a real hourly rate - then do not discount that number because the object looks simple. A plain mug can carry hours of throwing, trimming, handle-pulling, two firings, and glazing. The buyer is paying for all of it.

Account for the brutal reality of the kiln: not everything survives. A piece that cracks in the bisque or comes out with a glaze fault still cost you clay, time, and electricity. Spreading that loss rate across your successful pieces is not padding - it is honest accounting. Wheel-thrown production work and one-off hand-built or sculptural pieces sit at different price points, and they should; a coiled, carved vessel that took a full day is not a $30 object.

Fees matter too, because they come straight off your margin. On SCRAPD, founding-50 makers pay 5% commission - meaningfully lower than the roughly 10-11% effective rate many sellers see on Etsy once listing and transaction fees stack up. Our full guide to pricing handmade work covers the math.

How do you pack pottery so it survives shipping?

Pack ceramics on the principle of double-boxing: the piece is fully cushioned inside a snug inner box, and that inner box floats inside a larger outer box with two inches of cushioning on every side. A carrier will drop your parcel. Your packing, not their care, is what keeps the piece whole.

1. Wrap the piece in several layers of bubble wrap, paying special attention to the rim, handle, and any protruding element - those break first.
2. Fill the interior of any vessel with crumpled paper so the walls cannot flex inward.
3. Set the wrapped piece in an inner box with cushioning packed tight on all sides - it should not shift when you shake it.
4. Place that inner box inside a larger outer box, suspended in at least two inches of packing peanuts, crumpled paper, or foam on every face.
5. Tape every seam, mark the box "FRAGILE" on multiple sides (knowing carriers may ignore it), and keep it from being the heaviest thing in a stack if you can.

For weight-based fragile parcels, see our shipping guide for handmade sellers. Build the cost of robust packing materials into your price - thin packing to "save money" is the most expensive mistake a potter can make.

How do you handle breakage and claims?

Breakage will happen eventually, and how you handle the first one sets your reputation. Respond fast and warmly. Ask the buyer for photos of the piece and the packaging as received - this is for the carrier claim, not to interrogate the buyer. Offer a clear remedy: a replacement if the piece is part of a series, or a refund if it was a true one-off.

A buyer who receives a broken mug and a graceful, generous response often becomes a more loyal collector than one whose order arrived perfectly. The breakage is forgotten; the way you treated them is not.

How do you build a collector base for ceramics?

Ceramics buyers come back. Someone who bought one of your mugs and uses it every morning is your warmest future customer - for a matching bowl, a gift, a larger piece. Treat each sale as the start of a relationship rather than the end of a transaction.

Share your process - kiln openings, glaze tests, work in progress. Collectors love seeing the moment a kiln is unbricked. Announce new firings so people can plan. Tuck a short handwritten note into each parcel. None of this requires an ad budget; our guide to marketing a handmade shop without ads covers the rest, and building a maker brand helps people remember whose work they own.