Do you think people know they are paying for cheap Chinese labor when they purchase? If not, do you think they would care? When I read something like,"100% free-hand painted onto a canvas by a master artist," my impression isn't, "we outsource the painting to cheap Chinese labor." My impression is clearly wrong. I suspect others have this impression though. I think the concept is cool, but I'm not sure people would b…
That being said, for this product category (photo to painting), nearly all sellers on Etsy, Ebay, or other sites, are dominated by Chinese sellers. We don't produce the product, rather these sellers are selling through us.
> I think the concept is cool, but I'm not sure people would be so willing to pay if they knew some desperate artist in China was getting paid below minimum wage to create the artwork. I guess what I'm saying is you are selling the idea of a premium service at a great price—too good to be true—and it is, because it's not true.
I can't guarantee all the wages the artists are paid, as many sellers on the site are simply reselling or doling orders out to subcontractors (the artists). However from the ones I've visited, they are paid well above minimum wage, and in fact above the average salary in China.
Most people do know that the paintings come from China, and I'm actually one of the only sites that publicly reveals this (I released an article about the painters in China on the company blog). But as you can also understand, putting big text on our home page that says "Get paintings from cheap Chinese labor" would sound condescending, not be 100% true (since we're a marketplace behind the scenes), and probably negatively affect sales as well.