How it works

The gallery is a straight, filterable feed of everything currently listed for sale — paintings, limited-run prints, and digital editions, searchable by artist, medium, category, and price. Every work carries the details you'd expect from a serious dealer: dimensions, medium, edition size (or "1 of 1" for a unique piece), the year it was made, and a written note from the artist about the work itself. Nothing in the gallery is a stock photo or a placeholder — every image is the actual piece, photographed as it exists right now, in the condition it will ship in.

Artist profiles show a seller's full track record on the platform: how long they've been selling here, how many pieces they've placed with collectors, their median dispatch time, and every other work currently available from them. If a piece has changed hands before — bought, then resold by a previous collector — the listing says so plainly, and still credits the original artist by name, because attribution never changes even when ownership does.

Buying starts with a request, not an instant checkout button, because a few details genuinely need to be pinned down before money moves: which print format and size you want (for editioned work), any licensing terms you need, and where the piece should ship. You fill in a short form on the artwork page — your shipping address, a preferred carrier, a target delivery date, and any note you want the artist to see — and submit it as a purchase request.

The seller then has three options: accept your terms as submitted, counter with different terms (a different licence, for instance), or decline outright with a reason. If they counter, you can accept the counter-offer or decline it — nothing is binding and no money moves until both sides have agreed on exactly what's being sold and on what terms. Declining, at any point before payment, costs either side nothing. This negotiation step exists specifically so that by the time you pay, there's no ambiguity left about what you're buying.

Once terms are agreed, you pay — and that payment goes straight into escrow, not into the seller's pocket. The amount is the artwork's listed price, plus optional 1.5% transit insurance if you chose to add it when you made the request (more on that below); there's never a shipping or printing cost bundled into what you pay at this stage, because those are the seller's cost to arrange, not yours to prefund.

From the moment your payment clears, the order is live and trackable end to end from your dashboard: escrow funded, in production, shipped, delivered, released. Every stage is visible to both sides, and the two of you can message each other directly through a private, order-specific chat thread the whole way through — coordinating a pickup window, confirming a size, or just checking in on progress, without needing to trade personal contact details.

Bello splits insurance into two distinct things, because they cover different risks and land on different people. Transit insurance is the buyer's choice — 1.5% of the artwork's price, added at request time if you want it, covering transit mishaps like reimbursing the shipping cost if something goes wrong before delivery. Damage insurance is a different mechanism entirely: it only applies once an artwork's price crosses $3,000, and when it does, it's mandatory and it's always the seller's cost, not the buyer's — a flat 10% of the artwork's price, charged automatically to the seller's wallet once shipping is paid, right before pickup is scheduled, with no way to skip it.

This split exists because the two risks are genuinely different sizes. A modest reimbursement for a shipping mishap doesn't need the same backstop as full replacement value on an original that's, almost by definition, irreplaceable. So the buyer gets a cheap, optional way to cover the small stuff, and a higher-value piece automatically gets the artist committing to real financial coverage before it ever leaves the studio — without either side paying for protection the transaction doesn't actually need.

Shipping physical work is handled as a deliberate sequence, not a single click, because international art shipping genuinely requires more care than a paperback. First, the seller confirms the piece is in hand and ready, and submits its real packed weight along with a note on whether it needs special crating — fragile, oversized, or high-value pieces often do. That information goes to Bello's fulfillment team, who price the actual shipment based on real weight, real dimensions, and the crating decision, rather than a generic flat rate that either overcharges simple shipments or undercharges complicated ones.

Once that price is set, the seller pays it (this is the one cost that's genuinely the seller's, not the buyer's), picks a pickup date, and the courier is booked. From there the order moves through label issuance, pickup, and transit, with tracking visible to the buyer throughout. If a seller needs to pause a shipment briefly — waiting on a crate to be built, say — a buyer can see that clearly rather than watching a tracking number sit mysteriously idle. A self-service shipping calculator is also available anywhere on the site, so a buyer or seller can get a realistic cost estimate — by size, weight, origin, destination, and crating needs — before a real order is even placed.

The final step belongs entirely to the buyer: once the piece arrives, you confirm receipt from your dashboard. That single action is what actually releases the held escrow funds to the seller, net of Bello's commission. Nobody else — not the seller, not Bello — can force that release; it happens only when you say the work has arrived as expected. If a shipment goes missing or arrives damaged, that's exactly the scenario the insurance coverage from earlier exists for — whichever of the two applied to this order — and it's handled before release, not after.

For the seller, this is the moment the sale actually completes financially: the net proceeds land in their wallet as an immediately visible, itemized transaction, and — if the piece had been resold from a previous owner rather than sold by its original artist — that's also the moment a royalty payment goes out to the original artist automatically, alongside the seller's own payout.

A piece bought on Bello doesn't stop being a Bello piece once it's yours. If you decide to sell it on, you can relist it directly from your own collection — you set a new price, and it goes through the exact same request, escrow, and fulfillment pipeline as any first sale. You're not required to keep the original title, medium, or images the artist listed it with; those stay locked to preserve the work's provenance, but the price and listed/unlisted status are entirely yours to control as the current owner.

What makes this different from a private resale is that the original artist keeps a stake in every future sale of their work, forever — not just the first one. Every time a piece changes hands again, a resale royalty is calculated off the original artist's own commission tier and paid out to them automatically at release, on top of whatever the reselling owner nets from the sale. It's a small mechanic with a real purpose: an artist's early work appreciating in value in someone else's hands still benefits the person who made it, the same way it would in the traditional gallery world's droit de suite.

Bello doesn't charge listing fees, and there's no exclusivity requirement locking an artist to the platform. What Bello takes is a commission on completed sales — 8% for standard-tier sellers, dropping to 3% for artists on Pro membership. That's the only fee baked into a sale price; there's no separate transaction fee, no payment-processing surcharge passed on to the seller, and no hidden cut taken anywhere else in the flow.

Pro membership exists for sellers doing enough volume that the commission difference meaningfully adds up, and it applies to every sale going forward the moment it's active — including the seller's cut of any resale royalties they're owed as an original artist. There's no bidding war or gallery negotiation involved in getting a better rate; it's a flat, published number, the same for every artist at that tier.

Every seller on Bello is a real, reviewed person before their first piece ever goes live — this isn't an open marketplace where anyone can list anything with a stolen photo. Becoming a seller means submitting a real application: your legal name and address, years of experience, an artist statement, and an authorship sample — a piece of your own work, reviewed (with an AI-assisted first pass and human oversight) to confirm it's genuinely yours. A short liveness capture step confirms the account belongs to a real person sitting behind the application, not an automated signup.

Every physical work that ships carries a signed certificate of authenticity and a condition report photographed on the day it's packed, so a buyer isn't just trusting a listing description — they're getting a documented paper trail alongside the piece itself. If you apply and your application is still pending, you'll see its status directly in your dashboard rather than being shown the application form again; there's nothing to resubmit while a human is already reviewing what you sent.

Money you've earned on Bello — sale proceeds and resale royalties alike — lands in your on-platform wallet the instant an order releases, and it's visible immediately as an itemized transaction, not a vague balance. Withdrawing it to a real bank or payout method requires that method to be set up and approved first (a standard identity check, done once), and only ever covers money you've actually earned through a sale — deposits you've made to fund purchases stay ring-fenced and are never treated as withdrawable income.

This separation exists for a simple reason: a seller's wallet and a buyer's wallet can be the same account, since plenty of collectors on Bello also sell work they've bought and later parted with. Keeping "money you deposited to buy something" and "money you earned by selling something" cleanly separated means neither side of that same account can accidentally get confused with the other.

Bello ships internationally by default — there's no separate domestic-only tier of the marketplace. A seller sets a shipping preference and Bello's fulfillment team prices the real cost of getting a piece from wherever it is to wherever it's going, whether that's across town or across an ocean. Currency display adapts to where you're browsing from, though the underlying escrow and settlement always run in US dollars under the hood, so a price never quietly drifts between the moment you agree to buy and the moment you pay.

Because every order — international or not — runs through the same escrow-first pipeline described above, there's no separate, riskier process for buying from an artist on the other side of the world than there is for buying from someone in your own city. The protections are identical either way.