Avoid wasting money on the sale of your first NFT

My first NFT sold for 0.05 ETH

What an exciting time to be alive! Creators from all around the world can put their artwork online and get paid by crypto art collectors. I have been painting and sketching in my iPad since 2018 and I could have never found a better way of monetising them until the times of NFTs.

Here, I am sharing with you four of my learnings on selling my first NFT.

1. Do not run an auction with your first minted NFT — While the most common way to set your NFT sale price is through a fixed price I decided to start a bid for a week. When you are new out there it makes no sense to make an auction because your artwork has no value before you have created a demand for it or have built a community around.
2. Avoid the costs of converting your ETH to WETH — When you run an auction the people making the offer have to exchange their ETH to WETH, which costs gas fee. The same way you need to transfer later your WETH to ETH once you accept the bid. In other words, putting a fix price from the beginning avoids twice the need of exchanging currency thus paying gas fees twice. Alternatively, you can mint NFTs on the Polygon blockchain (with no gas fees!). However, buyers have to have a Polygon wallet and there are gas fees for converting ETH to MATIC.
3. Do not price too low your NFT or you won’t be able to accept the offer— I priced one of my NFTs way to low, 0.01 ETH (the equivalent to 38€ at the time). When I wanted to accept the offer from the buyer and sell the NFT I figured out I could not because the gas fees where all the time higher and so I would end up losing money. How can I run a transaction that will cost me around 100 € to accept 38 €? So what happens now is that the offer is kind of frozen. I might need to wait until the gas fees go really low or lose the chance of selling this NFT.

4. Be careful when customising the gas fees to accept a transaction, if they are too low it can stuck your wallet— I wanted to accept a transaction but did not want to pay the high gas fees (smart girl) so I customised the price to a very low gas fee since I had no rush to accept the payment. It all ended up in a stuck transaction in the blockchain for 5 days. Because the gas fee was so low, the blockchain did not put any priority at all to it so it was not going through. That meant as well that all my transactions after that one where piled up in a waiting list. The only solution I could find was sending ETH to myself with the same nonce (and paying gas fees of course). My learning here: do not go below the recommended Gwei because it can end up costing you more money than expected.

Those above are only a few learnings, there are many more things to learn and experiment with in the NFT world. Happy to keep on sharing more with you soon. Follow my OpenSea artwork here > https://opensea.io/art_by_sabela