Managing Artwork Inquiries

When a collector wants to ask about a piece, they send an inquiry from your public artwork pages and it lands at Admin → Inquiries. You reply from there, track where each one stands, and mark it sold when it turns into a purchase. This article covers that workflow.

Where inquiries come from

Every public artwork page carries Inquire About This Work. On a piece that has already sold, the same button reads Ask About Similar Work, so a collector arriving too late still starts a conversation instead of hitting a wall.

The collector fills in their Name, Email, an optional Phone, and a Message, with an opening line about the piece written for them. The form tells them galleries usually reply within one to two business days, and the acknowledgement they receive says the same thing. That is a promise your inbox has to keep.

Tip: A piece has to be publicly visible for anyone to inquire about it. If a work is not published, there is no page to inquire from.

The inquiries inbox

Go to Admin → Inquiries. Across the top you get three figures:

• Total inquiries
• Reported Sold
• Reported Conversion

The last two are marked as operator-reported rather than payment-verified, because they count inquiries you marked sold by hand. They are a measure of your follow-up, not of banked revenue. Do not put them in a board pack as sales figures.

Each row shows the Artwork with a thumbnail, who it is From, a preview of the Message, the Status, and recent activity including how many replies the thread has. Filter with the Status selector: All Statuses, Open, Replied, Sold or Archived.

Tick the checkboxes to act on several at once, with Export to download them and Archive to close them out.

Statuses

• Open is new and waiting on you.
• Replied happens on its own the first time you respond.
• Sold means the inquiry led to a purchase.
• Archived is closed with nothing more to do.