How to sell on Honed Assets: from first upload to first payout

This is the guide we wish every marketplace had published on the day we first uploaded something to one. It walks through the whole seller side of Honed Assets in the order you will meet it: opening a shop, getting approved, building a listing that sells, pricing it, bringing buyers to it, and getting paid. It is long because the details are where the money is. Skim the headings if you have sold online before; read the pricing and launch bonus sections either way.

Nothing here costs anything. There is no listing fee, no monthly fee and no fee on payouts. Honed Assets earns a share of each sale and nothing else.

Step 1: Open a shop

Go to /sell and start the onboarding. You need three things:

1. A shop name and a short bio. The name is what buyers see on every product card and in search, so pick the name you want to be known by rather than a placeholder.
2. A payout method: PayPal, Wise, UPI or a bank account. You can change it later from Settings, but adding it now means your first payout is never held up.
3. Something to sell. You can save products as drafts before the shop is approved, so there is no reason to wait.

Once you submit, staff review the shop, usually within one working day. You get an email when it is approved and any products you have already marked as published go live at that moment. Until then they simply sit as drafts.

What review is looking for at the shop level is straightforward: a real name, a bio that says what you make, and no sign that the shop exists to redistribute other people's work. It is not a portfolio review. A brand-new designer with one good product is exactly who we want.

Step 2: Build the listing

The product form is the most important screen in the dashboard, so here is every field and why it matters.

Title. Say what the thing is and what it is for, in that order. "Aster Grotesk, a 9-weight variable sans" beats "Aster". Buyers search by nouns: font, mockup, UI kit, template, icon set. Put the noun in the title.

Category. One of the twelve. It decides which licence tiers you can offer (more on that below), which browse page you appear on and which filters apply, so choose the one buyers would look under, not the one that sounds most impressive.

Description. A full rich-text editor: headings, lists, bold, links and images. Structure it the way a buyer reads it:

• What is included, as a list. File formats, counts, weights, sizes, artboards.
• What it was made for. The use case sells the product.
• What software or versions it needs.
• What is not included (fonts used in the preview, stock photos in the mockup scene) so nobody is surprised after paying.

Tags. These power browse and search. Use the words a buyer would type, not the words you would use to describe your process. Check your Demand page after a week: it lists the searches buyers actually ran, including the ones that returned nothing, and those are tags waiting to be used.

Cover. 1600×1000 works best, PNG, JPG or WebP under 5 MB. The cover is the listing. It is cropped to a card on browse pages and shown full width on the product page, so keep the subject centred and avoid small text that vanishes at card size.

Files. Up to 50 MB per file, uploaded straight to storage as you pick them. Accepted formats include zip, fig, sketch, pdf, epub, otf, ttf, woff2, svg, wav, mp3, cube and xmp. If your product has several formats, ship one zip with a clear folder structure and a short README inside; buyers download one thing and everything is where they expect it.

Version and release notes. Every product has a version number and a notes field. When you update the files, bump the version and write what changed. Buyers who already own the product see the new version and can download it again for free, and the release notes appear on the product page, which is a surprisingly effective signal that a product is maintained.

Support. Choose how many months you will answer buyer questions after purchase (the default is six; zero means no support) and, optionally, a price for extending support to twelve months. Support is a real commitment, so set a number you will honour. It is also a real differentiator for UI kits, templates and anything with a setup step.

SEO fields. A title, description and keywords for search engines. If you leave them blank the product title and the start of the description are used, which is fine. Fill them in when the product page should rank for a phrase that is not natural in the title.

Made with AI. A switch. If AI tools were part of how the product was made, turn it on. The label shows on the card and product page, and buyers who have chosen to hide AI-made work will not see it. Turning it off when it should be on is the kind of thing review catches, and it costs you trust with buyers when it surfaces later. AI-assisted work with real authorship is welcome here; hidden AI work is not.

Include in Pro. Whether Pro subscribers can download this product as part of their subscription. See the pricing section before deciding.

Step 3: Pick licence tiers and prices

Honed Assets does not have one price per product. It has one price per licence tier, and the tiers depend on the category.

For Templates, Icons, Presets, Audio and most other categories:

For Fonts:

E-books are sold as a single-reader copy.

You enable any subset of the tiers (at least one) and give each its own price. The cheapest priced tier is the listing price shown on cards. Behind the scenes each tier becomes its own checkout product, so one charge always maps to exactly one licence and there is never any ambiguity about what a buyer bought.

A few pricing habits that work:

• Price the Commercial tier as the real price and treat Personal as the entry point. Most professional buyers need Commercial; making it the obvious middle option helps them choose quickly.
• Make Extended meaningfully more expensive, typically three to five times Commercial. It exists for buyers who will ship your work inside something they sell at scale, and that is worth more.
• Do not undercut yourself on day one. Buyers on a curated marketplace are not looking for the cheapest file. They are looking for the one that saves them the most time. Price for that.
• Use a coupon, not a price cut, for launches. A coupon can expire; a lowered price becomes the price.

Buyers pay in their own currency and local tax is added at checkout automatically, so the prices you set are the USD prices before tax.

Step 4: Understand what you earn

The standard share is 70% of the sale price. Three things move it up, and nothing moves it down.

The 45-day launch bonus. Every product you publish earns 85% instead of 70% on every sale in its first 45 days. This is permanent, and it applies to every new product you ever upload, each with its own window. The practical consequence is that a shop that publishes regularly always has part of its catalogue earning at the higher rate. The dashboard shows how many launch days each product has left.

Your own referral link. Every seller has an affiliate link (Dashboard → Affiliate). When a buyer arrives through it and buys your product, you keep 85% of that line instead of 70%, because there is no affiliate commission to pay on a buyer you brought yourself. If they add products from other shops to the same order, you earn the 10% affiliate commission on those, paid out of the marketplace's share. The referral cookie lasts 60 days. Put the link in your bio, your newsletter and your portfolio; it is the single easiest way to raise your rate.

Honed Assets Pro. Pro is a $16 a month (or $144 a year) subscription that lets a buyer download any product marked "Include in Pro". At the end of each month, 70% of every subscriber's fee is split evenly across the distinct Pro products that subscriber downloaded. Concretely: a subscriber who downloads five Pro products in September sends each of those five sellers a fifth of 70% of their fee. A subscriber who downloads only your product sends you all of it. Sellers see the month-by-month breakdown per product in Dashboard → Pro.

Should you include a product in Pro? Include it when the product benefits from volume: icon sets, presets, textures, brushes, smaller templates. Consider keeping it out when the product is a high-value, low-volume purchase that you expect buyers to seek out and pay for outright: a full type family, a large UI system. Many shops do both, with a flagship product outside Pro and a catalogue inside it. You can change the setting per product at any time.

Shop memberships. Separately from Pro, you can set a monthly membership price for your own shop (Settings → Membership). Members download everything in your catalogue while they are paid up, and you keep 70% of every membership payment. It works best for shops that publish steadily, because the pitch to a buyer is "everything I make, as I make it".

Refunds are handled by the marketplace, only for corrupt files or listings that do not match what was delivered, and a refund for a misdescribed product is the one case where the loss is the seller's.

Step 5: Bring buyers in

Publishing is the beginning, not the end. The dashboard has a set of tools for the part that comes after.

Coupons. Create a code with a percentage off, an optional expiry and an optional usage cap. Every coupon has a share link at /coupon/YOURCODE: it stores the code for 30 days and sends the buyer to your shop with a banner showing the offer, so the code is applied before they reach checkout. Use coupons for launches, for your newsletter and for anyone who follows you elsewhere.

Announcements. Post an update to your shop's Announcements tab, with the same editor as product descriptions. Twice a calendar month you can also send it by email to everyone who has bought from you or follows your shop. That is the right cadence for "new product", "big update" and "sale this week", and it is a real audience that grows with every sale.

Bundles. Group several of your products at one price. A bundle is its own listing with its own page, and buyers who own part of it can still buy the rest. Bundles are the easiest way to raise your average order value without lowering the price of anything.

Shop posts. Every approved shop can publish two articles a month on this blog, filed under "From the shops", with your own product and bundle cards embedded in the text. A making-of, a tutorial that uses your product, a walkthrough of a template: these are read by buyers and indexed by search engines, and they link straight to your shop.

Sale events. From time to time Honed Assets runs a site-wide sale. You join or leave from Dashboard → Promotions with one click; the discount applies to your products for the duration and the sale page and banners promote everything that is in it. You absorb the discount on your lines, the same as a coupon, so joining is a choice, never a default.

Demand. Dashboard → Demand shows the last 30 days of buyer searches on the marketplace, the searches that returned no results, unit sales by category and tag, and the open requests buyers have posted. Zero-result searches are a list of products nobody has made yet. Requests are buyers telling you exactly what they would pay for.

Milestones. Shops earn a badge at 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 sales. It shows on your shop header and on every product's seller card.

Step 6: Get paid

Payouts go out on the 1st of every month. Your balance is the sum of your share of every sale, launch bonus, referral bonus, Pro share and membership payment for the month, minus any refunds. A balance of $50 or more is paid on the 1st; anything under that rolls into the next month so it is not eaten by transfer fees.

Before the first payout you complete your tax details in the dashboard. Every payout, and every line that went into it, is listed in Dashboard → Payouts, and the sales feed shows the rate applied to each line (70%, 85% launch, 85% referral) so you can check the arithmetic yourself.

A launch checklist

If you want the short version to work through today:

1. Open the shop at /sell with a real name, a bio and a payout method.
2. Prepare one product properly: one zip, a README inside, a 1600×1000 cover, a description with an "included" list.
3. Enable the tiers that fit and price Commercial as the real price.
4. Decide on Pro per product.
5. Set a support window you will honour.
6. Publish. The 45-day launch clock starts now.
7. Create a launch coupon and share its /coupon link with everyone who already follows your work, through your affiliate link.
8. Post an announcement and email it.
9. After a week, read the Demand page and add the tags you were missing.
10. Publish the next product. Every new one starts its own 45 days at 85%.

Questions

Anything this guide does not cover is in the help centre at /help, and the seller FAQ at the bottom of /sell answers the questions we hear most. For anything else, open a ticket from the dashboard or write to hello@honedassets.com. We reply to every seller.