Studio Queues Team · Last updated June 8, 2026
Most commission artists treat their menu as an afterthought. A bullet list pinned to a Twitter profile, a Google Doc linked in a bio, a Carrd page with three tiers and a "DM to book" CTA. The artist treats it like a price list. The browser treats it like a decision they don't have enough information to make. So they don't decide. They scroll on.
The browsers who actually convert into clients are the ones who hit a menu and immediately understand three things: what you offer, what it costs, and how to book. If any of those three answers takes more than a few seconds to find, most of them leave. Not because they didn't want a commission. Because they didn't want to do work to figure out whether they could get one from you.
This article covers what a commission menu setup actually needs to do, how to structure it, and how to plug it into a booking flow that catches the people who would have bought if you hadn't lost them at the menu.
The frame that gets this right: your commission menu is an ecommerce product page. The thing it's selling is "a commission from you." The browser is making the same kind of decision they make when they're looking at any other online purchase, with the additional friction that this purchase requires them to wait weeks for delivery and trust someone they've never met.
Baymard Institute, which has spent two decades doing usability research on ecommerce product pages, found in their 2026 benchmark that up to 62% of leading ecommerce sites have "mediocre" or worse product page UX. These are sites with full UX teams, budgets, and analytics. Most users hitting them, in their words, "will have, at best, a mediocre experience while navigating the product page." If trained UX professionals at major retailers are getting product pages wrong more than half the time, the assumption that an artist who threw together a Carrd page over a weekend has nailed it is generous.
The good news: most of what makes a product page convert is not skill-dependent. It's a small set of structural decisions, applied carefully. The artists whose menus convert browsers into clients aren't writing better copy than everyone else. They're making the same handful of structural decisions correctly.
Seven elements, in roughly this order of priority.
Before prices, before tiers, before anything: a one-sentence answer to "what does this person actually draw?" A browser hitting your menu cold needs to know within three seconds whether they're in the right place. If your style is anime-influenced character illustration with painterly backgrounds, say that. If you do realistic pet portraits, say that. If you draw furry characters, say that.
The artists who lose conversions here are the ones who hide the answer behind the menu. They open with "Commissions are open!" or "Welcome to my commission page" and force the browser to scroll down and decode what they actually make from the examples. That's a few seconds of friction at the most decisive moment in the flow, and many browsers will not pay it.
Lead with the answer. "Character illustration in a [style] aesthetic, full color, ready for personal use, prints, or avatars." Now the browser knows whether to keep reading.
Most commission menus have three to five tiers. The tier structure works when each tier is meaningfully different from the others on dimensions the buyer cares about. It fails when the tiers are differentiated only by polish level ("rough sketch" vs. "polished sketch" vs. "lineart" vs. "full color") because most buyers don't have strong preferences between those, and the menu becomes a guessing game.
The tier structures that convert tend to differentiate on one of these dimensions:
Within whatever dimension you choose, the tiers should look like clearly different products. A buyer should be able to glance at the names and know which one they want without reading the descriptions. "Bust," "Half-body," and "Full-body" passes this test. "Sketch," "Detailed sketch," and "Refined sketch" doesn't.
A practical maximum: five tiers. More than that and the choice overhead starts costing more than the additional options gain. Three is often plenty.
This is where most artist menus fail hardest. The price is the single piece of information the buyer most wants to know, and a surprising number of menus make them work to find it.
Common mistakes:
The Baymard research is consistent on this across product categories: price transparency and clarity correlate strongly with whether the user adds the product to their cart. When the price is unclear or hidden, abandonment goes up sharply.
For commissions specifically: each tier gets one number, prominently displayed near the tier name, in your default currency. If you have add-ons, show their prices the same way. If pricing varies meaningfully by complexity, state the starting price and explain what additional costs depend on (e.g., "Starting at $150. Extra characters +$80 each. Detailed background +$60.").
Don't make the buyer do math to find out what their commission will probably cost. Show the math for them.
Each tier needs at least two or three example images of finished work at that tier level. Not your portfolio's best piece for every tier; the actual range of work the buyer should expect at that tier.
Two reasons this matters. The first is calibration: the buyer is trying to figure out whether what you make at this price point matches what they want. Examples answer that more directly than any description can.
The second is honesty. If the only images you show are your best work, the buyer's expectation calibrates to your best work, and they'll be disappointed when they receive something more typical. If you show a representative range (one really strong piece, one solidly average piece), expectations calibrate honestly and the resulting commission feels like a hit rather than a miss.
A note on image presentation: thumbnails should be large enough to actually see (Baymard's research on "in-scale" product images applies here too). A grid of tiny thumbnails forces the buyer to click each one, which is friction most won't pay. Default to larger images, ideally with a lightbox to open them at full size on click.
For each tier, a brief description of what the buyer is actually getting. Not marketing copy; specifications.
This is the section where a lot of menus get clever, write paragraphs, and obscure the actual product. Resist. Bullet list, scannable, one line per spec. The buyer is scanning for "does this match what I want?" and a paragraph forces them to read where bullets let them scan.
If your tier structure has variants the buyer can choose (extra characters, detailed background, NSFW versions, rush turnaround, commercial license), list those as add-ons with their own prices, separate from the base tier prices.
Three reasons to do this rather than bundle them into tier prices:
Common add-ons worth offering: extra characters, detailed/illustrated background, NSFW variant, commercial license, rush delivery, source file. Most artists offer some subset of these. Pick the ones you actually want to offer, price them, list them.
The menu's job ends with the buyer either booking or not booking. The transition from menu to booking is where many artists lose conversions to vagueness.
The booking action that works: a clear button or link, prominently placed, labeled something like "Request a Commission" or "Book Now," that goes to your intake form. The intake form is where the buyer fills in the specifics and where your TOS is presented for click-to-accept.
The booking action that doesn't work: "DM me to book." This works for some artists who are well-known and have built audiences, but for most it's a conversion-killer. The buyer has to context-switch to a different platform, compose a message, wait for a reply, and probably have a back-and-forth before they can actually commit. Many won't pay that cost. They'll think "I'll come back when I have time" and not come back.
The intake form does the work of the DM exchange in advance. It captures the project specs, the buyer's references, contact info, and TOS acceptance in a single transaction. The artist receives a complete brief; the buyer feels like they've actually started the process. The follow-up message is "thanks for booking, here's what happens next," not "let me ask you twelve questions before we can start."
A menu without a connected booking form is half a system. The browser reads, decides, and then loses the momentum because there's no clean action to take. Your menu and your intake form should feel like one continuous experience.
A working flow looks like:
The friction points to avoid: requiring the buyer to retype information they already chose on the menu, requiring them to leave the platform to communicate, requiring them to wait for an artist response before they can move forward.
The artists with the highest conversion rates from their menus aren't the ones with the prettiest menus. They're the ones whose menu-to-booking flow has the fewest steps and the least context-switching.
Patterns that come up over and over:
Too many tiers. Six or seven tier options paralyzes the buyer. Three to five is the sweet spot. If you have a wider range of work, group similar tiers and use add-ons to differentiate within them.
No pricing. "DM for quotes" on tiered work that should obviously have a price. This is appropriate for fully custom commercial work; on tiered personal commissions it just makes you look harder to buy from.
Confusing tier names. "Bust + Background" vs. "Half-body" vs. "Half-body + Detailed BG" requires the buyer to parse the combinatorics. Cleaner: "Bust" "Half-body" "Full-body," with background as an add-on.
Missing what's NOT included. If you don't draw certain content, mechs, or NSFW, say so on the menu, not in a separate "About" section the buyer might miss. Saves you the awkward "actually I don't do that" message after they've already committed mentally.
Outdated examples. If your style has evolved meaningfully in the last year and your menu still shows examples from two years ago, you're misleading buyers and getting bookings for work you no longer make. Rotate examples to match what you currently produce.
Inconsistent pricing across platforms. Twitter says $200, Carrd says $180, your Discord pinned message says $250. The buyer notices, the buyer doesn't trust you, the buyer doesn't book. Pick one canonical menu and link to it from every platform.
No turnaround estimate. Buyers want to know when they'll get the work. "Turnaround: 2-4 weeks from acceptance" is more useful than nothing. Even rough estimates beat silence.
No clear "what now" after the menu. Buyer reads the whole menu, gets to the bottom, and there's no clear next step. Add a booking CTA at the top and bottom of the menu, not just in one easy-to-miss place.
A menu is not a launch-once artifact. It's a living document that needs maintenance:
Artists who treat the menu as a static thing tend to drift into menus that no longer match their actual practice, which then convert worse over time. Artists who treat it as an iterating document keep the menu in sync with the work and the conversion stays healthy.
A menu lives at the front of your booking funnel. It does three jobs: it tells browsers what you offer, it qualifies them as serious or not, and it hands them off to the intake form for the actual booking. Every job is structural; none of it is creative writing.
The artists who build menus that convert well treat the menu as the front of an integrated system. The menu connects to the intake form, the intake form connects to the payment system, the payment system connects to the project tracker, the tracker manages the queue and delivery. None of these pieces is the "secret" to conversion; the integration is. A great menu connected to a broken intake form loses the same buyers as a mediocre menu connected to nothing.
StudioQueues is built so the menu and booking flow are one system. Tiers, add-ons, pricing, examples, intake form, deposit collection, TOS acceptance, and project intake all live in the same place, and a buyer moves from "reading the menu" to "booked and paid" without leaving the page or context-switching. The artists who use it run the most conversion-friendly version of this flow as the default. Founding artist spots include 0% platform fees for life, and there are only 500 of them.
A commission menu is a product page. The browsers who convert into clients are the ones who can answer "what do you make, what does it cost, how do I book" within a few seconds of arriving. Most artist menus fail at one or more of these. The fix is structural: clear opening statement, meaningfully differentiated tiers, prominent prices, representative examples, scannable descriptions, separate add-ons, and a single clear booking action that lands in an intake form rather than a DM exchange.
The artists with menus that convert well aren't smarter writers or better designers. They've made the same handful of structural decisions in the order that respects the buyer's attention. The menu does the work of qualifying the buyer; the booking form does the work of capturing the project; the artist does the actual drawing. When all three parts of the flow are aligned, conversion stops being a mystery.
