Overview
The part of the new ArtSites that lets people buy your work is still being built. This article tells you now, rather than on the day you sit down to set it up, how it will take payment.
It takes payment through Stripe. It does not support PayPal.
If you sell through PayPal on your current website, that arrangement will not carry over, and you will need a Stripe account to sell on the new ArtSites. Nothing changes for you today: your current website, your prices and your PayPal store all keep working.
Why Stripe
We chose one payment company and built around it. Here is the honest case for that choice.
- People buy without leaving your website. A PayPal button sends the buyer off to another website to pay. Some of them do not come back.
- The buyer needs no account anywhere. Cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay all work. A PayPal button only works for someone who already has PayPal.
- The money still comes straight to you. Stripe changes how a payment is taken, not who gets paid. We still take nothing out of what you sell.
- Prices work in Canadian dollars, US dollars, pounds and euros, so you can price in the currency your buyers think in.
- One payment system means one thing to look after. Every improvement we make to the store reaches everybody, instead of being split across two ways of paying.
The part that is more work
Stripe's signup asks for more than PayPal does. It wants your bank details and identity documents, usually a passport or a driver's licence, and it takes longer than pasting in an email address.
If you already have PayPal working, that will feel like a step backwards before it feels like a step forward. We would rather say so here than let you discover it halfway through signing up.
Two things worth knowing. Getting paid needs a bank account whichever company takes the payment, so this is effort brought forward rather than effort added. And you do not have to do it on your own: if Stripe asks for something you are unsure about, write to us and a real person will go through it with you.
Does this mean PayPal is never coming?
No. PayPal is not built. It is not ruled out either.
We started with one payment company because building two at once would have meant a slower and worse store for everybody. That was a decision about what to do first, and it is one we are willing to look at again.
If PayPal matters to you, tell us. That is the most useful thing you can do about it, and we do read it.
While you wait
If you sell your work, your invitation to the new ArtSites arrives later than it does for most artists, so that you do not land somewhere with nothing to sell from. The article "Moving to the new ArtSites when you sell your work" explains why, and how to move sooner if you would rather.