To start with, I did my research. If you don’t have electricity at a show, how do you take credit? I realized I was missing a whole different market by NOT taking plastic and losing larger sales.
I needed help! I talked to my husband, who is my biggest supporter COMMANDMENT #10, and he offered up an old credit card swipe machine from work. Now, I have my contraption. What I did NOT have was a nameplate, receipt paper or bank account!
Next, I went to my bank and opened another checking account in my name. Going to the bank is always an interesting experience. The bank Gods want you to open a business account that you have to pay for every month. This was not in my budget! Yet again, I was having another CULTURE SHOCK!
Now that I had my “BIG BUSINESS” bank account, I could order that little plate with my name, account number and address. If you go with this option, have fun screwing the nameplate into your credit card contraption! (This is just a fair warning).
Then arises another obstacle; I have my contraption and receipt paper. How in the world do I get the money into the bank?
*Special Note - Once you swipe that card it is not a process of osmosis and it magically appears in your bank account. All you have is a piece of carbon paper. I am sure this dates me, but this was before the smart phone. This was before the techno Gods at Nextel; remember them, created the first cell phone with a credit card swipe function.
Then I started OPERATION OSMOSIS! Once again, I went back to research board and talked to other artists and BINGO!
What I found is PayPal is not just for EBay users. I needed to get from Point A (The Sale) to Point B (Money in the bank). You either like PayPal or you hate it, either way, they added a section to their site for small businesses. I think it was called “Virtual Business” at that time. Now, it is called “Merchant Services.”
You could just sign up for an account, within 72 hours PayPal verifies your bank account and in a nutshell; all you had to do was manually put in all of the information from your paper receipt copy and BAM! The fees were very low, lowest of anything that I looked at a bank or online and the money was in the bank within 24 hours.
*Special Note – Using the PayPal system, you had to personally transfer money to your account. If you don’t, it is in a holding pattern; hence the 24 hours.
It was a great option, as a starving artist, to take plastic with minimal fees. If I DID NOT do this, I would have lost a ton of sales. With the technology of cell phones today it is a much easier process. Long in the short, you get what you pay for. I eventually went that route with my first Palm Treo and Internet connection, but once again that takes MONEY.
At this point I was making a decent profit and I was seeing artists starting to advance into application/juried shows.
*Special Note - I’m comfortable. I am doing small art shows, have a decent booth space and making a profit. It is time to personally ask your self, “Self – Am I ready to go for the gold?”
Juried Art Shows and a New Playing Field & Commandment #7
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