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Upcoming commissions - and a question about PayPal
10 years ago
Hi!
The first part of the month got eaten up with the day job ending (it was a temp gig, but I am happy I was able to last a year there), and trying to replace a laptop, then trying to get a scanner to work with the replacement. This means I wanted to offer commissions earlier, and didn't feel I could as I'd no way to get them uploaded in a timely manner.
Now I feel like I can offer commissions.
$20 for blue pencil (or red pencil, or green - I'm really grooving on the Col-Erase pencils), one character, can be any rating from G to XXX, any species. I am hoping to get 10-20 of these completed over the upcoming 2-3 weeks. Please email me details of character appearance and activity at JonServal at aol dot com (I'm not great at keeping up with notes here, and I can't as easily flag them). It'd really help to have some sort of title which grabs me as "hey, it's a commission!" -- but you knew that.
The question. I've heard that PayPal's gotten to be pretty draconian about payments which are gifts vs. invoices. I would rather simply get paid after completion of work, but would anyone have suggestions for how to simply do that without risking getting me or my customers in trouble?
Thanks!
The first part of the month got eaten up with the day job ending (it was a temp gig, but I am happy I was able to last a year there), and trying to replace a laptop, then trying to get a scanner to work with the replacement. This means I wanted to offer commissions earlier, and didn't feel I could as I'd no way to get them uploaded in a timely manner.
Now I feel like I can offer commissions.
$20 for blue pencil (or red pencil, or green - I'm really grooving on the Col-Erase pencils), one character, can be any rating from G to XXX, any species. I am hoping to get 10-20 of these completed over the upcoming 2-3 weeks. Please email me details of character appearance and activity at JonServal at aol dot com (I'm not great at keeping up with notes here, and I can't as easily flag them). It'd really help to have some sort of title which grabs me as "hey, it's a commission!" -- but you knew that.
The question. I've heard that PayPal's gotten to be pretty draconian about payments which are gifts vs. invoices. I would rather simply get paid after completion of work, but would anyone have suggestions for how to simply do that without risking getting me or my customers in trouble?
Thanks!
It's better to invoice the clients to prevent the clients from flagging the transaction as personal and getting you both in trouble.
Oh, and its best to never let PayPal in on the details of the transactions beyond that. They hate it when people use their service for adult products.
This is coming from someone who isn't an artist at all but follows many of them and also feels like it's fair to both the artist and commissioner.
You can go the invoice route as well, it just has a lot more fiddly options but is generally the same effect and if I remember right allows businesses to request shipping info etc.
Things get tricky when you let people just pay you through the service. Some might send it as a gift (which it isn't) and others might include a note which could incite red flags in their system. So I've kept to sending money requests directly to the person I'm doing work for when it's due, and I've been fine for a few years now. Just remember to set it to USD in the little side-bar thing if you aren't in the US. I've nearly sent requests for CAD funds a couple times now.