Last week I put up a Twitter poll to gauge the reaction to an idea I had. The question was “Would being able to pay for a piece of my artwork in smaller monthly instalments make you more likely to buy one?”
Would being able to pay for a piece of my artwork in smaller monthly instalments make you more likely to buy one?
— Paul Watson (@lazcorp) April 15, 2016
The thinking behind this is that the economy is not in a good state and people’s finances are extremely tight (unless you happen to be the type of person who has loads of money hidden in offshore tax havens, of course, but I don’t tend to know people like that). This makes buying artwork difficult.
There were only 16 votes in total, so I’m not claiming any statistical significance in the results, but based on them it seemed at least worth a trial.
PayPal (which I use for my online ordering system) does allow websites to set up pay-by-instalment plans, but you have to be set up as a business account (which I was) and you also need to sign up to PayPal’s Website Standard Agreement: Premium Services for which they charge a monthly subscription fee, and which is very difficult to find on their website! Eventually I found out how to do that and got everything set up.
At the time of writing I have set up a pay-by-instalments option on the following three prints (click on any of these thumbnails to open their respective page on my online shop):
For each of these you should now an option to pay in 3 monthly instalments in addition to paying in full in one instalment, like this:
If you choose to pay in 3 instalments then the first payment of £20 is taken there-and-then at the checkout, the second payment of £20 is taken one month later, and the third and final payment of £20 is taken a month after that.
I chose instalments of £20 since that seemed like a reasonable amount of money. I may try additional instalment plans with lower amounts, if there’s any interest - I’m doing a lot of guesswork here just to test the water.
You don’t need to have a PayPal account to pay in instalments - as with any purchase from my online shop the PayPal checkout accepts most common debit and credit cards as well as PayPal payments.
I’ll monitor these for a few months and let you know how they go, and in the meantime I’ll probably set up pay-by-instalment options on some of the other pieces of my artwork that aren't already reasonably affordable.
As usual, if you have any comments or questions on either the concept or the implementation, please leave them below.