“I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.” [P.G. Wodehouse]

Recently I had the joy of helping the beautiful Katy Harvey set up her first fine art show in many years.

We  had the venue, we had the oil paintings, we had the wine, we had the crowd coming and we had a ‘visa’ machine from the venue for taking payments.

The purloining venue

Then only a day before the venue who had offered us the wireless payment machine, told us they would be taking 25% of whatever was processed through their machine. This was a huge dose of naivety on my part. They were going to be adding VAT and taking a cut for using the machine. This was going to make the whole evening unprofitable and the artwork a lot more expensive. Shocking news after 3 months of hardcore painting.

I starting doing research to see if we could gather together some kind of patchwork online payment website or rent a portable machine to save us from a disastrous end to what felt like a three month stint of hard labour for Katy. We tried numerous avenues but it is incredibly hard to set up an these payment things quickly and on limited struggling artist style budgets. The banks wanted us to have a merchant account with a set-up time of at least a few weeks, online payment providers were numerous and complicated to get the head around, although I did have wonderful advice from some. It still proved too much in the timeframe we had.

I had to look for an alternative and very sharpish. As Bertram Wilberforce “Bertie” Wooster would say “I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea…

In the end we did a fudge and I created an online shopping cart just using paypal buttons, and used the venue internet access to take secure payments. After 4 payments at the same location, paypal got miffed and said we were mis-using their service. We needed to sign up for a paypal Secure Terminal. Of course next time I will be doing this in less than 24 hours and with a tad more knowledge but for the first of many art shows, it worked well and we were able to take four online payments, a few cheques and some cash.

I still couldn’t help feeling it should be an easier process. I will be more prepared next time.

Tags: art, ebay, fate, fudge, offline payments, online payments, secure terminal, wireless payment machine