How does buy-now-pay-later financing work for selling art online?

Buy-now-pay-later options like Affirm, PayPal financing, or Afterpay can significantly increase your sales. Here’s how they work: You integrate one of these services into your website, and when a customer is looking at a piece—say it costs $149—they’ll see an option like ‘Starting at $14 a month with Affirm.’ The customer can choose to finance the purchase, splitting it into multiple payments. The key benefit for you as the artist is that you get paid 100% of the sale price immediately. The financing company pays you in full right away, and they handle collecting the payments from the customer over time. It’s their risk, not yours. So yes, the art ships immediately because you’ve been paid in full. Data from major e-commerce platforms shows these financing options significantly increase both conversion rates and average order values. It’s especially helpful for artists with higher-priced work, as it makes those pieces more accessible to buyers who might want to spread out the cost.

---

Asked by an artist asking about financing options for customers · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2021-07-27