L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

Rant Sponsor: PayPal

May 22, 2009 on 7:28 am | | In Backstage Pass, General Musing, Music

It’s a simple thing, really. People do it all the time. Sell stuff on a website. I help other people do this all the time. But selling my own MP3’s on my own site and turned into a week-long odyssey. I’ll spare you the full saga - a tale longer and more tedious than the original Odyssey - and point my sword at one particularly vexing enemy.

It would be easy to sell MP3s on my site if I wanted to pay half to someone else. But I have iTunes and Amazon for that.

I’m not thrilled about the pound of flesh the big retailers take, but I get it. They bring lot’s of eyeballs. You pay for eyeballs. They also set everything up, handle cranky customers like me, and every once in a great while send a check.

But on my own site?

There are two basic requirements: A way to collect money (PayPal) and a way to give access to downloads once the money has been paid (PayLoadz.com). PayLoadz has been easy. I uploaded the songs, created buttons, set up a page on my own site with my own design and none of their branding - it all works like a charm.

Then there’s PayPal.

The stage was set. Time for a sound check.

When my kids were little they adored a game called “Pooh sticks” and could spend hours dropping sticks and leaves from the upstream side of a bridge and then running the other side to see them emerge. I had that same giddy feeling as I bought a tune and then scampered over to PayPal. Yes! There it is! One sale for $0.99! Then I looked at my balance: $0.66. WTF? Had a troll under the bridge bitten off a third of my stick before it reached the other side?

Oh, yeah. If you want to receive payments, PayPal takes 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. This is actually a fairly standard merchant rate and it’s fine if you’re selling, say, $100 jackets. But the math gets worse the lower you go. On a $1 sale, you’re giving up a 33%. For payment processing alone.

I called PayPal, explained the sitch and then asked: “Do you have an alternate plan or rate for micropayments?”

No.

“Are you sure there’s no other deal you’ve got for handling micropayments.”

Yes.

“So people are just supposed to pay a third of their sales to PayPal.”

Yes.

Grrrr…

Off I go to PayLoadz, the company that handles the shopping cart end and ask if maybe they can gang up my sales and process them weekly, or monthly or when they reach some magic number. They wrote right back: “Oh, PayPal has a micropayment rate: 5% + $0.05. Here’s the link to sign up.”

So back I go to PayPal. “Why didn’t you tell me you had micropayments?”

PayPal: “Micropayments are only available on a Business Account. You have a Premier Account.”

Gah!

Of course all of this is by way of saying: Our new CD is almost here. Stay tuned!

See more like that one:

• The Bonehead of the Opera
• Sibling Revelry
• Mixed Reality Music
• No one will ever know
• Ten Reasons Why You Should Give My CD