May 26
Hi everyone, hope you're doing well! Quite a few updates to share, been relatively busy.
This is in two sections: the Gumroad alternative part of the site, and the art/commission portfolio part.
Gumroad alternative section
After digging pretty deep into Stripe's documentation, unfortunately the "gumroad alternative" part of ArtCentral is going on hold for now. There's two reasons for this:
- Cross-border payouts, which are needed to make this work (i.e. paying artists in countries other than my own their part of the sales) is a US-only feature for some reason, something that's hidden pretty far into Stripe's documentation. Technically, it's possible to pay out artists without doing this, but only by directly paying them at the point of sale - and if I do that, it becomes the artist who is liable for sales tax, disputes, etc and not my platform, which is something most artists do not want and that I want to avoid as well. In addition it would mean no ability to negotiate better payment fees per transaction, since the artist is technically the one doing the transacting in that scenario.
- Payouts are prohibitively expensive on other platforms, and even on Stripe it's not cheap and would add at *least* 2.25% on top of the other planned fees, as it's quietly noted in their documentation that only their paid per-seller-account options allow you to pay out across borders (£2 per active account, plus 0.25% + 10p for each payout to it). I'd have to ask them about tailored pricing for a specific business need as they do mention such things - something with a higher payout % but less monthly fees - but there's no guarantee that would get anywhere, especially for a startup, and without the US-only problem being solved it won't matter anyway. Annoying that their standard accounts don't offer that feature.
Still, that situation may change in future, I'm not sure. It does mean I'd have to (at least initially) charge a higher fee than the 3.5% or so I was hoping to charge - probably 5.75%, but that's something to think about later when it actually becomes possible to do this. If I find the energy I might inquire with WorldPay (a UK payment provider) what their offerings are, as they're a bit quiet about prices in public, but we'll see. Regardless it's on ice for now, but I'll continue to do a bit of research here and there in the meantime.
There's always the possibility of setting up in the US, but that's both expensive and difficult so it will take a lot of research to find out if that's plausible financially etc.
Art website / commission portfolio section
Outside of the above, I've been continuing development of the art website/commission portfolio section of the site. It's something interesting to do, and that part can work on its own in any case, so I might as well. I don't know when it will be ready though.
I did some experimentation with React.js to find out if it could be useful in helping structure the interface for the site, but it's not suitable. It was interesting to learn, but the only benefits it can bring are for huge projects with very complex UIs, which isn't something I need. I wrote a brief article about React and what projects it seems suited for on Medium. https://medium.com/p/e85d21b68158
I've made a fair bit of progress on the site's frontend. I'm currently working on the layout for the gallery pages; I'd still like to aim for something similar to DeviantArt's system for a nice clear image layout. I'm getting there, but before I finalise that I've been figuring out how best to scale down images for web viewing (it's not quite as simple as just "setting it to be smaller"). I also had some work to do to get uploads to work correctly in a nice smooth manner, but that's all done now.
With luck I'll be able to show some decent polished stuff in a few weeks. You can see a very un-polished preview of the artwork submission page here: https://i.imgur.com/N5V8gke.png. Still some layouts to do and other things for that one, but the text editor, upload functions and all the other functional parts are working correctly. A bunch of other pages are partially done, and the navbar works as intended.
Bonus points if you recognise the profile picture in the navigation bar!