If you sell stuff on Bandcamp, and most of that stuff sells for $12 USD or less, then please do yourself and Lady Justice a favor by signing up for PayPal micropayments. Instead of their standard transaction fees, which work out to about 33 cents for a $1 payment and 45 cents for a $5 payment, you’ll part with only 10 cents on a $1 payment and 30 cents on a $5 payment.
After switching to micropayments, all items sold via that PayPal account (through Bandcamp or elsewhere) will use the new rate. That means that if, on some other site, you sell a lot of items priced higher than $12, a micropayments account may actually end up costing you more in transaction fees than a standard one. If that’s your situation, you might consider using two PayPal accounts, one with micropayments for Bandcamp sales and another with the standard rate for your non-Bandcamp, higher-priced transactions.
Switching to micropayments isn’t irreversible. You can pop back to the standard rate any time by contacting PayPal.
Update: PayPal’s micropayments page doesn’t work properly in Safari. You’ll need to use either Firefox or IE to sign up.
Hot damn! This is the best advice I have had all day. Thanks Ethan.
This website looks a lot like phishing. It’s not encrypted and doesn’t look anything like PayPal. This has rather worried me now. Can you guys check this out again?
It could definitely use some visual design love, Ben, but PayPal’s micropayments site is indeed legit. Do a search for “micropayments” on paypal.com and you’ll see that they link directly to it. They also point to it from their blog, here: https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2008/10/micropayments-pricing-for-merchants/. We’ve also had some bands quietly using it for the past few months.
This is brilliant, and I love it. I also love the GBP currency option you’ve added. But now we’ve got these, can we drop the 0.50 min rate? 0.50 GBP is a lot more than 0.50 USD, y’see.
I spent entirely too long trying to figure out how to do this before I realize the site is busted in Safari. Works in Firefox. (FYI)
Hmmm…I am beginning to suspect that PayPal does not share our enthusiasm for the micropayments rate. Thanks for the info Benjamin, post updated.
have signed up but wondering about it from here in australia as the transaction fees from sales on the regular system are about as low and sometimes lower than the micropayments option on my account. fyi 🙂
Ethan — this is great!
As Ben mentioned, any chance of reducing the minimum per-track rates within Bandcamp?
The 50-cent minimum for individual tracks made sense with the standard PayPal rates, but the micropayment option, an artist could offer eMusic-equivalent per-track prices. That is, you’d still net almost 19 cents on a 25-cent download sale.
Ben, David: thanks, the minimum set price is now .1 of your currency unit (so a dime, 10p, etc).
Here is a more legit looking site with the same info:
https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.html