Hello!
We are revamping our artist merchandise sales and I am interested to hear how you handle this at your universities. In the past, when the artist would like help from us selling their merch we have been cash only. We are looking at moving to credit cards only.
We currently run our food and beverage concessions sales through Tessitura and so the first question my team had for me was, can we run artist merchandise sales through it too. I am very much against this because it would be a lot of work to set up for each performance. However, I think there might be a way to set it up with CD 1, CD 2, etc, and use editable price types but still a lot of setup.
We are also looking at purchasing a stand-alone card reader to run the cards through. We could then back-enter the sales into Tessitura the next day when there is more time. We are running into roadblocks with our university's accounting and IT departments but I think they will approve a device as long as it has its own data plan and does not use university wi-fi. We have been told that venmo, paypal, square are not options at this time but the university will revisit these policies soon. If the artist sells their own merch they are allowed to use venmo, square, etc as long as they use their own data plan and not university wi-fi. Has anyone gotten approval from your university to use paypal or venmo?
We are not looking at purchasing another POS like Clover.
The second part of this is settling up with the artists on the night of the event. Right now we have to cut them a check for their cut and mail it to them which is not ideal. I was hoping that we could use paypal for this but accounting says we are not allowed to set up our own paypal account.
To summarize, the main two questions I have are: How are you running credit cards for artist merchandise? How are you then settling up with the artist on the night of the performance?
Thanks in advance!
Hi Jessie,
I agree that this sounds like a lot of work and finagling! Knowing university finance systems, I would say night-of settlement is probably going to be impossible given the restrictions your controllers will have (it's always so fun and exciting trying to pay people, isn't it?).
We use a separate POS for credit card and Cash for our merch sales at our main campus venue. The venue staff handles the sales with a negotiated commission, or there is a base commission for the artist selling on their own that the artist owes the venue.
Our university (University of Colorado) will not let us use paypal or venmo for PCI compliance reasons. As a large, multi-campus university, we're in a higher tier of PCI compliance that makes it challenging to add new third party processors, though. It does not look like that reality will change for us anytime soon.
Can I ask where the pressure to move to Credit Card only is coming from, and also if selling artist merch is a significant benefit to your organization? If I were dealing with the issue, I would ask the person negotiating my contracts to stipulate "Merch is either artist sells or no merch" and just keep it out of your campus system. That said, I don't know if assisting with merch is a major money-maker for you.
Hi Andrew!
Thank you so much for your response! The pressure to move to credit card only is coming from our new ED. We use students to staff our artist merchandise table and there is some concern with the students handling the cash. Also, most patrons no longer bring cash with them. Selling artist merchandise is not a significant benefit to our organization. We rarely make much money on it at all but we see it as a benefit for the artist and it is just a service that we offer if they don't have someone to sell. We have considered adding a clause to contracts that stipulates merch is either artist sells or no merch.