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Payment Methods

Lesson 6 from: Bookkeeping for Etsy Sellers

Lauren Venell

Payment Methods

Lesson 6 from: Bookkeeping for Etsy Sellers

Lauren Venell

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Lesson Info

6. Payment Methods

Lesson Info

Payment Methods

This is where you, uh, put in what payment methods you accept this is the section of the top um for direct check out this doesn't say direct check out anywhere payment methods you except you can accept credit cards, debit cards and etc gift cards and other international payment methods. Um I really wish they had this is called direct check out like they don't say that anywhere um your funds will be deposited to your checking account etcetera. Um I also take paypal I also take money orders which is really rare almost nobody pays that way um but you can choose what payment methods you except here and and set them up so here's some other payment options people, this is the address that, um the money gets sent to this is not a working email address, by the way. So if anybody tries to email me through this it's not going to work like I said, the sweetmeat shop was struck down in twenty thirteen so there are no sweetmeats email addresses anymore, but I still use it for sending receiving mone...

y from paypal. So I guess if you guys wanted to, like, send me money to that address through paypal that'll work, but you won't be able to contact me that way um and then there's money order, personal check or other um I'm not really sure what other would necessarily be, but I'd be interested to find out so why not? I will pay you in three goats for this plush meet pillow um I don't know I might take three goats all right and then you can set up um your currency pretty self explanatory um currency changes if you change it when you move for example can affect your direct uh check out and you're etc bill a little bit um because there are conversions um and then you have this little option here that says changing your shop listing currency you can change it at any time um and you don't have to pick the currency for the country where you live if you live in france but you want to take things in dollars because it's easier for let's say most of your buyers air in the u s and it's easier for them to see price is in dollars as opposed to euros that's fine, but customers can also set up what currency they see listings in so that's not something that you you have to put together um in order for your customers to get the right price is so if I'm shopping in the u s I can buy from people around the world and all because I've set it up that prices show up in dollars for me if you're located in thailand and you sell mostly the u s customers you do not have to have your currency be u s dollars um but if you want to you can sure why not? Um and then they have this option for price conversion preference so if people are let's say I am shopping on a shop page where the seller is located in thailand um if that person has chosen to round prices than everything will appear in whole dollar amounts um as opposed to you know, when it gets converted from like but teo uh dollars maybe the price that they've chosen is actually like fifteen dollars and thirty seven cents um that might look weird to certain buyers or maybe that's just not in line with your marketing so you can choose to have it then um rounded up to, uh rounded up around it down to the nearest dollar mountains so it looks sort of clean and consistent throughout um I believe there are twenty one different currencies that you can choose from a look thai baht is one of them. I don't even know that. Okay, great, good guess any questions about this before we move on two setting sales tax? Yes, I was wondering if you know you can you list individual products that have different payment options like maybe I would take a money order for this product that callous eighty dollars but now you know five dollars or something no no unfortunately not um yeah I mean what you could do is you could check that other payment option if you wanted teo and then that means that the buyers have to contact you before they pay you for anything at which point you could then tell them um I will take explain you know this method or this method for this particular item so if you check the other box um you know, that leaves it sort of open ended and requires a communication between you and your buyer about what the payment method is and how they're going to get it to you um it doesn't mean then that they can autumn if you leave money order unchecked and you check other than you have some control over that conversation on and of course I would also then put it in the listing itself like I accept this in this for you know this particular item um so on and so forth um I don't know that I would necessarily recommend that if he could avoid it just because it could be kind of confusing to people especially if what if they order one of the items that you can pay through direct check out and then then the order in the same at the same time they buy something else that you can only pay you know pay for with whatever method um then what can they pay what can they use to pay for the whole order um so that could get a little tricky but uh if that's something that you really feel like you need to dio um you could choose other and then it's a conversation between you and the buyer that's a good question for like just larger like I've seen people list something for like a general commission and so it's like I'll paint you a pet portrait on dh it's ah as you know two hundred dollars right and maybe you'd want to do like two different payments or you know, break it down for the other person if they if it's a much larger um payment so if if you wanted to do something like that where you broke down the payment for a commission piece for example and you wanted to put a listing up that says general commission two hundred dollars pet portrait um if the buyer has contacted you and said can I pay you in installments or if you want to offer that to them um what you could do in that instance is create another private listing for them and you could create one listing for the first half um that has no shipping associated with it right? And then another listing for the second half that has the shipping charges built in um and that way they could pay you separately for those things, okay or you could choose the other and you could just send them a pay pal bill for the deposit and then build them for the rest of it later yeah that's a good question um other other questions coming in yet about what I have covered so far. Okay, great starting this let's move on to sales tax I think we will be able to finish on time we're going to roll right through this uh setting etc sales tax uh so this is this gets a little bit complicated so I'm going to try and go through this and they'll probably go through this again um sales tax is on ly here uh in the u s right? So on dh we'll talk about more about what sales tax is versus that or g s t what the difference is there uh so you can set your sales tax rates for buyers by specific zip code by zip code range or by state or by a combination of those things. So what I tend to do because I don't want to enter and here in california we have to pay sales tax based on district based on your county right in there about sixty different district's and they all have their own sales tax rate and when you send in a sales tax return usually in july it's usually when they're do uh you have to break out all of your sales by district right bye into those sixty different categories track how many buyers you had in this county versus this county versus this county and then how much tax you owe you know when I was in going like like twenty cents to this district and like five cents to this district and two dollars to this other district and it's ridiculous but what you gonna do um so because I don't want to take the time to enter in all sixty of the zip codes because most of them are not where my buyers are located anyway the chances of me having a sale um in yolo county are very slim I probably have only one or two a year they're um I'm not going to figure out what the zip codes are for yolo county and enter them in here it's just not worth my time because again I'm going to end up sending the like forty cents uh so what I like to do is I like to take a zip code range for all of the and again this is by district because each district has multiple zip codes in it right in san francisco we have the nine for one blank blank blank zip codes um I like to take a zip code range for the three counties where I do the most in state business and set up the tax rate for those and then have an average tax rate for the rest of california so nine o two that's the l a area. So a lot of stuff to their l a tax rate nine percent uh nine four zero that's the east bay san francisco bay area, but the other side of the bay? Um, eight and three quarters percent tax rate here in san francisco eight and a half. So those are the three counties where I would do at least ninety percent of my in state, etc sales so for me, it's worth it to pull out those zip code ranges and figure out what the sales tax rate is for that, um, and then the rest of the state I put in this eight and a quarter percent other districts may have seven and a half percent seven and three quarters. They may have nine and a quarter percent. And so for those other counties, I'm not collecting the correct sales tax rate, but sometimes I'm collecting a couple cents too much. Sometimes I'm collecting a couple of cents too little, but I'm willing to adjust that later, and I'm will if I have to. Oh, my god forbid, I'm willing to eat a dollar or two in sales tax that I should have collected, but I didn't, um, in order to not have to sit here that's worth a dollar or two dollars to me to not have to sit here and put in the zip code range for every district in california, right? Um if you're located in oregon or montana or alaska or new hampshire, you don't have sales tax you not to worry about any of this. Congratulations who you can like, take a coffee break right now. Um, but for the other forty six states in the u s who have etc shops um this is where you'll set that stuff up. Some people get confused about this and they think that it's additional because this is how it looks on a sales tax return um, like the california rate, if you would put in seven or seven and a quarter and then added like another one percent here or another three quarters of a percent in order to get up to that rate um then you're going to end up charging your customers one percent sales tax, right? So this is not cumulative, but what it does is it takes a preference. So if there is and this does happen, sometimes there are towns or cities with in a district that also have a separate tax rate because they had some ballot initiative that went through, so they added a quarter percent for something, so this goes sort of in backwards order of preference it go zip codes venza code range then state so if I were to choose a particular city or town ship that has its own weird tax rate let's just invent you know, um surfin yusa is a city in california and they have a tax rate of, you know, nine and a quarter percent and I sell a ton of these things to customers in surfing musa um I could put that under here in zip codes and then if I get a customer from surfing yusa it's going to use that particular zip code to calculate the sales tax rate if my buyer is not in surfin usa but they're in one of these zip codes, it will use the appropriate rate here, and if they're not in any of the zip codes or in the town of surfing yusa, then it will charge the state rate um if they're not in state, they don't get charge sales tax because sell sex only applies to sales in state, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that, um in a in the next segment, actually, but I just wanted to show you this for now um ok, last thing I'm going to say about sales tax before I start taking questions because we're getting to the end of our segment here uh you can also add tax rates this is not technically sales tax now because in canada they have gsd goods and services tax in most other countries they have that look it even says gsd this is where you would add the tax rate for other countries so you can add it by province in canada currently you can add it by country for all of these other countries that etc currently supports so um now I don't know if betsy and I can look this up during the break I don't know if it's he will add the vat rate for a digital product yet this law sort of came into effect really fast so nobody is on the ball as faras compliancy because they just didn't have enough time um but we'll take a look at that and see if you can add a tax rate for buyers in the you for that visual product thing because this is where you would do that okay are there any questions about the sales tax we went through this pretty fast we'll go into your eye sales tax to shipping when you're on etc s so that's a good question you so yeah I didn't talk about this yet you can apply the rate to shipping or not here's what's tricky again we'll talk about this week talk about sales tax in more general sense is and how you track that um in the next segment but um sales tax applies to any physical good that ends up in state with a retail buyer uh so you're shipping includes both your shipping and you're handling and your postage so postage because it's not a physical good really you're paying the post the post office a service fee to take this package from one location to another postage is not sales taxable um those shipping supplies that enveloped the box the bubble wrap that is taxable so you're rolling both a taxable and a nontaxable item in tow one charge um which is why you have this option here um I would tend to default to the yes on that because typically the postage is not like the biggest part of my shipping charge um and later on if you want to you can sort of pull that out separately when you do your sales tax return you can list the postage that you had is like a nontaxable item um but yes. So in general I would probably default to applying the rate to shipping unless you know that the bulk of that is posted like if you ship everything in just a regular little envelope that you like slap a stamp on and it goes in the mail and you have very little handling costs you have very little in the way of actual shipping materials and what the majority of your shipping cost contains is that postage um then, you know, you don't need to apply the rate to shipping otherwise, if in my case, because I'm sending sort of larger physical products, uh, you're charging, uh, mostly for those shipping materials and your time putting it all together. Then I would say yes, include that shipping in your sales tax. That's a good question. I'm glad somebody pointed that out on dh. Does its he apply their percentage, their feast to shipping and handling a cz? Well, the short answer is no.

Class Materials

bonus material

Product Profit Calculator
Simple Ledger for Creatives
Crafters Sample Chart of Accounts
Etsy® Bookkeeping Resources
Sample Etsy® Shop Policies

bonus material

The Etsy® Sales Chain - A Comparison.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Ssparrowinflight
 

This is a meaty course that has you at a run from the moment it opens. If you are like me and you have been wanting to start a handmade business using Etsy, this will be a great course for you! What I like best about this course is the information that is given is not from a sterile corporate perspective. She has been down in the handmade trenches from the very beginning of Etsy so she has seen all the changes. Lauren also shares the realities of business and shows you how to calculate the actual costs that go into your products. She gives you the knowledge and resources to know how to set up your book keeping as it relates to Etsy. The only negative about the course is that there is literally not enough time to cover EVERYTHING that you might run into for your personal situation concerning Etsy, but she does give you enough information and resources through her Extras that gets you in the right direction. I would sincerely recommend this class!

a Creativelive Student
 

This was so helpful! I have been wondering about so many things the last few months since I opened my shop on Etsy and have found some information, but often it is encrypted in such technical terms that it feels so unclear. I felt like Lauren answered so many of my questions (as well as questions I didn't know that I had) with such clear, easy-to-understand ways! I can't recommend this course enough! Thank you Lauren for making complex processes of bookkeeping seem reasonable and doable. Thank you for sharing experiences to back-up the information that you shared. This was wonderful!

a Creativelive Student
 

This course has a lot of helpful information, but I do caution that there isn't really enough time to get it all down if you are watching the livestream. Also, quite a bit of time is spent talking about VAT rules which are out of date, and much easier to deal with now.

Student Work

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