As you continue to grow your audience and start taking commission work, you’ll need a way to get paid for your NSFW art commissions. PayPal is a popular payment aggregator, meaning you don’t need a merchant account/legal business to receive payments and withdraw money.

Despite its sneaky fees and quirks, PayPal is the easiest way to get paid if you have clients abroad. As you start building other sources of income, you can connect these to your PayPal as well.

In this article, you’ll learn the difference between personal and business accounts, how to get paid with invoices, and what to be careful of when using PayPal for NSFW art commissions.

This is part 2 of the “Making Money as an NSFW Artist” Course

Table of Contents

• PayPal and NSFW Artists
• Making Your Account: Personal vs Business
• How to Receive Payments
• Invoicing 101
• Paypal Quirks You Should Know About
  • Fees
  • Pending/Holding Funds
  • Withdrawing to Your Local Currency
• Ways to Withdraw Your Balance
• Conclusion

PayPal and NSFW Artists

PayPal’s isn’t known for being kind to NSFW creators. Their policy prohibits sexually oriented digital goods, including artworks. 

However, the risk is well worth it. From experience, PayPal is by far the easiest payment platform for both artists and customers. As we go through each aspect of using PayPal, I’ll point out what to be careful of.

This quora answer talks about the risk adult content poses for merchants. It’s a peek into the complexities of business, which is why I don’t really fault companies for not wanting NSFW creators on their platforms. What do you think?

Making Your Account: Personal vs Business

PayPal offers two types of accounts.

Personal accounts are attached to your full name and address. Whenever you receive money, the sender will see your details. Personal accounts don’t have any fee benefits over business accounts, so I suggest going for the latter for privacy. This article talks more about the benefits of using a business account.

A business account doesn’t require actual business documents, so you can earn even if doing NSFW as a hobbyist/sole proprietor.

If you don’t have a legal/incorporated business name, fill it up with whatever you call yourself (but keep it SFW!). I just named mine HBeats Art.

When asked for business type, select Individual/Sole Proprietorship, and give your social security number. If you have a website but post NSFW to it, do not link it.

If you don’t have a social security number, personal accounts don’t require SSN. You can always upgrade a personal into a business account later on, or make more than one account.

Once done, your PayPal account will be ready to send/receive payments!

How to Receive Payments

You can receive payments by

1. Letting your client “pay for an item or service”
2. Letting your client “send money to friends”
3. Making an invoice to send to your client.

Let’s say you were commissioned to make a $20 artwork:

The first option is available if your client has a PayPal account and selects “Paying for an item or service”. They can send you an amount, along with a note.

This is not the recommended way to get paid. Notice how the client is the one setting the price, so they might enter a wrong amount/purposely make it lower. Also, if they mention anything about commissioning NSFW art in the note, you’re screwed. Even something like “Thanks for the sexy artwork” might get you banned!

The second option “Sending to a friend” also means the amount is set by your client. Although there’s no seller fee for sending to a friend, you can get fined $2500 for avoiding PayPal seller fees. This method is not recommended at all.

Finally, you can make an invoice to send to your client. This is the best method, allowing you to make an invoice document where you set the payment amount and product details. This way, you’re sure nothing related to NSFW is mentioned.

Invoicing 101

PayPal invoices are great for working with international clients, and don’t require your customers to have a PayPal account.

Let’s learn how to fill in one. Head to https://www.paypal.com/invoice/create, or go to Send & Request > Send > Send an Invoice

Click Create to make a new invoice

Welcome to your first invoice! Let’s break down what you’ll find

1. Depending on how you price, you may want to choose a different template. I price commissions by amount, not per hour, so I keep it as is.
2. You can setup business info here, such as logo, company name and address. This will appear on the invoice document your client receives.
3. Put the email address of your client here
4. You might bill recurrently for some projects, but most of mine are one time payments.
   Rule of thumb for invoice numbers is to do them incrementally. I didn’t touch mine from the original 0001.
   I usually leave reference blank, and keep the due date as due on receipt.

5. Don’t forget to choose the agreed on currency if working with international clients
6. Enter the items sold for documentation. Keep it SFW, like “lineart commission” or “portrait art”, not “pinup” or “ecchi fanart”
7. I usually don’t allow partial payment, and allow clients to tip
8. Your client will see whatever you write here. I just write “Thank you for choosing my art!”
9. If you have terms for things like late payments, art licensing, etc, you can include them here

And you’re done! Click send, and your client will receive the invoice through email before paying.

PayPal Quirks You Should Know About

Fees

Great! You’ve got your commission payment, but.. why is it missing an amount?

Whenever you receive money from invoicing, PayPal takes a service cut. For the online international transaction below, there was a service fee of 4.4% + $0.30:

Since PayPal is easy to use, I don’t mind the fee. To manage the cost, you can include fees into your commission prices. For example, instead of pricing lineart at $50, you’d price at $60 to cover fees.

However, do not ask clients to pay for the fees in addition to your commission prices. That is surcharging, and can get you fined and banned according to PayPal’s policy.

You can use SaleCalc to calculate PayPal fee on a specific amount.

Pending/Holding Funds

If your account is new, PayPal holds incoming payments for at most 21 days. You need to “demonstrate a pattern of positive buyer-seller transactions” before payments are received instantly.

On my new PayPal account, I’ve accepted two payments so far. I don’t know if there’s a number of required transactions, so I’ll update this post with that number in the future.

Withdrawing to your local currency

PayPal allows you to charge and get paid in different currencies.

You can add different currencies in your Wallet. I have one for USD (international clients) and PHP (local currency).

PayPal has a sneaky conversion fee that can stack up if you convert currencies.

USD -> PHP	Exchange Rate (Optimal)	PayPal Rate
60 USD	PHP 2,899	PHP 2,807 (lose $1.9)
400 USD	PHP 19,330	PHP 18,715 (lose $12)

Even if you have a USD currency account but the bank is non-US, PayPal will still convert the withdrawn amount to your local currency. No escaping this one, unfortunately.

Some posts say you can link a USD currency account’s debit card to PayPal, then call PayPal to have them change the card’s currency to USD on their end. This supposedly allows you to withdraw USD to the card, with no conversion fees even if you aren’t from the US. I’m still going to try it out myself, but I’ll update the post if ever.

You can check PayPal conversion rates here.

Ways to Withdraw Your Balance

Though you can use your PayPal balance/digital wallet to pay for some online goods, you might want to withdraw it as cash.

Head to Wallet > Link a bank. You can only link a local or US bank.

PayPal does not charge for bank withdrawal if over a certain amount (don’t forget conversion rates though!). However, they charge for withdrawal to debit cards.

You can also withdraw your funds through:

• PayPal debit card for US residents.
• Local cash apps which might be partnered with PayPal

Conclusion

Despite its fees and policy against NSFW goods, PayPal remains the easiest way to get paid online. Just be careful not to mention NSFW keywords on your invoice, business details, or payment notes.

Despite fees and quirks, PayPal remains the easiest way to get paid online. Just be careful not to mention NSFW keywords on your invoice, business details, or payment notes! Click To Tweet

When billing a client, use invoices so that you can set the payment amount and the product details. It’s also more professional, and allows you to keep track of transactions.

Finally, always be aware of PayPal’s fees when receiving, converting, and withdrawing money. Again, you can use these tools to calculate fees:

• PayPal’s Service Fee on Transactions
• PayPal’s Conversion Rates

Now that you know how to charge for your work, read on to find out how to price commission work without guessing and wasting your time.