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Not every business has a set price for every service and not every brand or creative has a reliable cash flow. Sliding scale payments, donations, and digital tip jars with pay-what-you-want pricing are just a few alternative payment options to explore.
Virtual tip jars and other payment methods can be useful for many types of small businesses and entrepreneurs, including:
Content creators who want to get support directly from their followers or try fundraising for a new project.
Food and beverage businesses that want to make tipping servers or bartenders easier.
Service providers who want to make their services accessible to more clients.
1. Choose your alternative payment options
You can use more than one payment option for your business, depending on your goals and needs.
Online tip jars are especially useful for people in creative industries or who would normally accept tips for their work, like artists.
Donations and crowdfunding are great for multiple use cases, from raising money for a new project to fundraising for a cause.
Sliding-scale payments are an alternative payment method where customers are charged based on what they can afford.
With each payment method, you can offer a few suggested payment amounts and a pay-what-you-wish option.
Pay-what-you-want options like the above also create the flexibility for clients to pay you more than your suggested minimum. Even if only five clients per week pay $10 over your pricing minimum, that’s still additional revenue of $200 a month, or $2,400 a year.
Once you make the switch, the user experience for your clients is still clean, streamlined, and easy to understand.
2. Pick your payment processor
To offer an online tip jar or collect any other payments, you’ll need to connect your business to a payment service provider.
You can work with one or more providers, depending on what payment methods you want to accept. For example, you can accept tips by connecting a processor like Stripe or Square to your appointment booking platform. Or you can accept tips with tools like Venmo, Cash App, or PayPal.
A reputable payment processor ensures that your customers can pay you securely by credit card or by using a tap-to-pay option on their phone.
Note: In Acuity Scheduling, it’s not possible to create a virtual tip jar if you’ve enabled the pay-what-you-want feature.
Read our guide to accepting donations on your website
3. Choose your minimum prices
Before you start sharing your tipping platform or add a sliding scale or donation-based option, take a second to figure out the best suggested pricing options.
If you’re selling or sharing a product and just want to collect additional tips, set a few suggested tip options either based on a percentage of the total price or in dollar amounts. For example, a content creator might not sell any products but set suggested tips of $2, $5, or $10. You can also add a choose-what-you-pay option. A similar method applies to donations and crowdfunding.
For service sellers, you’ll want to base your tip or sliding scale option on the regular price of your services. If you already set up pricing for services in Acuity, those automatically become your minimum prices. Not setting a minimum price sets your minimum at $0.
Establish a baseline minimum that supports your clients. But be mindful of your bottom line so that you’re earning enough between sliding scale appointments and regular-priced services to stay in business.
4. Get the word out
Once your pricing options are set up, find ways to share your new tip jar or alternative payment option. Add the payment options to your website and consider mentioning the new options in a future newsletter or social media update.
When thinking about the best way to promote and encourage alternative payment choices, think about how and where your followers or customers tend to interact with you. If you sell in person, you can create a custom QR code so customers can easily scan and tip you via their payment platform of choice.
If you want to accept tips or fundraise via social media, you can do that with a Bio Site. A Bio Site is a customizable link-in-bio page where you can share all of your most important links in one place. Keeping your tip or crowdfunding link on your Bio Site means your followers can always find it.
For service sellers, you can share the new option with your clients, then link out to your booking page so they can explore their choices right away.
The key is to make tipping or choosing a service simple so that followers and customers are more likely to complete the process.
Other ways to offer flexible pricing
A digital tip jar or sliding scale pricing isn’t the only way to offer alternative pricing to your customers. You may also find it useful to see if add-ons, upsells, and coupons bring in new business or encourage repeat business.
For example, a yoga studio may offer a pay-what-you-want class with a minimum price of $15 to all new students. At the same time, the studio can send coupon codes to past clients, encouraging them to attend at an even further discounted rate. Not only is this kind to your clients, but it could help generate repeat business.
If you’re a content creator, you could offer a free download for followers who tip or donate over a certain amount, effectively upselling them with the bonus.
Ready to add payment options to your website?
This post was updated on June 23, 2023.