Fitness creators it’s time to level up from Venmo
“Leave your email in the payment description with double twist backflip emoji so I can send you the link!” 😜
Still using Venmo or a personal money transfer app? It’s worth the time to think about using a business solution for a few reasons…
The shift to virtual was overnight. And for many fitness creators that meant finding a way to get paid ASAP. That likely meant using existing P2P (person-to-person) apps like Venmo / Zelle in the US or something like Paypal. Problem solved — no setup, no admin, no worries!
Well the reality is that there are many limitations in using P2P money transfer apps — some legal and some administrative— that comes with it.
If you’re looking to seriously create a business as a fitness creator it’s worth the investment to get payments humming professionally and easily so you can grow and scale.
What’s wrong with a P2P payment platform — seems to work fine for me?
P2P payment apps are amazing! Remember the days when you had to remember to transfer money to your friends or family because you couldn’t split the bill at the restaurant? These platforms solved that — personal and occasional transfers between friends and family.
Using these P2P platforms for your business is a little tricky and potentially breaches their terms of use. As an example, Venmo specifically states that the use of the platform for business purposes is not allowed (see here).
Venmo may NOT otherwise be used to receive business, commercial or merchant transactions, meaning you CANNOT use Venmo to accept payment from (or send payment to) another user for a good or service.
P2P platforms are designed for ease. They’re not designed to handle the intricacies of business.
While it’s not every day that this might happen, your business as a fitness creator needs protections for you as a the “seller” and your client as the “buyer” in the event anything goes wrong (e.g. who hasn’t accidentally dropped the hyphen in your friends Venmo handle and paid the wrong person 🙋♂️)
The other challenge is the admin pain! Manually checking and cross checking the payment app with your bookings to make sure everyone’s settled up and ready to be trained — painful! Or worse indirectly asking clients to take some of the admin load with instructions like this: “Leave your email in the payment description with double twist backflip emoji so I can send you the link!” 😜. We’ve all seen and likely done it!
If you’re serious about becoming a fitness creator, it’s worth using a professional business payment solution! You’ll be surprised at just how easy it is to set up and use!
I’m not big enough for a business payment solution — yes you totally are! And it’s takes 2 mins to setup!
Business payment solution. A lot of fitness creators we’ve spoken to hear this and immediately think a business payment solution is some serious, highly complex financial platform that isn’t designed for them. But that’s not the case at all.
You may already be familiar with the name, but Stripe is an incredibly easy to use and sleek payment platform built for businesses of all sizes (…even their website is cool!).
They’re one of the largest providers in the world, with best-in-class security and compliance to give you and your clients complete peace of mind with an amazingly simple experience. They collect a small fee for credit card processing (pricing here) but for the small percentage that they collect it unlocks an endless opportunity to grow your business when coupled with a platform like onPodio (drop-ins, memberships, class packages, etc!)
So if you’re still running your business via P2P payments it might be worth thinking about getting setup with a professional solution like Stripe.
onPodio is a platform for fitness creators to build their business by automating class bookings, scheduling, payments, transaction emails and much more. Check us out here at onPodio.com!
