Connect Your PayPal Account

Connect your PayPal account to EntryThingy

Connect your PayPal account once in your gallery preferences, and every paid call you create or edit will automatically use it to collect entry fees. There's no button code to copy, no PayPal account configuration, and no per-call setup beyond your fee amounts.

How to connect

1. Go to Preferences from your gallery admin menu.
2. Scroll to the Payments & Notifications section.
3. In the PayPal email address field, enter the email associated with your gallery's PayPal account (for example, payments@yourgallery.com  ).
4. Save your preferences.

That's it. EntryThingy will route entry-fee payments to that PayPal account on every call from now on.

What changes when you set up a paid call

Once your PayPal email is connected, the Entry Fees section of every call will show a green "PayPal connected" banner confirming the account in use. Instead of pasting a PayPal button code, you'll choose an Entry Fee Type and fill in a few structured fields.

Entry Fee Type is a dropdown with three choices:

• Free Entry — no fee. Picking this collapses the section; nothing else to configure.
• Paid Entry — collect fees through your connected PayPal account.
• Off-Platform Payment — artists submit on EntryThingy and contact you separately to pay. (How off-platform payments work.)

When you pick Paid Entry, you'll fill in:

• Base Entry Fee — the standard fee charged on every entry.
• Pricing options (a disclosure under the base fee) with two optional add-ons:
• Add per piece pricing — an additional amount charged for each piece in an entry, on top of the base fee.
• Offer different pricing tiers (e.g. members vs. non-members) — up to two dropdown options shown to artists at checkout (for example, "Member" at one price and "Non-member" at another). The artist picks one and the fee adjusts before they're sent to PayPal.

If you previously used PayPal's button generator to create member/non-member pricing in raw HTML, you can now configure the same tiers using Offer different pricing tiers — no HTML required.

What artists see

When an artist submits to one of your paid calls, they'll see a PayPal payment button right on the submission page. They can pay with PayPal, debit, or credit card without leaving EntryThingy. Once the payment clears, their entry is automatically marked as Submitted and you'll be notified by email.

Where the money goes

Payments go directly to your connected PayPal account. EntryThingy never holds your funds and you don't need to transfer anything from us — your PayPal balance reflects entry-fee payments as they're collected.

Frequently asked questions

Do my existing calls switch over automatically?

Yes. As soon as you connect your PayPal email, all of your paid calls — including ones you set up earlier with PayPal button code — start using the new flow on the next artist submission.

There's one thing worth checking: the new flow reads each call's fees from the Base Entry Fee and the Pricing options disclosure (per-piece pricing and pricing tiers), not from the button code you may have pasted in earlier. Open each existing paid call and confirm those fields are filled in correctly. If they're blank, artists may be charged $0 or the wrong amount.

What email address should I use?

Use the email associated with your gallery's PayPal account — the same one you'd log into PayPal with. It needs to be a confirmed email on a Business or Premier account so that PayPal can route payments to you.

Can I still use my old PayPal button code if I prefer?

Yes. If you've pasted PayPal button HTML into a call's submit page, that code continues to work. New calls you set up after connecting your PayPal account will use the new flow by default, but existing button-code calls aren't disrupted.

Why is this better than the old button code approach?

You only have to set up PayPal once instead of generating a new button for every call. Member pricing, per-piece fees, and other variations are all configured directly in EntryThingy. And there's nothing to enable or maintain inside your PayPal account — no IPN settings, no webhook URLs.

I don't see the "PayPal email address" field in my preferences.

The field is in the Payments & Notifications section of Preferences. If you don't see it, refresh the page or contact us at help@entrythingy.com — we'll get you set up.

Need help?

Email us at help@entrythingy.com if you'd like a hand connecting your PayPal account or migrating an existing call.