When setting up your organization, Arta provides flexible payment options: Terms or Prepayment to support a variety of business needs and use cases. In this section, we provide an overview and dive into the workflow of each option.

Prepayment

Clients or their customers pay Arta directly for the shipping costs.

Clients may opt to have their customers pay Arta directly for shipping costs:

• In order to launch an integration sooner.
• If they’re integrating Arta Booking post-checkout.

If booking a shipment via the API, Arta will provide a payment URL in the response, which you can expose to your customers to complete the booking process.

If booking a shipment through the Client Dashboard or Arta Booking, users will be prompted to pay once the shipment has been booked.

Terms

Clients wishing to collect the cost of shipping directly from their customers and invoiced by Arta can apply for Terms.

Clients may prefer to be invoiced by Arta for shipping costs if they’re:

• Integrating Arta into a back-office platform for internal teams to book shipments
• Integrating Arta into an ecommerce checkout workflow and wish to create a consolidated checkout process where customers pay for their goods and shipping with a single transaction.

Clients who handle the presentation of Arta’s costs and choose to be invoiced by Arta can:

• Add a markup on shipping costs to open a new revenue stream
• Discount or subsidize shipping costs as a promotion
• Distribute shipping costs between sellers and buyers. For example, sellers pay for packing materials and labor, buyers pay for transportation and other white glove services.

Once booked, Arta begins the fulfillment process immediately for open terms clients and invoices once the shipment is in transit.  If a client is Terms, our hosted UIs such as Arta Tracking and Notifications do not reveal Arta’s costs to your customers.

While Arta guarantees our pricing, address changes or booking additional services may increase the cost of a shipment after it’s been booked.  Arta’s integration team will work with you to determine whether you’d prefer to be invoiced for these charges as well or whether you prefer we collect money for additional charges directly from the responsible party.

Learn how to add payment methods and manage your fulfillment Billing here.