SUCCESS STORY
ARTSTATION

Trolley provides ArtStation with a massive competitive advantage

A few hours
from kickoff to integration of the Trolley recipient widget.
100+ countries
& a multitude of language and currency requirements for ArtStation's artists.
Competitive advantage
by sending payouts via direct deposit globally, in local currencies.
ARTSTATION
Company Info
Website
www.artstation.com
Industry
Digital Media, Gaming
HQ Location
Montreal, Canada
Customer Since
2018
Recipients
Creators, Artists
Payout Countries
Global

ArtStation (part of the Epic Games family) is the leading showcase platform for artists and designers in the games, film, media, and entertainment industry. From the beginning, ArtStation has been a place for these artists to showcase their work, discover other artists, and stay inspired. In 2018, ArtStation launched a marketplace to allow its users to sell their art and turned to Trolley to facilitate the payouts to artists for their art purchased on the ArtStation marketplace.

The challenge

When planning to build their marketplace, ArtStation knew that paying their artists would be a challenging task. Their artists are located around the world (100+ countries), speak many languages, and have bank accounts in many currencies. ArtStation needed a solution that would make it easy for any one of them to earn a fair commission on their hard work.

In addition to currency, geographic, and language challenges, ArtStation also wanted to offer their artists the option of both PayPal or direct deposit payouts. However, they did not want these options to add unnecessary levels of complexity.
Leo from ArtStation

Trolley helped us launch our new marketplace for our global artist community in record time.

Thanks to Trolley, we were able to offer superior payouts than our competitors right out of the gate.

Leonard Teo, Sr Director, Epic Games I Former CEO & Founder, ArtStation

The solution

After choosing to work with Trolley and institute the white-label Recipient Widget (iFrame), it was only a few hours before they had Trolley working as intended in their test environment.

By embedding the iFrame code, they were able to adjust the colors to match their brand and pass the logged-in artist's language preference to collect the artist's banking details or PayPal details in the language of their choice.

With Trolley, we don't have to worry about things like security. After dropping in the widget, artists can just enter all their payout information, and [we can easily) pay them. It's so simple; we couldn't believe it.

ArtStation used Trolley's RESTful API (and Javascript SDK) in conjunction with their own platform to power streamlined payouts. Their platform performs the business logic to determine how much is owed to a given artist and enforces any rules/milestones a purchase needs to hit before an artist should be paid out.

Once those milestones are reached, ArtStartion simply creates a payment in Trolley referencing their own internal user IDs (saved in Trolley's referenceld field), linked to payment details for that exact artist. Then Trolley processes the payment for ArtStation.

The result

Once Trolley was integrated, Teo and the ArtStation team were confident they made the right choice:

"Trolley gave us a massive competitive advantage. Out the gate, we're able to send payouts via direct deposit to our users globally, in local currency. We've had users compare us to competing platforms, saying that we leapfrogged them just because of this.

It's really like magic. Once sellers enter their payout information, a single API call can just send money direct to their bank accounts across the world.

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