Topping up your balance, spending it at checkout, and reading your credit history.
Account credit is money you have put onto Artmire in advance. It sits on your account until you spend it on a purchase, and Account Credit in your account shows the balance and everything that has moved in or out of it.
Top Up on that page opens the same three-step flow as a purchase: enter the amount and any note for your own records, review it, then pay by card through Stripe. Once the payment clears, the balance goes up and the top-up appears in your history.
A top-up is charged in your account's currency, and your balance is a single figure in that currency. When you spend it on an item priced in a different one, the amount is converted at that point.
At checkout on a single item, tick Use TopUp Credit. Your credit no longer has to cover the whole order: whatever it does not cover is charged to your card in the same payment. Step 2 shows the split — the total, the credit applied, and the amount left to pay — before you enter a card.
Occasionally a little less than your whole balance is used. Card payments cannot be taken below about €0.50, so if your credit would leave less than that to charge, slightly less credit is applied and the few remaining cents stay on your account for next time. The purchase still goes through — you are never blocked for being a few cents short.
Credit still cannot be used on a shopping cart payment. A cart group is paid by card only. To spend credit on something in your cart, remove it from the cart and buy it on its own with Buy Item.
Your credit leaves your balance when you reach the payment step, not when you finally pay. So if you go as far as the payment step and then stop, your balance will read lower and the order is holding the difference.
You are not left guessing where it went. The order says so under Orders, and going back into that checkout shows the credit ticked and held. To get it back, delete the unpaid order — the credit returns to your balance immediately, and both movements appear in your credit history. Paying the order, or deleting it, are the only two things that release it.
Every movement is listed, newest first, showing what it related to, whether it was money in or out, the amount and the date. A top-up is recorded as Income; paying for an item with credit is recorded as Expense, against that item's title.
Above the list you can filter by Direction — All, Income or Expense — and by a date range, then clear the filters again. The list is paginated, with the total count shown.
On a phone each line keeps the direction, the amount and the date. The item title and the action behind the movement are on the wider screen only — a credit line there is a record of money moving, and the purchase itself is in Orders.
It is not required for anything. Every item on Artmire can be bought by card without ever touching credit.
There is no button to withdraw credit back to your card — once topped up, it is spent on Artmire. Only add what you expect to use. If you have topped up by mistake, write to us rather than leaving it: we would rather sort it out than have money sitting on an account you did not mean to fund.
If a purchase is refunded, how the money comes back depends on how you paid — a card payment is returned by the seller through the arrangement in their Returns & Exchanges policy. Read that policy on the item page before buying, since each seller writes their own.