donation services

Question

A friend came to me about a donation service on his website. We want to go as cheap as possible, and when I suggested paypal he said he wants to go an "independent" route --I think this means he doesn't want a gateway service, but I don't think that is possible without collecting the data and going old school with paper (please correct me!). There is another post that mentions ecommerce that I looked at. And from his list, pretty much all I need to take care of is the:

Justin Standard:

• Secure session for users
• Payment processing
  
  • what external systems do you interface with
  • what kinds of payments do you accept
  • what currencies do you accept

The first might be done for us with the third party service, but if there is a way to go "independent", then I will deal with that when it comes up.

It's a donation, so we are obviously going to want to maximize what we can accept. I saw a list of services online, but it looks god old. Some of the sites seem reputable, and I've been looking at them. But I'd really like to ask the community what services they've possibly used and been happy with or ones they've heard good things about.

Edit: I guess I should have mentioned this is non-profit so we want to avoid high fees, ie paypal --unless this is truly the best we could do, but I think that's doubtful.

Answer 1

I'd say to reconsider the approach. Many more people will be comfortable donating via Paypal or Amazon Honor System than through some means they've never heard of. You're asking them to give out their credit card information, and they're rightfully going to be cautious.

It's hard enough convincing people to donate to anything - I wouldn't want to add another obstacle. Any gains from keeping a higher percentage of donations could easily be outweighed by getting fewer donations.

Also, I imagine that if you roll your own, you're more liable for security breaches, but I am not a lawyer.

Answer 2

The charitable organization I volunteer with has been using Paypal for about 4 years now. Most donations are added onto a purchase, with only about 18% of the purchases paid by Paypal. The majority of people prefer to pay by cheque.

If it's a charity registered with Revenue Canada, CanadaHelps is an option. Google around and maybe you'll find something comparable for your country.

Answer 3

You are going to need a payment gateway of some description in order to process the credit card. PayPal is not a great option for these sorts of things, because they have relatively high fees, and they hold your money. A proper gateway drops it right in your merchant account.

I work for a company that does this sort of work for non-profits/charities and so on, but we don't allow others to program stuff and then use our payment gateway, for security reasons.

There's lots of options out there. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is authorize.net, which I've heard good things about.

Answer 4

Some good options for non profits are covered in this fundraiserhelp article.

Another interesting system is Gimme some candy which is only slightly related. It's similar to giving to charity at a store where they put a paper balloon or shoe or something on the wall for each donation.

Still, you might want to re-formulate your question so it is a programming question, otherwise it is likely to be closed.