Secure web donations.

Posted by luaphluaph PM | on Fri, 14/08/2009 - 14:14 257 5 comments | report

I work for a charity, and currently we do not have the facility to accept donations through our website - we desperately need to introduce this feature.

We want something that is more 'branded' and professional looking than Paypal, but naturally also want something that is not going to cost the earth.

I've been looking online and am very confused! The best option may be to tie in the online payments with a replacement for our system for accepting card payments on site - eg Cardnet or Streamline. Alternatively we could introduce something such as PSP and keep this separate from other systems.

Does anybody have any experience of setting up such an online system, and if so where are the pitfalls and unexpected benefits, and does your system work as expected?

Thanks for your help, Paul.

Comments

What's wrong with Paypal

Gentoo | Tue, 08/09/2009 - 21:23 | Permalink

There are several options, but I was slightly through off course by your suggestion that paypal isn't sufficiently professional - it's in very common use (BTW I don't have shares in the company...)

Paypal (despite your reticence it's widely used on charitable objective website, widely recognised)

The disadvantages with this (personal experience) is that you need to take care over each step because it's a PITA to unpick afterwards

google checkout

no experience

justgiving.com (credit cards only)

usually for people doing a marathon or mountain climbing thingy, very easy to set up,giftaid embedded

All of these options will take a turn (quite a few percentage points) for running the operation, but someone's got to pay for it

Then of course there's plain publish your BACS details, which would be free to both parties, easy to set up easy to use

PayPal is OK - or use your Merchant account

DuaneJAckson | Tue, 08/09/2009 - 21:32 | Permalink

I agree, there's no shame in using PayPal.

I *think* that you could have a branded interface to PayPal if you have a PayPal "Pro" account.

Am I right in thinking you already have a merhcant account? If so, you could get an account with a "payment gateway" like IridiumCorp.

You then need a developer to spend an hour or so creating a form on your site that connects to the payment gateway to process the payment which then gets put in your merchant account.

Sage have a payment processor, SagePay, but you may want to avoid them considering the ongoing problems they're having.

Is Paypal unprofessional ?

naomi2000 | Tue, 15/09/2009 - 16:54 | Permalink

I wouldn't think it was unprofessional for a charity to take Paypal donations at all - it's my preferred method of making online payment. I am quite nervous about giving credit card details over the web, particularly to small organisations which may not have the resources to keep my details safe .

Lots of organisations which appear to take web based payment don't actually do so and put the payments through manually afterwards using a physical terminal.

What would impress me would be the ability to do my gift aid declaration on the charity's website when making my payment and be able to easily download a copy for my personal files.