I’m looking to add a donation page for a church website. As I understand things, if I use a stack like Cartloom (from @nickcates), I can get a free plan that charges a 2% service fee per transaction. (Or is there a non-profit option with a lower fee?)
What alternatives might there be for someone looking to receive donations online, rather than, for example, selling items?
PayPal, for example, has a non-profit setup where there are no monthly fees, but it’s a 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction, which looks to be more than Cartloom even without a nonprofit plan.
Cartloom is a service that folks use IN ADDITION to a payment processor like PayPal.
There are many moving pieces to the online payment thing. And each different service collects their percentage. It’s annoying, but there it is.
Credit cards
The credit card companies will charge a small percentage. It will vary depending on your monthly throughput.
Exchange fees
If you’re collecting money internationally you’ll usually have to pay a surcharge for changing currencies.
Other payment mechanisms
PayPal, Stripe, and Square are all payment processors – they take care of the above two things – and then add there own online payment mechanisms too (.e.g. PayPal). and charge another small fee.
When you see the 2.2% + 30¢ – it’s for that stuff above. And it’s also a minimum. It will be significantly more if you collect > $100 from a foreign country on an amex card (large numbers, foreign exchange, and some cards have higher surcharges)
But integrating PayPal/Stripe/Square (or all three) onto your site in a secure way is really really really hard to do. That’s where CartLoom (and other similar services like eJunkie come in). The handle the secure forms, collect and store the customer info, send receipts, calculate taxes, etc.
What we do at YourHead Software:
We use Cartloom to collect customer info.
We collect money through PayPal and Stripe.
This system has been humming along pretty nicely for since 2009 (i think – it’s been so long i’m actually not sure if it’s been 6 or 7 years – but a long time).
So if I want to implement a donate page for a nonprofit, I’ll need to first sign up for something equivalent to Square or PayPal, and then find someway to implement that into the website. Cartloom would be one way to do that second task, but wouldn’t the widgets from Square or PayPal also do that?
And if I did decide to do both Square/PayPal and something like Cartloom, I’m looking at the Square/Paypal fee plus the Cartloom fee?
I have been trying to get my donation/funding page up for a month, and now it appears that I need not only Stripe Stacks, but a third party for forms, and then they ask for SSL Cert, which again, I have to pay for, when I thought that perhaps Stripe would have that, if I am using their forms?
Again, I’m stuck between a rock and hard place…for 3 weeks now.
Everyone should be using SSL nowadays, as Paul(@pmjd) mentioned with every good quality hosting company it’s free. Let’s encrypt is a a free certificate authority that cost the hosting company absolutely nothing so anyone that is still not offering free SSL is trying to rip you off. Time to change hosting companies.
Now there are still paid certificates that come with an insurance bond, that offers you liability protection if the SSL should get hacked. You may desire to have and pay for that insurance as the free one’s have none.
But most importantly is that all the payment gateways like Stripe and Paypal don’t use your certificate. The payment(collection of credit card and payment data) takes place on their site and uses their Certificate not yours.
