Online Payment Options
Submitted by Erik on Tue, 10/21/2008 - 8:38am.
Recently, I've been talking with some fellow PTO technologists about "best practices" in enabling PTOs to accept online payments. Several PTOs have Paypal buttons on their sites that take the visitor to a Paypal page where s/he can make a donation.I'd like to see some better options.
Assuming a PTO website is based on the Drupal? system (as North and Ward now are) here are a few Drupal-based modules that could be useful in the future.
The Ubercart related modules is probably much more than we need at this point. It supports the whole product catalog, in addition to payments. Might be good if we’re selling school apparel and accessories, but too much right now.
The e-Commerce related modules may be better fit. Less focus on managing a product catalog.
The fee and donation modules operate on the Simple Paypal Framework module. This could be the simplest way to collect online payments that is at least a little bit integrated into our site.
Focus on top line instead of bottom line
Our Paypal account is already registered as 501(c)(3), so I think we're getting the maximum benefit of that designation, as far as using Paypal is concerned. I like the idea of reducing the cost (and scaling the benefit) by sharing a payment processing account across PTOs, but I think would be incredibly hard to "sell" to the PTOs because of their concern of financial security. It's been hard enough just getting them to accept online donations & payments.
At this point, I think the more fruitful course of action is to focus on "growing the top line" by helping PTOs make better use of online technologies. The opportunities to do so are so significant, that they dwarf the relative costs of online payments. Once that really takes off, then we can address how to minimize the transaction costs.
Thanks, Charles, for a rapid and thoughtful response!
Paypal
PayPal charges relatively high fees compared to normal merchant credit-card accounts. But it's more trouble to set up a credit card merchant account. This is a situation where it would help to be able to do this under the aegis of an existing 501(c)3 non-profit that has some history and a bank account.
Of course, however this is done, there would be additional complexity if a single website is collecting money for all the PTO/PTSOs. That's where a more complex eCommerce package might be helpful -- if there's one out there that can be configured to distribute revenue across multiple "departments", based on what's sold.