What's a simple way for people to gift us money online, in the UK.

June 19, 2017 2:47 PM

After much duress from our very nice friends and family, my fiancée and I are setting up our gift list. We have a bunch of items picked out at a department store, but we also want to allow people to alternatively contribute towards a bigger ticket item - a dining table in this case. Ideally we'd have a simple online payment form that would let our guests gift us however much they feel comfortable. Can anyone recommend any simple services which can do this?
posted by Magnakai to Technology (4 answers total)

Best answer: You could create a Square Cash account and choose a "$cashtag," which gives you a URL people can go to and give you money. For instance, this is the link to donate to Wikipedia: https://cash.me/$Wikipedia I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but I personally use Square Cash for exchanging money between friends/family via the mobile app. For non-business purposes, there are no fees either.
posted by AppleTurnover at 4:05 PM on June 19, 2017

My Halifax account lets me create unlimited(?) extra savings accounts (terrible interest rate but that's not the point) and rename them whatever I want. If your bank allows that, create a new account and give out the account number and sort code. That way people can just do a bank transfer and you'll receive the money into a separate account.
You could also create a Paypal account and give out the email address for that but using Paypal to receive money from lots of people can occasionally cause issues (like if someone requests a refund, the account can get locked and your money is stuck in there for ages).
posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:07 PM on June 19, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure you need to do an online giving account...we did not do so, and got plenty of cash and checks tucked into cards. I feel like that's plenty easy for people to do if they so choose, and avoids the appearance of asking for cash (which will turn some people off).
posted by rainbowbrite at 5:33 PM on June 19, 2017

Best answer: Thanks guys. In the end we went with a Paypal.me link. It gives you a nice landing page and the brand name will be familiar to a lot of people. I don't necessarily expect to actually get much through this, but I just want to give as many options as possible to our lovely guests. Many younger people will just never use chequebooks, and it can be nice to get a task out of the way ahead of time.
posted by Magnakai at 2:15 AM on June 20, 2017