I need a Shopping Cart That Takes Donations.

June 8, 2008 3:53 PM

Can anyone recommend a good shopping cart system that can also handle something like donations?

For example, while PayPal does offer a donation system and it does offer a shopping cart, it doesn't seem to be able to intergrate the two sets of data so that someone could choose to donate whatever they like to one project via a donation button and also add a payment option for something physical, to get a shopping cart (and that flexibility of adding or deleting an amount of money) means that all items have to have a fixed price-- you can't just have areas where one or two or ANY item can be a variable price that one types in what they want.

In talking with my boss, he says we now aren't completely tied to paypal as the solution for this... so if anyone can offer any help into a possible solution, I'd really appreciate it.

posted by ShawnStruck to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Three thoughts:

1) Adding this feature would be very, very simple for any programmer to add to an existing shopping cart system, provided you host it yourself of course.

2) Why not create an item "$1 donation to Foo" and people can just change the quantity? You're stuck with whole-dollar amounts but I can't see that being a big problem.

3) If you allow donations to be "bought" without first verifying an email address/account/something you will be found by botnets and used to validate stolen credit card numbers. This is from first-hand experience. At the very least use a Captcha for donation-only checkouts.
posted by Skorgu at 4:00 PM on June 8

Use any standard shopping cart of your choice with PayPal as a payment provider. Put your physical items in one category or however many categories they require, and create a Donations category as well. List donations the same what you list other products. Depending on your funding profile, you might do for example $25, $50, $100 and $250 donations.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:09 PM on June 8

Additional information:
The webhost the orginization is using is yahoo! small business plan. This is non-negotiable.
posted by ShawnStruck at 4:16 PM on June 8

Oh, sorry. You asked for specific shopping carts.

The world and his dog uses osCommerce. I hate it, the layout is atrocious, and I've yet to see an implementation that isn't ugly, but that's just me. It is free and has been around for a long time, so that probably has something to do with it's popularity.

Magento is newer, is also free, and looks a lot better IMHO. Either cart will manage payments via PayPal.

Yahoo Small Business seems to also offer some kind of cart integration; have you looked into that?
posted by DarlingBri at 4:22 PM on June 8 [1 favorite]

Yahoo Small Business seems to also offer some kind of cart integration; have you looked into that?

Yeah, I just keep running into the problem of not being able to treat a "type in any amount you want for a donation" in the same way as any other shopping cart item.

Why not create an item "$1 donation to Foo" and people can just change the quantity? You're stuck with whole-dollar amounts but I can't see that being a big problem.

If there's no other way, then I can tell my boss that and we'll go with it, but that's not totally what he's looking for.
posted by ShawnStruck at 4:32 PM on June 8

We use GoogleCheckout. Dreamhost has zencart already sitting around, and we were able to make it work for us. We have a guy who does PHP working on either making the zencart thing work better.
posted by Medieval Maven at 4:34 PM on June 8

I don't think you can run any php applications on a Yahoo hosted site, so you are probably stuck with whatever they offer. Please let us know what scripting language you can run.

If you can run PHP, then I recommend Ubercart on Drupal is really simple to set-up, theme and operate. It doesn't have some of the really fancy features of Zencart and is much simpler than OsCommerce.

It handles a bunch of payment providers including paypal. There is a module purely for donations donations, but I haven't used it.

Dan
posted by dantodd at 4:45 PM on June 8

@ dantodd:

I just set up a mysql database and phpadmin on the server space, so looks like Yahoo lets us run php apps.
posted by ShawnStruck at 4:53 PM on June 8

Kintera can do it for you. Every charity run/bike/etc. event I know of in San Diego uses them.
posted by Lukenlogs at 10:48 PM on June 8