Collecting donations in your Ecwid store
In addition to selling physical and digital products and/or services, you can set up your Ecwid store to collect donations. You can also use your store for donation purposes only.
There are two main tools for accepting donations in Ecwid.
First, you can create products in your catalog and enable the Pay what you want pricing for them. These products will be displayed on your storefront and allow your customers to donate any sum they want by buying them. You can also offer customers recurring donations, meaning buyers can subscribe to donations at regular intervals, — if you enable subscriptions for your store.
Second, you can let your customers donate fixed amounts of money at checkout using the tipping option.
Adding a donation option to your catalog
The easiest way to accept donations in your Ecwid store is to create a product named “Donation” and enable the Pay what you want option for it.
How Pay What You Want works in Ecwid
The Pay what you want pricing option allows customers to pay as much as they want for your item. The initial price can be equal to “0” or more, if you need to define a minimum donation amount.
You can provide fixed donation amount options to choose from (the “Your value” option will be also available) or go for one empty field on the product page. Your customers will enter the amount they want to donate there.
Donation products have no weight and do not require delivery. The purchasing process is very similar to buying a regular item. Customers will choose/enter the donation amount, add the product to their cart (like they do with other products), and check out.
If you want to raise money for different purposes, you can create several products and enable the Pay what you want pricing for each of them.
All products with the enabled Pay what you want pricing will have a special “(initial price) or more” text on your storefront. Products with zero initial prices will be additionally marked with a special orange label that reads “Free or your own price”:
Adding donations to your store
The Pay what you want feature allows customers to donate to you only once. If you want to make a recurring donation, so a customer could pay you the same amount of money on a regular basis, you can additionally turn on the recurring subscriptions option in your store and then create recurring donations with it.
To create a donation product:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to Catalog → Products.
- Click Add New Product.
- In the Name field type “Donation” or any other name.
- Uncheck the Requires shipping or pickup option (if you are not going to sell a physical product associated with donations, e.g. a cup).
- Fill in other settings as you wish. You can upload an image and explain the goal of collecting donations in the description field.
- Click Manage pricing options in the Pricing section.
- Find and click Enable “Pay what you want” pricing.
- Click the toggle button into the enabled position.
- Set the Minimum price for your product – this will be the smallest amount of money that your customers can donate.
- (optional) Click Add fixed price tiers to provide one or more donation amount options. Example:
- Click Save.
That’s it! Now customers can donate by buying this product.
Before adding recurring donations, you need to enable recurring subscriptions in your store. That way, you can add products with subscriptions, including donations.
To enable recurring subscriptions:
- Connect Stripe as a payment method.
- Include rules for using recurring subscriptions in your store’s Terms & Conditions.
- From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → General → Cart & Checkout.
- In the Sell subscriptions box, turn on the Product subscriptions toggle to enable products with subscription prices.
Now you can create a recurring donation product:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to Catalog → Products.
- Click Add New Product.
- In the Name field type “Donation” or any other name. You may want to indicate the frequency of the donation period, for example, Monthly donations.
- Uncheck the Requires shipping or pickup option (if you are not going to sell a physical product associated with donations, e.g., cat box subscription).
- Fill in other settings as you wish. You can upload an image and explain the goal of collecting donations in the description field.
- Click Manage pricing options in the Pricing section.
- Click Sell as subscription and turn on the toggle.
- In the Billing period field, click on the dropdown menu to select how often you want to charge your customers for this product — Once per day, Once per week, Once per 2 weeks, Once per month, Once per 3 months, Once per year. For customers, this will be the donation period.
- Tick the Allow purchase without subscription box, so your customers can choose between one-time purchase (donation) and subscription. Otherwise, they can only subscribe to donating regularly.
- Click Enable “Pay what you want” pricing and turn on the toggle.
- Set the Minimum price for your product – this will be the smallest amount of money that your customers can donate.
- (optional) Click Add fixed price tiers to provide one or more donation amount options.
- Click Save.
That’s it! Now customers can subscribe to recurring donations:
Repeat these steps to create products for other donation goals if you have them. To speed up the process, you can use the Duplicate product button in the upper right corner to create new products. Once a product is duplicated, change the description and pricing options, and a new product is ready.
If you sell other products in your Ecwid store, you can add all the donation products to one category. This way your customers will be able to view all the available donation options in one spot. To remind customers at checkout that they can leave a donation, you can display products with the enabled Pay what you want option as Related products. Another way to highlight them is to create product ribbons.
Adding donation options to checkout
In Ecwid, you can also collect donations using tips. If you go for this option, customers will be able to leave donations at checkout. They will choose from the predefined donation amount options that are displayed in the tips section (fixed sums or a percentage of order total, depending on how you set it up).
The drawback of this approach is that a customer has to add at least one product to their cart to make a donation. They can’t make a donation with an empty shopping cart. So, if you want to use the tipping option to accept donations, you have to add some products to your store.
To collect donations at checkout using tips:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → General → Cart & Checkout and scroll down to the Tips and gratuity section.
- Click the toggle to enable Tipping option at checkout.
- Do not forget to click Save, then click Tip Settings.
- Edit Title and Description sections. The texts you enter here will display at checkout in the tips section. Type “Donations” or any other name in the title field and explain the goal of collecting donations in the description field.
- Choose Tip calculation type in the dropdown menu: Percentage of order total or Fixed amounts.
- Add Tip amounts — these are donation amounts that customers will be able to choose from. To let customers check out with no donations, leave the zero (“No tip”) option available.
You can preselect a donation amount for your customers that will be automatically added to customer orders at checkout. For this, hover your mouse over a tip amount field and click Make default:
- Click Save.
After you set up tips and rename them to donations, customers will be able to choose the donation amount they want to make at checkout, on the payment step: