Ecommerce Donations without Shopping Cart?

[Luminated]

Hey all,

I have a client that wants to take online donations like this site does:

https://www.champlainhousingtrust.org/donate

How does one go about integrating this into a site? What kind of ecommerce software can I use that will integrate into a site without using a shopping cart? Any help is appreciated…I’ve done ecommerce before but only when building the site off a shopping cart engine like ZenCart and OSCommerce. I know Foxycart exists but I don’t think it would fit this kind of use. Thanks in advance all!

[AshtonSanders]

First off, unless the client is on the verge of making more than $1000 in donations a month, I would just use a Paypal Donate button. The 3% service fee can’t be beat at such low charge amounts.

If you really don’t want to do paypal donate button (where they click the button, go to Paypal, charges their card, and then comes back to your website), you can do it like that website you linked to.

I’m sure most of this will be repetitive, so I won’t go into much details:

If you want to process visitor’s credit cards (for donations, products, etc.) without them seeing another website, you need:

1) Security cert
2) Merchant account

Authorize.net is probably one of the biggest merchant accounts, although there are many. I don’t know their fees exactly, but I would estimate it being about $50+/month when it’s all said and done.

Unless they are getting lots of donations, I would stick with a paypal donation button…

[Luminated]

I guess I was curious from a coding standpoint, not so much as to what is required. I am aware of the different parts (merchant account, payment gateway, SSL Cert, etc..) that comprise e-commerce, but what engine is running this part of the site? Like, when the client hits "submit", is it interfacing directly with the payment gateway?

But I do recall that PayPal does have Websites Payments Pro which allows on-site credit card processing…I think I need to check out their technical documentation to find how to integrate it without using shopping cart software.

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