Over the past year I’ve supported Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, a charity that means a lot to me and certainly a great cause. I was asked to write a blog post on shops “within information sites,” although I feel that can vary so much depending on your business model. Instead, I decided to concentrate purely on charity e-commerce.
Leading by example
While I thought that many charities overlooked their online shops when it came to it, I was quite impressed with Oxfam’s online shop. A simple interface means that the shop isn’t overwhelmed with navigation items, banners and irrelevant images. While there are a few things it could learn from best e-commerce practices (I use the term very loosely!), it is certainly a step in the right direction.
A combined experience
Many charities run events. It’s useful to offer tickets to these events through the website, especially if you can integrate them with your online shop. This will mean that users can place a ticket to an event in their shopping basket, as well as your products and even a donation, so they don’t have to make a payment more than once. This is very powerful when it comes to cross-selling your products.
Sourcing products
It is likely that you have a few boxes of merchandise laying around. Sell these on the website, but also approach promotional companies that would be willing to re-brand their products with your charity logo. Negotiate a deal and integrate it with your system, so that when a user places an order through the website, a notification is sent to the supplier and it allows them to drop ship on your behalf. Make sure you have a solid service level agreement in place, as it is potentially your reputation on the line if they don’t deliver (fortunately, with charity shops you get a lot more resilience from your users!)
Second hand products and physical shops
The beauty of charity is that people want to give. This is where you can potentially make the online shop flourish. Using your physical stores and operations branches, you can encourage each offline store to contribute to the website, offering the facility for them to list all products that have been donated through their own interface. Oxfam do this brilliantly, take a look at their second hand shop here.
Encourage donations throughout the process
As you are a charity, it’s important to make it easy for users to add a donation to their order. Put a text field for them to enter an additional donation both at the basket and checkout, as well as giving them the option to “round up their order” to the nearest whole amount. For example, if the total is 6.49 then put a check box for them to round the order up to 10.00 and donate more to your charity.
Greetings cards, paintings, artwork and unique material
It’s useful to showcase and sell your supporter’s designs. Invite people to submit their artwork. Sell it as a greetings card, t-shirt, mug, key ring, etc. (Partner with a third party if necessary) When this is done correctly, you can create an intuitive system where user’s vote for each other’s designs and the shop showcases the more popular ones above the rest.
Make full use of your payment platform
If you have an online shop then chances are, you have paid for a payment platform such as Sage Pay. There isn’t usually a limit on where you can use it within your site, so it’s a great opportunity to offer more services that require payment integration.
Some great examples I can think of include online donations (obviously!), supporter events (so your supporters can sell tickets to their events online through your site) and fundraising pages (a lot like Just Giving and Virgin Moneygiving), where your supporters can setup their own fundraising pages with targets and running totals.
I would love to hear what ideas you can come up with for making the most out of payment integration within a charity website.
Water aid is a good example of charities with good donation “call to actions” and a simple and easy donation process – http://www.wateraid.org/uk/