Donations vs. e-commerce

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Tom McGonegal
Tom McGonegal
Ancient Membership Photogenic First Comment Facilitator Level 1
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions

Hi All,

Just starting to get my feet wet with Convio in general. Our organization uses Convio for donations and membership sales. We are currently putting together plans to accept online registrations for programs for member adults, member children, non-member adults, non-member children; nature walks, educational programs, trips, camps, etc. We will take partial payments and full payments online and are hoping to be able to use Convio, since our donations and memberships come through that way. I have read that the Donations API is not designed to be used for "e-commerce," but I guess we're wondering if it shouldn't be used and/or can't be used. Has anyone done anything like this? As I say, we're not selling tee shirts and hats, but just wanted to see if Convio could process a payment for program registrations.

Thank you!

Tom.

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  • Tristan Schmid
    Tristan Schmid
    Ancient Membership First Comment Facilitator Level 2 Inquirer Level 2

    I'd be interested in knowing the answer to this too. And also why the donations form can't be used for e-commerce purchases such as branded items (hats etc.)

    Thanks!

  • Brian Mucha
    Brian Mucha
    Ancient Membership 2500 Comments 250 Likes Name Dropper
    Tristan Schmid:

    I'd be interested in knowing the answer to this too. And also why the donations form can't be used for e-commerce purchases such as branded items (hats etc.)

    Thanks!

    We use the eCommerce package for processing registrations/tickets for events, but we don't do anything with the API. As far as I know the donation forms and ecommerce packages are totally different products and work fairly differently. And the API is not common to them both.

    The big benifit of eCom is the shopping cart functionality where the user can add a ticket, donation, dinner reservation, and shirt or whatever and pay all in a single transaction. Ecommerce also does inventory, which can be nice for tickets.

    Conversely we also sometimes use donation forms for item purchases. Its is much more straight forward than a big eCom site, but of course you don't get all the nice browsing, search, product photos, inventory management and such that eCom offers.

    In the end both process payments and can be reported on.

    Regards, Brian

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