PayPal Donations

Vendor Site: www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/donate-intro-outside
Example Client: www.nationalreview.com/

With no way to customize the look of or the fields on the donation form, PayPal is difficult to integrate into a website; the user experience is unmistakably PayPal. However, it is widely known and trusted by tech-savvy donors, which could conceivably make the PayPal branding a good thing. The lowest fees among donation tools and some advanced features make this worth a look for organizations with a technically savvy staff-person.

Fees and Transaction Costs
Setup Fees: None   Fees When Few Donations: Low   Fees When Many Donations: Low

• No setup fee
• $0.30 per donation and 2.9% of the donated amount for both credit card and eCheck transactions
• Even lower percentages (2.5%) are available for organizations taking in more than $3000 per month

Merchant Account: Vendors’s

• The organization will use PayPal’s merchant account
• The charge on the donor’s credit card shows “Paypal:” followed by the organization’s name

Company Background: Excellent

• Public company that is best known for handling online payments for small business and eBay; they also provide a widely-used shopping cart tool
• Their PayPal Donations service has only superficial changes to adapt their standard payment tool to the needs of nonprofits
• With a profitable business model, thousands of customers, and backing from the immensely profitable eBay, they are here to stay

Setup and Support: Acceptable

• PayPal is essentially a self-service proposition. Organizations needs to setup the payment process on their own using the documentation – which is extensive, but technical in nature
• The setup requires only HTML knowledge, but some experience with payment processing is helpful
• PayPal offers email support, but a number of current customers mention that it can be difficult to get helpful answers rather than canned responses

Donation Form Appearance: Acceptable

• The PayPal payment process cannot be integrated with the organization’s website
• In a typical flow, a donor would click a “Donate via Paypal” button to be taken to the PayPal site and fill out PayPal’s standard – but well thought out - payment information screens
• The PayPal form can be changed only by picking a custom background color and adding a logo or banner
• The donor doesn’t need a PayPal account. They can choose instead to donate via credit card, but they are prompted to login if they have an account
• There is no way to remove a $0 “shipping and handling” charge on the donor’s confirmation screen

Donation Form Flexibility: Acceptable

• No custom fields or donation-specific fields can be included, not even a newsletter sign-up or a program for a targeted donation

Payment Processing: Excellent

• PayPal accepts Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and (of course) PayPal.
• Their standard setup supports eCheck payments
• Organizations can accept monthly donations, using a separate donation form, via the PayPal Subscriptions tool
• They support credit cards issued by banks outside North America
• While they don’t disclose the details of their backend processes, there is little doubt that such a large payment processor is doing careful verification and checks to prevent fraud

Reports & Data: Excellent

• While not tailored to nonprofit needs, PayPal offers a number of real-time online reports to summarize donor details and how much money the organization has received
• Data can be downloaded into a text file with customizable field order
• Data is automatically synched with a database via PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification service

Money Distribution: Excellent

• Money is transferred to organization’s bank account upon user request, as often as desired