Customer giving just got even more flexible! In addition to or in stead of Post-purchase customer donations (available on Shopify), merchants can now allow shoppers to add a donation to one of their causes on the Cart page and soon other pre-checkout pages.
In this article:
What happens in Shopify/WooCommerce
Setting up Cart/Pre-purchase Donations:
Head to Customer Donations in your Virtue App
Choose 3 donate options for your customers to choose from
Style the widget using our themes or create your own.
Toggle on Cart Donations
Click save
Head to your store, add a product to cart and you will see the Cart Donations widget
Shoppers are able to manually increase their donation amount by adding extra quantities in their cart.
Note that when both Post-purchase (Shopify only) and Cart donations are activated, the customer will still see the Post-purchase customer donation widget after their purchase if no donation was added at cart.
What happens in Shopify/WooCommerce when this feature is activated
1. A Donation product gets created in your catalogue - there is 1 product for the donation. For each of the causes selected by the store there will be 1 variant.. Each variant has a value of £1. When donations are made by the customer we set the quantity of the donation based on the amount the customer selected. ie. if the customer is donating £2 then the quantity of the item will be 2. In Shopify/WooCommerce, Customer Donations are flagged as a 'non-physical' product. This is enough for most warehousing apps to ignore it when it comes to fulfilment. However, we still recommend checking this with your warehousing app. Please email support@virtueimpact.com if you have any questions.
2. Hiding the donation product from your public catalogue - 'Donation' will be visible in your store as a product. To hide 'Donations' from your product catalogue go to your store:
Shopify: Shopify > Product > search for Donation product and click on it > Manage > Untick online store > Save
WooCommerce: In the ‘Edit product’ page, select the product Donation product. You may choose which store pages the product will be listed on by using the ‘Catalog visibility’ option (in the ‘Publish’ widget on the right). Choose ‘Hidden’ from the drop-down menu.
3. Fees on Customer Donations - these fees are completely separate from Virtue and are applied to any transaction in your store. The fee on donation product depend on which payment method your customer chose and your Shopify/WooCommerce plan. Right now the shopper covers any %ge based fees associated with donation product sale. The %ge fee is typically between 0-3% You can read more here. Shoppers can find out more about donation fees in Learn More of the Cart Widget.
Please note WooCommerce stores will be prompted to review their order transaction fees are correct and can modify these manually if needed on the Customer Giving screen.
4. Impact of running discounts and promotion - orders that contain donation products will behave in the same way to other products when discounts are applied. This means that if you have a store-wide 50% discount and a donation is added, the donation will also be discounted by 50%. You may wish to exclude the donation product from discount offers using your store discount settings or a third party app.
5. Donation product fulfilment settings (Shopify only) - you are able to set the donation product to auto-fulfil, in which case the order with the donation will show as 'partially fulfilled' in your shopify orders screen. If you set the donation product not to auto-fulfil this will leave the donation product as unfulfilled.
Pre-purchase/Cart Donations vs Post-purchase donations (Shopify only)
Flexibility - Shopify 2.0 stores will soon be able to add cart donations to any pre-checkout page on their site. Shoppers are able to manually add extra donations
Shoppers can pay with any payment method - post-purchase donations will only show to shoppers paying with Shopify Payments, while cart donations allow for any payment method
Fewer fees to the store- while a transaction fee ay still apply as it does for any product sold in your store, cart donations become a part of the same order and the same transaction.
How are we developing this feature
Shopify 2.0 stores are now able to add cart donations to any pre-checkout page on their site.
To learn more about Virtue and the Customer Donation feature head to the Support Hub - you'll find detailed documentation on the App there. If you need support with setting up Cart Customer Donations or anything else please contact support@virtueimpact.com.
Enjoy selling with impact!
Virtue Team
