That's very standard, yes. It's pretty much what everyone charges, it's so standard even Authorize.net charges that for merchant payment processing.
The interchange pricing plus fee is just that isn't it, a fee plus the interchange fee? Comparing a partial fee to a full fee doesn't seem fair, or I'm missing something.
So yes, 2.9% + 30c is pretty standard. Don't really know of any exception (apart from native digital currencies. Bitpay does Saas payment processing at 0% fees for example).
I run a UK CASC (Community Amateur Sports Club) which is registered as a non-profit with HMRC and whose articles of association with Companies House require us to be structured in such a way that we are a non-profit (obligations to invest all profits in the promotion of sport).
Even as this type of entity we are eligible and receive the PayPal charity rates.
The donations by Tilt may work for groups that are not actually legal non-profit entities, but for any group that is a non-profit the fees are excessively high.
The reality is, our donations and contributions are usually fairly predictable. So we work to maximise how much we get from that revenue, by choosing the lowest fees and claiming back Gift Aid (CASCs can do this).
PayPal works really well for us, and with the fees being half what competitors offer I'm not even looking to change.
> The interchange pricing plus fee is just that isn't it, a fee plus the interchange fee?
Nope. With Authorize.net resellers, you can either pay a variable percentage (as low as 1.9% on qualified cards or 2.9% on unqualified cards, determined arbitrarily) OR $0.30 + 0.10% if you elect for Interchange Pricing Plus when you set up your Authorize.net account.
My previous employer had me spend several hours of development time in contact with our reseller to save cents on each transaction. I don't know if it was worth it.
Cool thanks for the info. So I assume you guys were mostly doing <$10 payments to favor the variable pricing? What kind of industry was your employer in?
About the qualified cards, what does that mean and how can that be arbitrary? Thanks!
He sold textbooks and lab materials to middle school teachers; teachers were reimbursed by the State after attending a workshop he ran every weekend.
Most orders were in excess of $100.
$100 * 0.10% + $0.30 = $0.40
$100 * 2.90% = $2.90
The trick is, if you don't know to ask for IPP, you get the 2.9% (but some orders will be as low as 1.9%) rate. If you do ask, you can opt for $0.30 + 0.10%.
I don't know what sort of behind-the-curtain negotiation it required to get the rates he got, but whether or not it saves you $ depends on your average transaction and expected sales volume.
Using my numbers, if your transactions are normally below $11, you'll probably benefit more from the standard three tier.
Neat. Anything to reduce friction; a lot of people in the nonprofit world don't seem to grasp the importance of making it easy to donate the way that for-profits seem to grasp it.
On two of the non-profits I've worked on, we had trouble with donation
fraud. At the time, a few years ago, it was a huge problem. Donation
fraud happened to a sizable percentage of non-profits and charity
organizations, and it particularly harmed the small, all-volunteer
groups which lacked the resources/skills to deal with it. Basically,
criminals would target charities with bogus donations as a way to test
their stolen credit cards. As you might imagine with all the
charge-backs and uncertainty, this caused a lot of problems and
headaches for the charities.
I'm sure you probably can't give much detail on your risk management and
fraud detection measures, but has the donation fraud problem been more
or less solved?
I wonder about this. I work for a nonprofit and we lost a fair number of donations because of false positives for fraud. We ended up loosening the standard. As a nonprofit, we aren't sending out a product, so it seems like it makes more sense to err on the side of accepting donations and deal with chargebacks, if there are some, than to reject potential valid donations. However, we are bigger than the organizations you seem to be describing, so maybe it depends on the size of your organization.
Hey there - fraud is still an ongoing issue for many non-profits, and it's been one of the most well-received features in the product (an understated but important one!). With Tilt.com and our other enterprise tools, we've needed to build automated and manual systems along with third-party integrations to successfully fight fraud at scale.
The by-product of our current efforts is that we're able to include it into each product we release -- shoot me an email if you'd like to intro us to your contacts at those non-profits. james @ tilt is my email.
No it hasn't. Bitcoin is a push system of payment, creditcards are a pull system of payment. Bitcoin payments use cryptography on a non-proprietary ledger secured by proof of work of hundreds of millions of dollars of computing power (meaning once the payment is done, there is no central party to reverse it like say Paypal could reverse payments on their proprietary Paypal ledger, and unless you have a computer from the 22nd century, you won't be able to reverse the transaction).
In other words, it's an entirely different system of payments. No clue what type of fraud you're referring to, but the fraud explained in the post you replied to does not apply to bitcoin.
If due to lack of punctuation you mean something different, i.e. that CC fraud is so rampant that everyone is switching to bitcoin donations and that they've been popping up everywhere because of that, I doubt that that's been the key driving factor, although it surely is part of the equation.
In any case I don't really know what you meant to say :-/
Cool idea! I think there are a few things on the usability side that you could do to make it even better:
* Lock the body when you open the modal by setting overflow: hidden. That will prevent people from scrolling around accidentally while filling out the form.
* This is related to the first point, but you should probably position: fixed the modal
* Make the label for the monthly donation clickable - people shouldn't have to find the little check box!
* Lighten the .iframe-subheader-text as it can be pretty low contrast when the background is white
* Add some subtle animations to the open and closing of the modal. It feels very jarring right now.
If you make the black overlay container position fixed and the window itself normal, you can have the modal scroll within the context of the black overlay. Facebook uses this same method and it's significantly nicer!
I assume "Make this a monthly donation" can be cancelled via a link that you send to the donator's email? Maybe that should be mentioned to assure the user they can easily cancel monthly payments.
I've handled the fundraising site for an alumni organization for several years. One thing we find essential is displaying "progress" by plugging into our templates the amount raised so far by each different campaign. On the API page https://github.com/Crowdtilt/crowdtilt-api-spec/#get-campaig... this appears to be a simple ajax call. And you don't have to touch paypal. Well done!
One of the non-profits I work with receives a significant portion of donations via ACH so something like this would not be considered regardless of how simple it is to use or how elegant the design may be.
Are there any plans to accept donations via ACH in the future?
Yes, there are - though credit card giving is the preferred online giving method (by far), PayPal, ACH, and bitcoin will be implemented (probably in that order) soon.
Tilt.com is still where we spend about 90% of our resources, but our suite of enterprise tools for professional crowdfunding and fundraising (open.tilt.com) has been a big area of growth since we started launching the tools this year -- and additional payment methods have been a frequent request on all products there.
Unlike most modals, you can customize the look and feel to your heart's content. You can also implement as an iframe to give you further control over the user experience (including adding other info fields) for donors.
The modal design is purely subjective. I think they did a fine job. It's great for the purpose, because it's uncluttered, has clear prompts, and has useful placeholders. IMHO, anything else would just be fluff that gets in the way of the UX.
I missed those the first time around, because my gaze was focused on the form and it's container. You're right, that should be addressed. I would imagine addressing the scroll bar issue would resolve the cut off text as well. It looks like something that wasn't a priority for roll-out, because it doesn't really affect UX so much, but I do think it's something that needs to be fixed in the next release.
Congrats, Tilt team! This is absolutely needed. The previous product I worked on was used by a lot of non-profits for crowdfunding and it just shows how necessary something like this is.
Cool idea, but it would be nice if it automated Paypal, Amazon, Bitcoin and/or Google as well. I think that asking for a Credit Card can be a barrier to getting donations.
Paypal will be added soon, but adding PayPal (and Amazon + other payment options) limits the ability for us to enable recurring donations for the org/cause/charity, which has become a significant capital raise mechanism for non profits in the last few years. That checkbox is one of the most well received features that is right out of the box.
I'd guess that for all but a very small subset of nonprofits there is pretty much zero interest in Bitcoin because pretty much no one would like to donate to them using it.
There's actually been loads of both small and prominent organisations accepting bitcoin. Save the Children, American Red Cross, EFF, Greenpeace, Hal Finney's ALS fund, Mozilla, Wikipedia etc etc.
If you look at the Humble Bundle for example, Linux users consistently outdonate windows users in voluntary transactions every single time. Bitcoin is a bit like that, too, both because of the type of crowd and because people are eager to spend and use bitcoin and to support charitable organisations that participate in the bitcoin ecosystem.
Lastly, it's an interesting angle because payment processing costs 0% for charities, yet the payout is in dollars, euros or a bunch of other currencies including bitcoin (just like for any other business btw if you use Bitpay)
It very much seems like charity is one of bitcoin's biggest usecases at the moment. Not saying it's the best thing ever, but we shouldn't discount it as there being no interest and no charitable bitcoin users.
In my anecdotal experience, specifically with charitable donations, bitcoin contributions tended to arrive in very small amounts compared to donations in the form of government currency. Also, we saw the frequency of bitcoin donations taper off from a couple per day to absolutely nothing after about two weeks of accepting it. On the upside, adding a bitcoin donation option was actually very simple, so although the bitcoin contributions haven't been very significant, it really didn't cost us anything either.
> It very much seems like charity is one of bitcoin's biggest usecases at the moment. Not saying it's the best thing ever, but we shouldn't discount it as there being no interest and no charitable bitcoin users.
But that's not really the question; the question is if there are enough to justify the development effort and, especially, to justify prioritizing that over other options like PayPal.
There's no real development effort. Multiple companies have code snippets and tens of plugins available for most popular CMS/Ecommerce/Webplatforms that you just throw on your website, add your unique id and tell the company your bank account. It doesn't get much more complex than that.
Regardless, the point is fair. You could probably raise a few dollars by selling hugs in the streets, doesn't mean it's the best way to spend your time. Whether bitcoin is, it's hard to say. It's definitely small and nascent, no doubt about that, but it also means its users are more eager, more engaged, on average. As in, if you take a million average bitcoin users and a million non-bitcoin users, the former I believe will raise a ton more money. But given there are only a few million, it's inevitably going to be small in absolute terms. In any case I was just replying to someone saying non-profits have near-zero interest and I disagreed.
Recurring payments are not supported globally yet. For example, a German customer cannot use PayPal to make RPs.
Except if the company is applying at PayPal and is large enough (e.g. Twitch; German users can indeed subscribe to channels), because PayPal is basically granting the account owner (company) the right to just deduct money from the donator. And for this they need to trust the company.
Source: We called PayPal support last friday because we tried to make RPs work with German customers in one of our projects, but had to cancel that plan because we are not a large enough company (i.e. we didn't even apply for this kind-of secret treatment).
Monthly donations are a great feature, but one of the things we see often (I'm a non-profit development (that's our neologism for fundraising) manager) is the desire to have payment installations. That is, not necessarily a standard monthly donation, but $1k over ten payments (monthly and then ending) or $1k over four payments (quarterly and then ending). Is support for pledges like these in the works?
Claim on this website: "Accept donations on your site instantly, from all cards and countries".
Truth is: in Germany the prefered way for paying on the internet is Lastschrift (direct debit). Paying with credit card is not very popular and credit cards aren't that common in Germany.
To put it harshly in other words: the statement on the website above is simply fraudulent. I can't pay with my EC card by direct debit.
It is accurate that you can pay from all cards and countries if you take their meaning to be logoed cards (Mastercard, Visa, Discover, American Express, etc). Nearly all debit cards in the US support one of those standard payment systems, so you can use them everywhere regardless of whether a specific store supports debit cards. It sounds like Lastschrift isn't logoed with one of those, so a store can only support Lastschrift if they specifically support Lastschrift by connecting with one of those payment processors. As such, it isn't supported by most US or worldwide websites unless those sites have taken specific steps to support it. Several countries have setups like that where there is a specific proprietary payment system that is only supported within their country and thus not supported in most websites outside of their country. We can hardly fault them for that.
wet blanket alert: a modal form with credit card inputs has been done many times before. What is instant or new about this? Kudos for yet another checkout, payment button code snippet?
Hi there. Thanks for the comment, and it's a valid question if you've never tried to implement current options for donations -- I'd be happy to address each example you're talking about when you say "what's new about this" (eg, stripe checkout, great for payments checkout - but isn't copy and paste, requires server code, isn't customizable, doesn't enable recurring donations, doesn't provide automated tax-deductible receipts, doesn't allow for adding additional fields for addl info collection...).
It turns out that accepting payments vs accepting donations for a cause, charity, political campaign, personal project, etc actually ends up having a different set of needs. And with online giving growing at the rate we see it to growing, a simple / powerful way for any site to collect donations, optimized for conversion on any device, with two lines of code is something we think our customers will find useful.
hi jjb123, thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yes I can see how payments vs. donations are different. I didn't mean to say what you did isn't useful. I'm a developer too so I can appreciate what it took to make your thing a reality. I guess I'm just saying you don't make the difference clear to the user. The only difference I see with Stripe's is Tilt's monthly donation checkbox. I guess investigating further, you differentiate with Stripe in making your modal for the non-developer. Still a layperson will have to inject two lines of code, but then they don't have to do all the customization by writing more code and can instead use Tilt's GUI.
TL;DR; It would be good to make it more clear to the end user what's new about this. Perhaps a better title for this HN post is "Accept donations on your site without writing code". The word "instantly" obviously never can be true and seems like overhype.
WePay.com used to have a Donate button that as I recall was pretty much exactly this. They dropped that, along with their invoicing services, a little over a year ago. Any reasons you think this will get better traction?
I'm pretty sure 2.9% + $0.30 is standard.