Looking for a way to run school fundraisers through my shop, any advice?

Hey,

Back ground info: we are a coffee roastery that is looking to run school fundraisers online through our site instead of the old pen and paper method. With Covid and many schools going cashless we are looking to offer this as an added bonus to running a fundraiser with us.

I am basically looking for a way to duplicate our shop with our store to have a separate location to shop and checkout just for those involved in the fundraiser, both to stream line the process for them and make it easier for us to fulfill those orders.

Are there apps that could tackle this, or is there an angle I’m not seeing that I could code myself?

Thanks!

Hey @jfairchild If there is a non-profit involved please see https://www.shopify.com/nonprofits

to duplicate our shop with our store to have a separate location to shop

For merchants using Shopify Plus use an expansion store.

For other plans, though I haven’t heard any anecdotes recently, it’s not unheard of to try and negotiate to a second store at a cheaper price especially with a reduced product inventory of only a handful.

There is also the shopify lite plan $9/mth but that does not come with a website , its only for embedding buy-buttons in other websites that go to a shopify checkout process and give you the ecommerce admin without the online-sales channel.

If you need to pursue any of the following with expertise contact me with details.

Frontend user experience

To just present a different frontend experience there’s also setting up specific pages using layout tags, or a different theme with the parameter: ‘?preview_theme_id=’ in specific links, or using a pagebuilder app.

Buy buttons

Buy buttons can let you basically embed ecommerce anywhere you can add code.

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-sales-channels/buy-button

Permalinks

Permalinks let you send people directly to checkout with products.

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-design/cart-use-permalinks-to-pre-load-the-cart/td-p/613702

https://shopify.dev/apps/channels/cart-permalinks

Arbitrary Donation Amounts

If you need people to be able to enter any arbitrary amount for a product they want there is also a new tipping feature built into /checkout, just change the labels/locale strings to “donation” instead of tip. And make test orders and review every step of the process to validate that’s suitable when you need arbitrary amounts.

Otherwise it basically takes an app to generate a product with any arbitrary price at time of customer input. There are a few that do this, or use the draft system. This can also be scripted with usemechanic https://tasks.mechanic.dev/create-a-draft-order-from-the-cart .

Alternatively use paypal https://www.paypal.com/donate/buttons

Tips- Remember to set any donation products to be inventoryless to avoid out of stock situations.

  • Remember to set any donation products to be digital to avoid shipping steps.
  • If you have accelerated checkout buttons disabled on normal product pages you may want to enable it for donation product pages.
  • If you use a payment-installments service you may want to disable that from being shown on donation product pages.
  • And validate your tax setup with an actual accountant.

Goodluck

1 Like

Thank you for your response!

There are a few avenues mentioned i had not considered and am not going down the rabbit hole to see if any of those will suit out needs!

here there @jfairchild - did you solve this problem? im having a similar issue

Hi! Did you ever find a solution for this? We’re trying to figure out something similar for school fundraisers. We’ve tried the whole “code tracking” but it’s not streamlined enough. Curious if you found something?

Hey all, I built the Fundlet app specifically for this use case. It plugs into your existing site to quickly run fundraisers. Check it out at Fundlet Fundraiser - Fundlet Fundraisers for Shopify | Shopify App Store and reach out with any questions.