Is your ministry or organization looking to take donations online? You are just a plugin or two away from being able to do this on your website. Before you start looking for plugins to do this, the first and foremost thing you need is to make sure your site is secure with a SSL certificate. If you don’t have the green padlock on your website, then pause reading here and go make sure you have that. If not, then get that taken care of first and then come back.
The next thing you need to consider is the payment gateway you want to use to accept credit and debit cards on your site. This is a company that will process the payments for you and transfer the money to your bank account.
All of these gateways will have fees tied to them. I won’t list the fees in this article as they may change from time to time and may not be correct when you read this article.
Payment gateways
- PayPal
- Square
- Stripe
- Authorize.net
PayPal
Probably the easiest and most recognizable is PayPal. Most people have PayPal already and have tied them to their bank accounts. In fact, world wide, there are just under 300 million users of PayPal so more than likely, your donors will already have an account. They also have handheld devices you can use to take payments at events. If you hold events, you can use these to take payments at the door.
Square
Square is similar to PayPal in that they offer hardware to be able to take payments outside your website and can integrate with a plugin to take payments. But they are just a payment gateway and your customers won’t have accounts that are already connected to their bank accounts. Square will take the payment and transfer it to your bank account, normally within the next day.
Square also offers a wide range of business tools, so if you need any type of resource for your ministry or organization like payroll or point of sale, you may want to consider Square.
Stripe
Stripe is also a payment processing platform that will integrate into WordPress. Stripe is similar to Square in just being a payment gateway and again it will take the payments from the donors credit or debit card and transfer the money to your bank account.
Authorize.net
As they put it, is a helps makes it simple to accept electronic and credit card payments in person, online or over the phone. Authorize.net also offers hardware to allow you to take payments in person as well as online. They also offer a wide variety of options for taking payments.
For any of the payment gateways you need to create an account and link it to your bank account before you can set it up for your website. Each gateway will also have it’s own method of integrating into your website so read the information they give you. If it is not set up correctly, then you won’t be able to take payments. These are not the only payment gateways available but they are the most popular.
Next week we will cover how to set up your website to use these gateways. If you have any questions concerning the different gateways and which one is best for you, feel free to book a free consultation with us and we can discuses that.
