I have been delighted on many occasions with the great impact that ecommerce has on enhancing contributions and sales on the sites that we build for churches. I am also often on the listening end of a conversation about the frustrations and misconceptions of staff as they try to deal with online giving, online stores, event registrations, etc.

These five ecommerce power tips can help avoid frustration and for the many church finance staff personnel wondering, these tips will offer some meaningful answers to a dilemma they may face at this very moment. How to make the most of PayPal or other online payment systems while maintaining proper accounting and without creating a big pile of additional administrative work.

Church eCommerce Tip #1 - Using Donate Buttons

The key to using these buttons effectively is to ensure that the buttons are placed within a meaningful and compelling context.  If the buttons are simply placed in a sidebar, for example, without any meaningful content or text related to giving, it’s unlikely that it will be effective. Creating a simple call to action could do the trick. For instance, simply adding “Help us feed the hungry” or similar and appropriate text placed with the donate button could make a tremendous difference in response.

Church eCommerce Tip #2 - Member Contribution Accounting

One challenge of using online payment systems such as PayPal and others, is the inevitable accounting that has to occur back at the church finance office. Most systems offer user-defined fields that can be used to capture a member ID, account number or other identifier.  Simply making a field available in your online form that captures this and saves it with the transaction information, will enable accounting and tracking using that information for reporting.

Most online payment systems have very full featured export tools, including PayPal. Exporting information and then using the member or a count ID captured to import transactions into your membership system (or other database) should be straightforward. Because membership records are not always fully up to date, the name on a credit card may not exactly match the member record, and even addresses may vary. Matching records may be time intensive and error prone if a member ID or account ID is not captured.

Church eCommerce Tip #3 - Event / Class Registration

A very similar situation applies to events or class registrations.  Both can be handled very quickly and effectively with online payment as simple as PayPal. However with registration, in many cases the name on the credit card is not the name of the registrant. So again the best practice is to use an optional field available in the payment system to capture the registrant’s name much like the account ID was captured into Tip #2. 

This step will avoid general confusion and additional work to generate registration or attendance rosters.  In this case, the captured registrant name would be the information used for creating a roster versus the credit card or payor’s name. In cases where registration occurs in a separate step, and then payment made online, it is even more critical to have the registrant’s name to match the registration record.

Church eCommerce Tip #4 - Shipping and Handling

There are many different options for setting up shipping and handling charges in most online payment systems. Some may seem confusing and complex: per item, per order, %, flat fee, by weight, etc. For that reason, some churches opt to just publish a total price which includes shipping and handling.  This is not advisable from an accounting standpoint.  Even where accounting for sales tax is not an issue, separating actual sales dollars from the supplies and expense of shipping and handling is a significant accounting issue. Additionally, sales would always be misleading and inflated while no real life cost numbers would exist for the ohead expense of shipping and handling.

Church eCommerce Tip #5 - Registering to Purchase

I see it pop in on churches’ contact forms from time to time; a visitor inquiring as to why they must register for an account in order to make a simple purchase. This inconvenience is rarely voiced, it most often simply results in the loss of a potential purchase.  To optimize the opportunity ecommerce presents, it’s important to make the process simple and quick. It’s hard to make a compelling argument to require registration for anything other than contributions.  Contributions requires reporting for member statements and tax purposes. However for all else; classes, events and merchandise such as sermon CDs, there is no such reporting or tax implications.  Eliminating registration requirements for these purchases can greatly enhance response.

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