Studio Missive 13:the current state of e‑commerce for nonprofits

Hi friends,

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening around the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

1. While considering design ideas for carousels in a client’s music and video app this week, I struggled with an obvious implementation for desktop designs. This app houses a lot of content — think Apple Music or YouTube. On phones, people touch the screen and swipe around, so there’s less of a need for obvious visual affordances. In large viewports, what do you do? Left and right arrows are one possibility. Dots below the carousel are another. Autoplay (ugh). Simple horizontal scrolling without any Javascript. There are a lot of ways to skin the carousel design cat! Smashing Magazine documented almost all of them, which was helpful in getting my brain juices… juicing. (Editor’s note: this sounds really gross. Stop it.)
2. The Space Exploration Logo Archive website is dope. Logos from every notable space agency and mission around the world, both real and fictional. You can even download the SVG for any of the logos! Invaluable work and a great classic design. It reminds me of the all-time great book Logo Modernism.
3. I loved Niki’s exploration of colours in coding themes.
4. I found a new site for collecting design inspiration. This one is cool because it filters designs by component type, so if you’re looking to design a card, a footer, a hero, navigation, etc, you can filter straight to that sort of content. I found Mammoth Murals while looking at hero images, and that site design rocks.

What are you working on?

I didn’t get around to filming my first YouTube video this week. It was Thanksgiving in Canada, and Monday was a holiday, which I wasn’t really thinking about when I committed to a specific timeframe in my newsletter last week. Four days isn’t enough time to do the client work and try something totally new. Filming is currently penciled in for next week. (I look awesome in Zoom calls, though.)

This week, I got pretty deep into some research about e‑commerce solutions for nonprofits. I work with a lot of nonprofits, and most of them want more or less the same feature set:

1. The ability to ​“sell” items, like books, swag, etc, at preset prices. Maybe they want to let people buy goats for farmers in impoverished countries. This is a basic requirement for e‑commerce sites, so this part is easy.
2. The ability to collect one-time or recurring donations of user-set amounts.
3. It would be great if those donations could live inside the cart alongside the price-fixed items in the store.

This combination of requirements is difficult to build for. In the past few years, I’ve built this out with Snipcart, but they no longer offer the option of subscription payments for new customers. Their support is getting worse all the time too. This year, they stopped sending email receipts on every Snipcart store for twelve days! Some of my clients will randomly have features of their store disabled in test environments until we reach out to customer service, which could get days to get a response from.

I’ve been on the hunt all week for something else that could do the job, and I’ve come up empty. I can think of lots of e‑commerce solutions, but not a lot of e‑commerce solutions that integrate well with pay-what-you-want donation systems. (And as an aside, a prevailing limit for every option is that, if you want to use Stripe, Stripe won’t allow end users to simultaneously purchase a one-time product and a subscription. It’s one or the other.)

Here are just few options I’ve considered:

• WooCommerce can do it with plugins. I used to build out nonprofit sites with WooCommerce specifically because of this toolset, but I avoid WordPress like the plague these days because building anything with WordPress is like trying to play Jenga with spagetti. 
• Shopify can maybe do it, if you’re willing to use third-party plugins. If you’re not, one could theoretically hack something together by setting the price of each donation object to $1 and treating the inventory number as the donation amount, but that’s a lot of unsupported hackery to build into a business’s critical infrastructure. Plus, you’d have to build out the whole site in Shopify, and I don’t think Shopify offers enough customization to make this work.
• One could build it directly with Stripe, but there are a lot of ways it could easily go sideways. There would be lot of URL callbacks and pings back and forth throughout the process to create new Stripe Products based on the donation amount the end user sets. So you might have ​“One-time donation where needed most” with a sale price of $50 and its own sku, and another separate sku for ​“One-time donation where needed most” with a donation amount of $100. It gets messy quickly, and I worry about the room for errors at any step along the way.

What I’m leaning to, after all this research, is combining a normal e‑commerce system for typical products (maybe Craft Commerce?) with custom webforms for donations. Most large nonprofits (like Charity Water or World Vision) use forms for their donations. World Vision has a separate store for items you can buy from their gift catalogue, and they no longer use a cart for even those transactions. You just pay for one item at a time. (My understanding is they used to be on Shopify, but the costs were prohibitive. I know nothing for a fact, and have only heard rumours, so take it all with a giant grain of salt.)

I’ve been dealing with variants of this problem for the majority of my career. Snipcart was my favourite solution, but it’s become so tedious to work with for clients that I’m having serious conversations with some of them about migrating them elsewhere before Snipcart disappears. 

If you are aware of a tool that would solve this problem for me, and that would integrate into an existing website, please let me know.

Until next week,

Nathan

P.S. As seen in this week’s issue of The Index, this is truly a wild demo.