Studio Missive 27: Rethinking e‑commerce for EHC
Hi friends,
Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening at the studio this week.
What’s inspiring you:
- Terry Godier asked why every RSS reader looks like an email inbox, and actually found an answer. He also asks why we can’t try something new and offers a few alternatives. I love being reminded that doing “what everybody else does” is optional, particularly in software patterns. (And I would wager part of the reason people don’t use RSS is because they don’t like email.)
- These minimalistic city maps are gorgeous, and you can make your own for any city in the world. (The website for doing so doesn’t even load for me, but you can also just run some Python. Cool!)
- Jon Hicks did a deep dive on the user experience of every major music app. What a treasure trove of insights. This piece is getting bookmarked for future projects. (As an aside: about five years ago, I told my wife that if Apple ever asked me to work in Cupertino and “fix the Music apps,” I’d seriously considering closing the studio to do it. iTunes used to be state-of-the-art, classy software. It’s part of the reason I fell in love with the Macintosh. Now, every time I use the Music app on my Mac, I turn into this.)
What are you working on?
In Studio Missive 13, I lamented about the current e‑commerce options available for nonprofits, and particularly despaired over how far Snipcart had fallen. In Studio Missive 14, I wrote about discovering Fundraise Up. Today, I’m excited to announce the first NPO I’ve transitioned to Fundraise Up is Every Home for Christ.
EHC’s previous system relied on Snipcart, which was becoming less and less viable, so there was a sense of urgency about this. Thankfully, Fundraise Up is one of the easiest e‑commerce systems I’ve ever worked with. Truthfully, there was very little to do: you copy and paste an embed code, and Fundraise Up handles everything else.
The biggest challenges were structural, not technical. For example, EHC offers free resources that supporters can order online. Previously, this was handled through Snipcart. Fundraise Up doesn’t support physical product orders, so this workflow had to be rebuilt from scratch.
To solve this, I designed a new ordering system using simple webforms built with Formie. The forms look almost identical to the previous Snipcart experience, so there is minimal learning curve and friction for existing supporters. Each order triggers a custom internal workflow, making it easy for EHC’s staff to process and fulfill requests.
For supporters, each resource order leads to a custom thank-you page that includes a donation prompt. Automated email sequences encourage people to move from a free resource order toward making a voluntary donation. Behind the scenes, each of these donations connects to a dedicated fundraising campaign and financial designation. This ensures every contribution is tracked and allocated correctly.
The result is a system with dozens of active campaigns in Fundraise Up, and more than a dozen resource-specific forms on the website. The strategic and tactical work required to design, configure, and coordinate all these moving parts was the most time-intensive part of this project. It involved multiple stakeholders, long-term planning, fallback strategies, and a tight execution window. Once the structures were in place, implementation was straightforward.
It’s too early to say if Fundraise Up is going to be a success. Snipcart boosted online giving for EHC by over 150% compared to their prior system. I was reticent to let it go. Just in case this all goes sideways, I’ve kept all the Snipcart code in a separate git branch, so now there are four “main” branches we use:
main: This is the main branch on the production site for Snipcart.staging: This is the test branch for Snipcart code.main-fundraise-up: This is the currently-live production site, with Fundraise Up powering donations.staging-fundraise-up: This is the currently-live test site, with Fundraise Up powering donations.
All future work will be merged into both staging and staging-fundraise-up for testing. If we ever need to roll back to Snipcart, in case Fundraise Up is a dud, all I’ll have to do is swap out the git branches in production. In less than two minutes, we’d have a production-ready e‑commerce system with a different provider.
In short, this was an easy project to execute, but a difficult one to strategically and tactically plan. Without the data on how Fundraise Up performs, this makes a terrible case study, but the work is valuable and important.
For now, I consider phase one of this transition a success. But until I get the hard numbers back on Fundraise Up over the next several months, I will continue to search for the perfect e‑commerce solution for NPOs.
Until next week,
Nathan