Donation for WooCommerce Review: Accept Donations on WooCommerce

Looking to accept donations on your WordPress site?

In our Donation for WooCommerce review, we’re going to take a look at a plugin that lets you tap into WooCommerce to accept one-time or recurring donations on your site.

In addition to directly accepting donations, you’ll also get other unique options such as letting shoppers “round up” their bill and donate the difference or just generally add a donation at checkout or while browsing their shopping carts.

It can be useful whether you want to create a standalone fundraising system or you just want to add donation functionality to an existing WooCommerce store.

Want to see it in action and learn more? Keep reading our hands-on Donation for WooCommerce review and we’ll take you through everything the plugin has to offer.

Donation for WooCommerce Review: The Feature List

Before we get to the hands-on section, let’s run over the features of this plugin to give you an idea of what to expect.

First off, it helps you accept both one-time and recurring donations (in any interval), though you’ll need the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin to handle recurring payments.

You have several options for where you collect donations. First, you can add each campaign/cause as a separate WooCommerce product. You also have the option to control whether or not this product appears on your shop listing pages.

But then you also get ways to collect donations outside the regular product system. For example, you’ll get a widget and shortcode to display donations on your shop page or blog. You can also display a donation option on the cart or checkout pages, which lets you sort of “upsell” your donation like a lot of other stores do. For example, it’s common to see an option at checkout to let you donate some amount to a cause that the store supports.

In terms of donation amounts, you also get several options. You can enter one or more predetermined amounts or let users enter their own custom donation amount (with optional minimum and maximum).

However, the most unique option here is the ability to create a round off donation that automatically rounds up the person’s order to the nearest interval and donates the difference.

For example, let’s say you set the round off interval to $1 and the customer’s order was $91.27. This feature would let them round up the order to $92 and donate the difference ($0.73), which is a great way to encourage lots of small donations.

Other notable features include the following:

• You can view donation campaign stats including the number of donations and amounts.
• Donors can donate to multiple campaigns at the same time.
• You can offer donation options in multiple currencies via compatibility with the Currency Switcher for WooCommerce plugin.

Hands-On With Donation for WooCommerce

Let’s go hands-on and I’ll show you how Donation for WooCommerce works…

Note – for this review, I’ve also installed the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin to unlock the recurring donation features in Donation for WooCommerce. Just remember – if you want to use recurring donations, you’ll need to purchase WooCommerce Subscriptions separately.

Creating a New Donation Campaign

A donation campaign is one specific fundraising effort on your site. You can create unlimited donation campaigns and display each campaign in different ways.

To get started, you go to WC Donation → Add New. Then, you can configure several different settings.

First, you can add a title and cover image just like you do for a blog post or a product.

In the Campaign Settings, you can configure how the donation amounts work. You have three options:

• One or more pre-defined donation amounts. You can add as many levels as you want.
• A custom donation where people can choose the amount (you can also add a min/max if desired).
• Both – you can have some pre-defined amounts but also let people choose their own custom amount.

Here’s an example of using the mixed approach, with four pre-defined levels and also a custom option with a minimum $5 donation:

In the Form Settings tab, you can customize the donation form labels, display type, and colors:

And, if you have WooCommerce Subscriptions installed, you can use the Recurring Donations tab to enable recurrence and also customize the schedule. For example, should it be every month or every year (among many other options).

Then, you can use the options to control where to display your campaign. In this interface, you have three options:

• Display product single page – this creates a standalone “product” page for your donation.
• Display product shop page – this lists the campaign as a “product” on your main shop page. You could use this feature to showcase all of the different campaigns that people can donate to in one spot.
• Shortcode – use the shortcode to display your donation form anywhere on your site. For example, you could add it to a blog post or page.
• Widget – though it’s not pictured, you can also display a donation campaign using a dedicated widget.

In addition to these options, you also get some other options to showcase a campaign in the plugin’s settings, such as showing it on the shopping cart page – more on that next.

Here’s what it looks like to use the shortcode to add a donation form to any post/page. You can add your own content around the donation form to add more context about the campaign:

When someone clicks Donate, it will add the “product” to their cart and take them straight to the regular WooCommerce checkout page to process their donation.

Configuring Other Settings

To configure the other features that I mentioned earlier, such as the round-up donation feature, you can go to WC Donation → General Settings.

Here, you can enable three types of donations:

• Cart Donation – shows a donate form in the shopping cart.
• Checkout Donation – shows a donation form at checkout.
• Round Off Donation – lets people round up their order based on a multiple that you select. E.g. round up to the nearest $5.

For each type, you can link the donation type to one of your existing donation campaigns. For the Round Off Donation, you can also configure the multiplier and the popup message that lets people know about the option.

Here’s what the cart donation looks like. It would be nice to have a built-in feature to add some context around the donation button, though you could easily do it yourself using WooCommerce hooks (you can use the free HookMeUp plugin if you don’t want to need to use code to access the WooCommerce hooks):

Here’s what the checkout donation looks like. Again, you could use WooCommerce hooks to add context if needed. Clicking Donate adds the product to their cart and keeps them on the checkout page without requiring a page load, which is very frictionless UX:

And here’s what the round-off popup looks like:

Managing Donor Information

To manage donations/donors, you can use the regular WooCommerce order/customer areas, which also gives you access to all of WooCommerce’s reporting tools to track donations to individual campaigns.

Donation for WooCommerce Pricing

Donation for WooCommerce is a premium plugin, but it’s pretty affordable for what you get. It costs just $49 and you can purchase it through the official WooCommerce extension marketplace.

Your purchase comes with one year of support and updates as well as a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Donation for WooCommerce can be useful in two main situations:

1. You have an existing WooCommerce store that you want to add donation functionality to. The special features, like showing a donate button on your cart/checkout/popup are especially useful as they let you integrate donations into your store.
2. You’re creating a standalone fundraising/donation site and you want to use WooCommerce as the foundation to process donation payments. You’ll also get the reliability of WooCommerce Subscriptions if you want to have recurring donations.

If either of those situations fits you, you should definitely give Donation for WooCommerce a look. Click the button below to get started.

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