In this article we will explain the inner workings of how Customer giving works when you use Virtue.
A Donation product gets created in your catalogue
When you integrate Virtue with your store, it automatically creates a new product in your store called "Donation".
Example screenshot of the Donation product in a Shopify store
For each of the causes you have chosen, there will be 1 variant or variation. Each variant has a value of 1.
Example of Variants for causes in a Shopify Donation product
Hiding the donation product from your public catalogue
'Donation' will be visible in your store as a product. It is recommended that you hide this product from your store. You are able to hide this 'Donation' from your product catalogue by going to your store:
Shopify
To hide the donation product in Shopify please follow the steps in this article.
WooCommerce
In the ‘Edit product’ page, select the product Donation product. You may choose which store pages the product will be listed on by using the ‘Catalog visibility’ option (in the ‘Publish’ widget on the right). Choose ‘Hidden’ from the drop-down menu.
Customers add donations to cart
When donations are made by a customer, Virtue will add the donation to their cart. To add the donation to the customer's cart, Virtue sets the quantity of the donation based on the amount the customer selected in the Virtue customer giving widget.
For example, if the customer chooses to donate "£2" with their order, Virtue will set the quantity of the Donation item in the cart to "2".
Then when the customer checks out the donation is part of their order.
Order fulfilment with donations in orders
The Customer Donation product is set up as a 'non-physical' or virtual product. This is enough for most warehousing apps to ignore it when it comes to fulfilment. However, we still recommend checking this with your warehousing app.
Please email [email protected] if you have any questions.
Payment Fees on Customer Donations
These fees are completely separate from Virtue and are applied to any transaction in your store.
As the customer donations are a product - your platform will have a fee on the product. This fee is typically between 0-3% depending on your Shopify/WooCommerce plan. You can read more here.
The payment fee is taken directly out of the customer donation as to not charge stores extra for their customers donating. Shoppers can find out more about donation fees in the Learn More section of the Customer giving Widget.
Please note: WooCommerce stores will be prompted to review their order transaction fees are correct and can modify these manually if needed on the Customer Giving screen.