Support

I know there have been some previous posts on this issue, but I want to underscore how painful the donation workflow is. WA has not taken advantage of many of PayPal's integration capabilities. Glaring issues in the workflow include:

• When a logged in member enters the donation page on the WA site, their address / city / state etc. is not prepopulated. Aggravating given the user has already made it through the difficult member sign up process, providing their address info.
• After submitting, user is forwarded OFF the WA site onto the PayPal site. (should be able to offer on-site checkout if the WA user has Website Payments Pro). Disrupts the experience
• Then PayPal tries to trick people into creating a PayPal account. Not obvious at all that the transaction can be completed without signing into PayPal. Majority of users are now going to get completely angered by the prospect of signing up for yet ANOTHER login.
• If that's not bad enough, PayPal asks for the user's billing address info again! This is the THIRD time.

Frankly, I think its disingenuous for WA to claim donation capability when there is essentially a simple link to PayPal.

I doubt that we will be getting very positive feedback on this if we launch. As a result, it is hard for me to justify a $100/mo investment to the board without a solid timeline on when WA's online donation process will improve.

All good points.

We are actually right now researching and planning a number of improvements related to payments - which will apply across the board: donations, event registrations, membership dues.

Broadly, we are looking at the following aspects:

- built-in payment workflow option (e.g. via PayPal Payment Pro) 

- additional choices of payment processors

- recurring payments (e.g. monthly membership payments)

- completing previously attempted but failed payments

I can not quite agree that what we currently have is a 'simple link' :-) There is a lot going on behind the scenes - the stuff we send to PayPal site, monitoring their response and proper workflow depending on whether we do get the payment confirmation from them. This does not affect the validity of your points and the high priority we are assigning to all these issues.

Until we have completed our analysis and defined specific steps I can not provide a firm timeline but it is our current goal to address most of these issues within this year. 

So you have to make a call whether what we already offer is worth the price in your specific example.

Again, thanks for taking the time to provide detailed feedback. 

Dmitry,

Its reassuring that WA is responsive to feedback and has demonstrated significant continued improvements to the site.Thanks for the reply.

Anand