Amazon Offers Free Online Payment Processing to US Non-Profits

Website & Technology June 19, 2009

By Lori Halley

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We’ve talked before about some of the most popular online payment processors suited to smaller non-profits who want to accept donations or sell fundraising products on their websites. Maybe you're already using WildApricot Payments and that's what makes sense for your organization.

Now there’s another payment option you might want to look at: Amazon Payments.

Amazon Payments makes it easy for millions of Amazon customers to donate using the information in their Amazon.com accounts. It offers a range of solutions that enable you to raise money via one-time donations, recurring donations or selling goods for fundraising.

Note that you must be located in the United States to accept payments with Amazon Payments and Amazon Simple Pay Donations, specifically, are only available to US-based, IRS-certified 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations

Free Trial Offer

Amazon is offering free payment processing until September 30 for non-profit organizations that start using Amazon Simple Pay Donations (HTML-based buttons for one-time donations) and Checkout by Amazon (simple tools for order management, shipping charges, sales tax, refunds, and cancellations) to accept payments online.

After the trial offer expires, you’ll pay on a per-transaction with no setup fees or on-going monthly charges. Amazon Payments' processing fees and volume discounts are essentially the same as the Paypal and Google Checkout fees — as long as each donation is $10 or more. You can collect donations as small as one dollar with Amazon Payments, but the processing fee for amounts under $10 is a hefty 5.0% + $0.05 for all transactions, regardless of the monthly volume.

Some of the large and small non-profit organizations who accept donations through Amazon Payments include the American Red Cross, One Day’s Wages, and One Laptop per Child — mostly as a second or third payment method, so donors have plenty of choice.

If your organization is already using Amazon Payments, or if you’ve got advice for other non-profits about choosing a payment processor to handle online fundraising, please leave a comment and share your experience?

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Comments

Blake Raab:

Interesting. I guess, as you say, it might be good as an alternate option, but with the costs, I'll stick with PayPal.
Cliff Kerr:

Will WildApricot support the Amazon payment plan the same way it supports Google, Paypal, and Authorize.net? We are already a participating Amazon associate and this plan would would be a perfect fit as a WildApricot widget.
Dmitry Buterin:

There is no specific plan for this yet, I would appreciate if you could post about this on our wishlist so that we can gauge the priority.
Lori Halley:

Blake, I see no reason to shift away from PayPal if that's what your donors are comfortable with - Amazon Payments will suit some organizations as an alternative payment method, but frankly I can't see it replacing PayPal etc. as long as Amazon restricts this service to US-based, IRS-certified 501(c)(3) non-profits only.
Joseph Ponnou:

While this would greatly benefit non-profits orgs outside US also, this approach of opening only to IRS-certified 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations initially makes sense because of potential AML issues that would otherwise arise.