Online sales

Hillary Wells

Is there a way to set up an online store? We are looking into options for our gift store.

Kristine Carter

Hi Hillary, 


Everything I have recently read on the community boards about this 1- are all from several years ago and 2- basically all say "no."  And that Blackbaud has no intention of adding this capability other than to work with a third-party vendor that could integrate into the Altru side.  Which will probably be an additional cost.  It seems like many Blackbaud customers have given up trying to get this as an added feature.


We are very disappointed with this as it was one of the selling points when we signed up in 2012.  


As an alternative, we are working with our website people to add an e-commerce option.  Unfortunately, this is also through a third-party and won't be able to integrate with the merchandise sales that we do through Altru.  This could get a little dicey when we reopen when keeping track of inventory.  We have a pretty small gift shop and do not keep a lot in reserve.  But is an easier and cheaper workaround in the short-term.


I will try to post an update here if we can ever get that going.  

Dianne Crosby

Kristine is correct - Altru does not have the ability to sell merchandise online.

Hillary Wells

Any recommendations for an e-commerce?

Dianne Crosby

We aren't using one, so I can't give a personal recommendation.  However, I've heard of other museum stores who use Shopify and are happy with it.

Mark Ingalls

Hi Community,


Mark Ingalls from Natural History Museum of Utah, next store neighbors to Diane and Red Butte Gardens:-)   We have been using clover for a year or so and have found it to be pretty good.  We tried Square for a while but moved to Clover that had more traction with University of Utah wide approvals...   If you would like more details about our clover use let me know and I can get you in touch with some folks who did the setup and configurations...   

Dianne Crosby

Hi Mark!

Jess Munroe

Hello! I hope you're staying safe and healthy. For the World Golf Hall of Fame, we use Shopify for our Online Store and manually adjust inventory from Altru when an order is placed. Although tedious, Shopify is extremely user friendly and has all kinds of templates for selling items. You can also run promotions and discounts on there, too. We would love if Blackbaud Altru would update the platform to incorporate having an Online Store straight from Altru, but for now, this has been working out great for us. Hope this helps!

Monica Dugas

Hi Jess!


We are looking to go online and use shopify as well. How do you manually adjust inventory in Altru and still account for a sale? I want reports to be accurate. Thanks! 

Jess Munroe

Monica Dugas‍ - Unfortunately, because Shopify is a third party website, we merge our retail sales online with in-store at the end of each month. We will go into Merchandise and do an Inventory Adjustment for our Online Store (just go to Merchandise - search for the item, hit the arrow next to the SKU and go to 'Change Inventory' - you can add Reasons for adjusting inventory in Code Tables, found in the Administration tab under Data). We run a Sales by Product report in Shopify and add the total sales in to our in-store sales monthly.


I suppose if you want sales to link to Altru, you could have a spreadsheet of items sold and ring them in Altru weekly or monthly. However, this won't be completely accurate because of shipping costs. It's easier for us to do a manual inventory adjustment and add the sales into our Merchandise Sales in Altru. Our store is also a much smaller version of our actual inventory, so it isn't overwhelming to do it this way.


Shopify also has great reports, too. You can run reports on almost anything - Sales by Product, Sales by Customer, Rate of Return, Promotions that are doing well/not so well, etc. If you want an example of our shop, it's found here. 

Dianne Crosby

We don't have an online store, but we've talked about it.  If we were to get one, I would create a custom payment type such as "Shopify".  Then, every time an online transaction occurred I would process the order in Daily Sales using that payment type.  That way all your sales are reflected in Altru's sales reports. 


For shipping, I would create a "Shipping" merchandise item and edit its price before adding it to the order.

Liz Broughton

We are using Square for our online store as we already had an account set up with them, and building the website was super easy given we are a small museum and it was all on me (the Visitor Services Mgr) to do so. To reconcile the Altru inventory, we created a payment type for Square and I've been ringing things up in Daily Sales so that the Sales Report looks accurate. While we are still closed to the public, reconciling the inventories is very manageable, but I can foresee it being a pain once we resume normal merchandise sales in Altru.


Given how not pretty the online design portion of Altru (ie online scheduled event ticket sales) has been, I'm not holding out hope that they will roll out online merchandise sales anytime soon.