Selling Merchandise through RE NXT

How do you plan on separating these purchases from actual philanthropic gifts? You would have to make sure that these purchases don't go through your normal acknowledgement process. I've always discouraged this thinking, as it really muddies the waters. I'm not sure if you're not asking for bigger problems later down the line.

Question for you is, how do you handle the transaction for merchandise purchase today with Jotform? meaning, how are they ETL into RE today?

For my org, all transactions results in gifts in RE. Every gift is a "gift" to our org, how much of the gift is deductible contribution is otherwise indicated.

Therefore, what you want to achieve, I would go with RE Event Online Registration form as the workaround (not best, but not worst). The "event record" can be a generic "Merchandise Store" event name (can be customized in the registration form later to whatever you want). Each item for purchase will be a "Other fees" (meaning it does not come with ticket/registrant record). This will allow "quantity" of item to be purchased in the pricing increment.

@Chris Hounsell It sounds like you are already tracking the in-person frame sales somewhere in RE through the BBMS POS. I would definitely try to be consistent with what's already being done. I would think these gifts are already being funneled into a specific fund, and some of that framework is already established.

Event forms is the way to go with this. There are few caveats to be aware of -

• The interface for front-end users can sometimes be confusing. Do your best to rename headers/fields in a way that makes the most sense to this process. If an alumni is choosing multiple frame options specifically, this will be confusing. If you can infer where to send the frames based on the person whose paying's address - do that. The more participant option questions you put in the longer the form gets.
• You cannot rename everything - for instances the transaction details included in the eConfirmation will read like they've registered for an event… can't do anything about that.
• How the data comes into the system will create more work for you DBA/data team. The data does NOT currently run through the Online Data Review tool, meaning duplicates will be created within your system. You will need to review incoming 'registrations' on a daily/weekly basis.
• If an alumni processes more than one transaction through the form, that can be tricky to resolve on the back end and may require manual entry on the part of your data team to 'move'/'combine' event participant records prior to a constituent merge.

It's possible, but clearly behaves like a band-aid. Good luck!

@Austen Brown you are right about it being a band-aids. Just want to make sure the options are considered:

You cannot change default confirmation page, BUT you can have a custom page build and once the transaction is done, donor is directed to that page. It won't have the details of what was "purchased" but at least it won't be confusing. (i.e. Thank you for your purchase, you ordered is being processed, and you will hear from us in X days).

Using the "Other fees" option, there will be no event registrant (participant) records on the constituent record, so that shouldn't be a concern.

The biggest issue I can think of is, there isn't a great "report" that will tell you what was purchased for how many. You can see it in the event record page on NXT, but I don't think a good report is available for this.