You can accept online payments for new member dues, renewal dues, event registration fees, donations, and store purchases. Online payments require that your organization has a credit card merchant account or PayPal account. If you do not have one of these, we can assist you in setting one up. ACH and eCheck options are available through Authorize.Net and their resellers.
Although the topic of payment gateways can be a little complex, for our purposes, think of a payment gateway as the 'glue' between MemberLeap and your merchant account and/or bank account.
Merchant Account/Bank Account <------> Payment Gateway <------> MemberLeap
On the plus side, a credit card merchant account is probably easier to use (for the end user- the new member or event registrant in this case). However, the costs involved can be prohibitive for some organizations.
To use a credit cart merchant account, you will want to talk to your financial institution or merchant account provider, and ask if they use one of our supported gateways. We currently support:
Costs involved will vary from provider to provider, so if you don't have a merchant account, you may want to shop around to find an offer that will reflect the nature of your transactions. For example if you have a high volume of low-cost transactions, you may want to look for lower transaction fees. If the opposite, you may want to look for lower 'discount rates' (%-based fees).
We can work with other providers too, however these will come at an additional cost that would be included with the initial set up cost. Just let us know if you want to use a provider that isn't listed above and if it's one that we have done work with in the past it would be an additional $50. If you want to use one that we haven't integrated with then you will either need to upgrade to a full MemberLeap plan so we can go through the discovery process for the integration and provide you with a quote on what that cost would be, otherwise we recommend using one of our options listed above.
Once your merchant account provider has your gateway set up, you will want to contact Vieth Consulting to assist you in integration and run a few tests to verify everything is working correctly.
For organizations who want to save money and if your transaction volume is low, PayPal is an excellent option.
On the down side, PayPal adds a little more indirection for the end user (the new member or event registrant). They will be leaving MemberLeap web pages, and be processing their transaction on the PayPal website. This can be confusing to some. Also, PayPal will prompt the payer to log-in, and if non-PayPal users don't see the click here if not a member button, this can cause confusion as well.
But, it is a valid option for many groups who have low-volume transactions.
To set-up PayPal, you will need to create a PayPal account for your organization. Ideally, you should set it up with an organization-based email address (treasurer@yourgroup.org). So that if the contact people in the organization change, the email account will not have to change.
The account is free, but is subject to transaction fees. Go to PayPal to find out what the current fees are.
To hook-up the PayPal account with the system, you will be using PayPal's Instant Payment Notification (IPN). When you have your PayPal account established, contact Vieth Consulting for procedures on how to set-up your PayPal account with IPN.