There are a few ways to accept donations, tips, and other custom price situations such as invoices in Miva Merchant.
Sometimes people create a donate button with PayPal or some other service. This works, but the problem is that it makes your store look bad. Your customers are wondering, "Why is there something completely different here for donating?" Your customers need to trust your store and want to go through the normal checkout process, so putting various out of context buttons in for donations could turn them off.
Another option is an old Miva module being used for invoices. In as much as this older module works, it's also, well, very old, and hasn't been updated in years. There is no guarantee that the module will continue to work as Miva Merchant is updated.
The Easy Way
The easiest way of accepting tips, donations, and more in Miva Merchant is to use our brand new module, Custom Attribute Prices.
Ok, sure, this is a blatant marketing pitch for the module, but that doesn't mean it isn't the best solution for invoicing, tips, and donations out there for Miva Merchant.
Is Custom Attribute Prices easy to use?
Yes, it's super easy to use. Setup literally takes minutes. In fact, it will probably take longer to install the module than to set up your first donation product.
All you have to do is create a product and give it a text attribute with a few defined settings. See the product page for details.
How does reporting work for Custom Attribute Price?
Since you are using a normal store product for your donation, tip, or invoice, reporting is the same as everything else in your store. The attribute shows up in the invoice and order details so you know what the person paid for and what they paid.
Some Ways to Use Custom Attribute Price
Donations are an obvious choice, a tip jar if you're in the service industry, and for stores that need online invoice payment, this is the perfect solution.
But what else can you do?
Another way I thought might be interesting is making a product and giving it the attribute that holds the price field, but also give it a text attribute. This way the customer can enter the price they want to pay as well as entering some kind of note about why they are paying. I had a client that wanted this functionality a few years ago and we had to go through a lot of work to make it happen. With this module it could have been done in minutes.
Contact us if you have any questions about this module.
Another option could be our Get Money module which lets you send an encrypted link to your customers to populate the price and name of the service they are paying for.
