There’s nothing worse than running a successful marketing campaign that drives an increased number of visitors to your website just for them to abandon their cart and leave without placing an order.
Today’s socially conscious consumer is making purpose-driven purchases that are influenced by their values, and they’re being more conscious of where they spend their dollars. As more eCommerce and direct-to-consumer brands enter the market, a recent study has found that consumers are 4 to 6 times more likely to purchase from, protect, and champion purpose-driven brands.
So what does this mean for your brand, and how can you create a checkout experience that turns your website visitors into loyal customers? Enabling a checkout donation strategy can help your brand create more engaging interactions with your customers, leading to increased conversions and customer loyalty.
Here’s everything you need to know about enabling donations for your Shopify checkout experience.
Why Having an Engaging Checkout Experience is Important
The average cart abandonment rate across all industries is 70%. While you’re not alone in losing revenue-driving opportunities, you can stay ahead of the curve by aligning your values with your customers to ensure that your brand stays top-of-mind.
Implementing a donation strategy during the checkout process isn’t only good for engaging your customers— it’s also good for business. The ability for customers to give to a good cause during the checkout process increases AOV by up to 29%. And stores that integrate social impact into their marketing strategy can see as much as a 20% conversion rate lift.
As the market for purpose-driven commerce continues to grow, consumers are going to continue shifting their buying behavior to support brands whose values align with their own, and ditch those who don’t.
How to Choose Which Nonprofits to Support
The first step in setting up donations for your Shopify checkout experience is to explore nonprofit partnership opportunities. The best way to explore which nonprofits make sense for your brand is to look at your brand values and identify what is important to both your company and your customers. Pulling inspiration from your brand values will help ensure that your donation strategy is authentic and will be an initiative that your community can get excited about.
If your brand prides itself on using sustainable materials in your products and are committed to environmental sustainability, a nonprofit like One Tree Planted, The Surfrider Foundation, or the National Resources Defense Council would be good options.
Or if you’re passionate about uplifting the voices of underrepresented groups, you could support organizations like Outright Action International, Black Girl Ventures, or the Native American Rights Fund.
You can also explore nonprofit opportunities based on the goal that your brand hopes to accomplish through your donation strategy. Do you want to provide relief to support Ukrainian refugees? Or do you want to provide meals to children in food insecure homes?
No matter which causes you choose to support, it’s important to do your research ahead of time to ensure that you are aligned with the mission of the nonprofit. This will help your brand find the best fit for your initiatives and pave the way for a more successful strategy.
Integrating a Shopify Donation App for Your Brand
Once you’ve established the nonprofit or causes that your brand wants to support, the next step is to integrate the technology needed to enable donations during the Shopify checkout process.
The Change Commerce donation app on Shopify makes implementing charitable donations during the checkout process as easy as possible. With dozens of features, you can create a donation strategy that’s tailored to your brand’s needs. Here’s a quick look into some of the features and benefits:
- Create an omnichannel giving experience for eCommerce and POS
- Measure and track your impact against your bottom line
- 100% of donations are always sent to your supported nonprofits
- Flexibility to select which products or collections you want to donate on
- Create capsule-collection impact by setting specific causes on specific products
Whether you want to enable store donations, customer round-up donations, donate online or in-store, you’ll get everything you need to create a unique Shopify checkout experience. Get a step-by-step on how to integrate and activate the ShoppingGives app.
3 Checkout Donation Strategies You Can Implement
To create a successful checkout experience, your donation strategy should be authentic to your brand. To help ensure you’re creating a checkout donation strategy that meets your brand’s needs and your customer’s expectations, here are three tactics you can use to integrate giving during the checkout process.
Enable Donations for Your eCommerce Experience
When implementing a donation strategy for your online Shopify checkout experience, you have the power to engage all of your website visitors with your social impact initiatives. As soon as they enter your site, you can catch their attention with hero or eyebrow banners that promote your donation strategy. This is an easy and effective way to continue guiding your website visitors down the path of conversion to complete a purchase.
On your cart or checkout page, your customers will be able to see your donation widget that will:
- Tell them how much is being donated if they place an order
- Inform them which nonprofit or cause the donation will benefit
- Give them the opportunity to learn more about how the donation process works
A great way to make your Shopify donation checkout experience unique is to give your customers the opportunity to search and select a cause of their choice to support on their purchase. Just like your brand has your favorite causes, so do your customers. Enabling them to search for their local animal shelter or community elementary school has the power to create more meaningful customer experiences that can drive loyalty and lifetime value.
To customize your checkout donation strategy and tune your efforts in to a single cause, you can choose to set a default cause on any nonprofit. Setting a default cause will ensure that as soon as your customers enter your site, the donation widget will be pre-loaded with that specific cause already set to be supported on the purchase. You’ll still be able to empower your customers to search and select a cause of their own if you’d like, but this ensures that your favorite cause is always being highlighted.
Integrate A Donation Strategy for Your Shopify POS Experience
You can also enable donations for your Shopify POS checkout experience to engage your in-store customers in your donation strategy as well. By enabling donations for both your eCommerce and your POS experiences, you can create an omnichannel giving strategy that meets your customers no matter where they are.
You can then use in-store print marketing to inform your customers of your donation strategy as soon as they walk in. This will help to ensure that your customers are aware of your initiatives and invites them to get involved by making a purchase.
To make the POS checkout process even more impactful, you can choose to support local nonprofits or organizations that are well-known around your community. Whether supporting the cause in-store or taking your efforts one step further to host a community event in support of the cause, this can help to bring in customers from the area and encourage them to make a purchase, knowing that by doing so, they’re helping to give back to their own community.
Empower Your Customers to Get Involved with Round-Up and Add-On Donations
Another tactic for checkout donations is empowering your customers to either round-up their purchase or add-on a donation to their purchase. This is an easy way to invite your customers to get involved in the giving and create a donation of their own.
To take this tactic one step further, you could reward your customers for making a donation by awarding them loyalty points through Yotpo Loyalty. This integration enables you to reward your customers for creating donations on their purchases, and gives your customers the opportunity to redeem their loyalty points for additional donations later on.
Brands Who Are Integrating Shopify Donations at Checkout
To give you some inspiration for beginning your checkout donation strategy, here are some examples of brands who are leveraging the tactics included above.
KraveBeauty
KraveBeauty has enabled a donation checkout strategy for their eCommerce experience. When customers shop from their website, KraveBeauty has a default cause set to donate 1% towards the Women’s Earth Alliance. Throughout their purchase journey, KraveBeauty customers can see how much of their purchase will be donated once they place their order, at no extra cost to them.
Dolce Vita
Dolce Vita empowers their customers to add-on a donation amount of their choice during the Shopify checkout process. To ensure the activation is successful, Dolce Vita shares a “how-to” on their website to help their customers better understand how to create a donation with their purchase.
goodMRKT
goodMRKT recently launched their new checkout donation strategy by using the Customer Round-Up Donation feature for Shopify POS through the Change Commerce app. They launched their program during the Retail Innovation Conference & Expo (RICE) event to enable customer donations as well as donate 1% of sales to support PAVE GLOBAL.
"We're excited to implement this targeted giving initiative to PAVE GLOBAL during RICE. The ability to expand our giving via the ShoppingGives Round-Up Donations option paired with our donation of 1% of each purchase enables us to create omni-channel giving matching our in-store experience. This is a great way for us to meet the asks of our community of shoppers, allowing them to join us in giving back even more." - Harry Cunningham, Co-founder and Chief Brand Officer at goodMRKT
Awara Sleep
Awara Sleep leverages donations through their eCommerce website to support Trees.org whenever someone purchases a mattress. Through their donation strategy, Awara donates enough funds on the purchase of every mattress to plant 10 trees, at no extra cost to their customers.
Aloha
Aloha is a great example of a brand who leverages multiple donation checkout tactics. Aloha donates a portion of proceeds on behalf of their customers while also enabling their customers to either round-up their purchase or add-on a donation amount of their choice.
Ready to Get Started?
As consumers continue to buy with their values, integrating a donation strategy for your checkout experience can help you keep up with consumer demand and stay one step ahead of your competitors. Get started on integrating a checkout donation strategy for your brand now.