Integrated e-commerce
Single product purchases/event booking
The TLE payment form can be utilised to merchandise any product, service or event where the data required to perform the transaction can be captured within a single form. Where a site is promoting multiple items for purchase, the traditional product catalogue/shopping basket approach is more appropriate (see below). Both approaches can be adopted within a single site as required.
Product catalogue
The TLE product catalogue enables you to merchandise multiple items and for the site visitor to add items to their shopping basket before proceeding to checkout and make payment. Individual products can have variants (e.g. a t-shirt might have colour and size variations). Discounts can be supported, with the potential to offer different levels of discount to different logged-in user groups.
Media purchases
The e-Commerce media module allows a visitor to purchase downloadable content such as documents, audio or video files and to gain immediate access to the purchased items as soon as payment is approved.
Donations
Many charities opt to utilise third-party service providers such as JustGiving to process donations. TLE’s solution can of course support links to external sites if this is the approach that you wish to adopt. In addition, TLE offers its payment form as a means for you to develop a customised donations page, with the payment processed via your chosen payment gateway (see “e-Commerce Pre-Requisites” below).
Personal fundraising page
The TLE personal fundraising page feature enables a website visitor to register with your site and to create a page that describes their particular interest in supporting your work. The purpose of their page is to encourage other site visitors to make a donation towards their personal fundraising goal. So, an individual might be planning to undertake a sponsored event on your behalf or might wish to create a fund in tribute to a relative. The creator of the page can specify their fundraising target and their current performance against that target will be displayed. Donors can add a personal message to accompany their donations which can be displayed within the page if the donor wishes.
GiftAid calculator
For fundraising charities that rely upon donations from members of the public, GiftAid can make a significant difference to the value of each donation. The TLE GiftAid calculator is an interactive tool that displays the real value of a donation to the recipient of that donation.
Advanced donations feature
The probability of a site visitor making a donation to a particular cause is increased if they have some emotional engagement with the cause. The use of video or images is an effective means to illustrate a story and to create that engagement. The advanced donation feature enables a page author to specify a number of images or videos that will appear randomly within a donations page when that page is visited.
Site administrators can establish which image or video was displayed when a visitor made a donation and thereby can determine the most effective stories for encouraging visitor engagement. Such pages can use an embedded GiftAid calculator to show the potential donor the value of their proposed donation if giftaided, increasing the probability of their agreeing to this.
e-commerce pre-requisites
In order to implement the e-Commerce functionality described above (other than taking donations on an external website such as JustGiving), clients require an Internet Merchant Account (the necessary banking relationship) and an account with a suitable provider of payment gateway services. TLE supports integration with the leading payment gateway providers, including WorldPay, Sage Pay, Barclays ePDQ and PayPal; please contact us for a list of currently-supported gateways. We are happy to undertake bespoke integration at extra cost with gateways that are not currently on our supported list.
TLE offers a shared VeriSign (SSL) certificate for securing online transactions and this meets the needs of the majority of TLE’s clients. Certain payment gateways require the client to purchase a dedicated SSL certificate and some clients prefer to have their own certificate. TLE can support this requirement, subject to the client meeting the cost of the purchase of the certificate and its implementation.
For any client wishing to utilise the TLE e-Commerce features, we would of course expect to discuss these matters fully prior to proceeding.
