Tip jar service?

Man this off-line blogging is a blessing and a curse, isn’t it?

Now that Amazon Honor System has gone away, what other options do I have for soliciting donations on my navaid.com website? I get most of my donations through PayPal, but some people preferred to stay away from PayPal for some reason. Amazon has a donation service, but only for registered charities.

We’re only talking about $5 or $10 a month, so it’s not like I need a full ecommerce solution.

5 thoughts on “Tip jar service?”

  2. I encountered the same thing WRT PayPal when I was selling geocoins. Some people thought it was Evil or something, but eventually most of them used it because I didn’t want to handle cash transactions. I think in the earliest days of PayPal there was an incident where someone was collecting contributions for something via PayPal and PayPal felt it was an inappropriate use of their service and froze/seized the funds, but that was a long time ago. Now it is a perfectly legitimate means of processing payments online.

    Of course, whenever you receive a payment they’re going to take their slice per transaction so hopefully people will contribute enough to make it worth while.

  3. Paypal still has problems with stuff like that. I know someone who was trying to collect shared contributions for a friend in our community who lost everything in a fire last year and they ran into Paypal grief. And at the time one of the other contributers was involved in another “raise money to help X” fundraisers and that one was apparently also getting Paypal grief.

    Me, I just am unsurprised that Paypal’s TOS allows it to sieze/not-allow-transfer-of money with no recourse, because that’s they way deregulated capitalism is supposed to work – caveat emptor.

    My own reasons for avoiding paypal when other options exist are more pragmatic – the e-mail I use for paypal is one I have only ever used for paypal and ebay, and it’s the only address I have received “realistic” phishing attempts on. It doesn’t give me much faith in trusting their security model and providing them with a bank account to “validate” my account.

  4. I’ve been using PayPal since it was fairly new, and had my account linked to it for at least 5 years, and never had a problem. And real email from PayPal always uses your full name in the salutation, unlike phishing scams.

  5. An option to the tip jar might be to create a wishlist with someone like Amazon or ThinkGeek and encourage people to buy you items off it if they want to contribute. 🙂

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