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Ecommerce and online shop mean the same thing here, and neither means a charity shop in the high-street sense. This is your own shop, selling your own merchandise, run from your Zeffy account. You list items with a price, a description and an image, buyers pick a size or a colour, pay by card, and get a receipt.
What is different is where the sale goes. A retail platform puts your buyer in a separate system with its own login and its own reporting. In Zeffy, that buyer lands in the same place as the person who gave to your spring appeal and the family who bought tickets to the summer fete. Selling merchandise is usually one of several things you are running rather than a shop you are opening. So when you email supporters before Christmas, whoever bought a t-shirt in March is already on the list.
You can have a shop live the same afternoon. Create a campaign, choose the online shop form type, then add each item with a title, price, description and image. Set the quantity you have so stock counts itself down, add sizes or colours if you need them, and share the link or put it on your website. Every sale shows up in your dashboard as it happens.
Most charities start smaller than they expect to. One item, one photograph and a price is already a working shop, and you can add the rest once you see what sells. If you are running a donation form or an event already, the shop sits alongside it in the same account rather than becoming a second system to look after.
No platform fee, no transaction fee, no card fee. Ever. A £25 shirt puts £25 in your account, which is not how shop builders usually work: most charge a monthly subscription whether you sell anything or not, then take a percentage of each sale on top. This is not a free tier with the useful parts locked away either, so your shop will not hit a paywall the month it starts working. Zeffy is free to your charity with no conditions attached. Separately, anyone paying through a Zeffy checkout is offered the option to add a voluntary contribution, on its own line, and they are free to lower it or set it to zero.
Both, and they are set up separately. Add a variant type of size or colour to any item, or both on the same item, and enter the stock for each option so a sold-out medium stops being sellable. Discount codes are their own setting: give a code a percentage or a fixed amount in pounds, then apply it to every item, to specific items only, or to the whole order total. You can cap how many times a code is used, and buyers can use one code per purchase.
One thing worth knowing before you build. The checkout handles one selection at a time rather than a full basket, so a parent buying a youth large and an adult small adds them as two selections. That is fine for a handful of items and worth planning around if your list is long.
Stock counts itself down. Enter an available quantity for each item, or for each size and colour if you are using variants, and Zeffy reduces it as purchases come in. When an option is running low, supporters can see how many are left, which nudges the last few out the door and stops someone buying a medium you do not have.
You choose collection, delivery, or both, and buyers choose between them before they pay. Turn on delivery and set your postage cost, add a collection address with any instructions, and both options appear at checkout with the price attached, so nobody is guessing whether postage is included. When you need somewhere to send the parcel, add the Full address question so you have the postcode before you start packing.
After the sale, orders sit in a fulfilment tab where you mark each one not fulfilled, ready, or fulfilled, and filter by status while you work through them. Zeffy emails the buyer when you mark an order ready for collection or on its way, so the follow-up messages you would otherwise write by hand are already covered.
You still choose your courier and take the parcels to the Post Office yourself. Zeffy does not price by weight or distance, so the postage you set is one flat amount for every buyer who chooses delivery.
Shop sales land in the same contact list as everything else you run. When someone buys a shirt they get a contact record with that purchase on it, sitting alongside their donations, event tickets and memberships, so you are not exporting three spreadsheets to work out who your regulars are.
One caveat worth knowing: records are matched on email address, so a supporter who buys with a work address and gives with a personal one shows up twice until you merge them. For the full picture see CRM and supporter management.
No. Two things qualify you: being a charity or another not-for-profit organisation in the UK, and having a bank account in the organisation's name. You do not need a Registered Charity Number or a Companies House CRN, so a student group selling hoodies or an unregistered community organisation selling cakes at the fete opens a shop on the same terms as a registered charity. What does not qualify is an individual selling for themselves, a business, or an organisation with no bank account in its own name.
Being eligible to claim Gift Aid is a separate question, and it makes no difference to the shop either way, since what you sell is not Gift Aid eligible in the first place.
No. Gift Aid cannot be claimed on ticket or item purchases, so it is not available on online shop forms. A hoodie or a cookbook is a sale rather than a gift, and the same goes for an event ticket or an auction lot. How VAT applies to what you sell is a question for HMRC or your accountant rather than for us.
The straightforward route is to keep the two things side by side. Run the shop for merchandise, and run a donation form for gifts, where Gift Aid is offered once your account is connected to Swiftaid and the declaration is confirmed at the point someone gives. A supporter can buy a t-shirt and give separately, and both land on the same contact record.
The shop you built online is also your stall at the fete. Print a QR code and let buyers pay from their own phone, which captures everything the online checkout does, including the size they picked. Or take a card in person with Tap to Pay, using the phone in your pocket, with no reader and no dongle to buy. It solves the problem every stall has now, which is that far fewer supporters turn up carrying cash.
Tap to Pay is quicker in a queue, but it records the payment without the size, so that part you will be writing down yourself. Worth deciding which one you are using before the event rather than during it.
Clothing is the most common answer, and branded t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags and caps all work the same way: one item with an image and a price, with size or colour options underneath.
Plenty of charities sell beyond merchandise too, from cakes and plants at a summer fete to cookbooks, Christmas cards and event extras, and you can sell digital downloads like a printable or a guide.
Zeffy does not publish a restricted-items list, so the real question is usually what your supporters will buy rather than what the platform permits.
Zeffy sells, you supply. There is no print-on-demand built in, so your items come from your own printer or supplier, and someone on your team holds them until they go out. The way most charities avoid a cupboard full of unsold mediums is to run the shop as a pre-order window: open it for two weeks, let the sizes come in, then place one print run against real orders. Set a maximum quantity per item if you want a hard cap, and close the shop when the window ends.
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