Hi, I'm new to coffee cup and here is my situation. I manage a non-profit organization and we are going to begin to accept credit card donations. Our current website is through vchurches and they do not allow secure pages for donations to be made. If I create a website with coffee cup and publish, can I use our current web address? If so, someone please explain, in simple terms, how to do that. I consider myself literate with computers, but have no clue about domain, or web hosting. Thanks in advance for your help! ~Carole

Short answer Carole is, yes! The rest of the answer is a bit longer. When you purchase a CoffeeCup program you can set up a FREE hosting account on their S-Drive system. You can link your current web address to that site. Some features are limited unless you upgrade to a paid account. Not required in all cases, simply depends on what you want to do with the site. Someone else here will have to run you through swapping your domain name over. It is a process and takes a day or two but really isn't that hard.

About your donations...If you simply want to collect donations, and let users use a credit/debit card, then that is a cake walk with any web site. No secure pages required if you are not collecting personal information yourself. With CoffeeCup's Web Form Builder you can create a donation form, linked to a paypal account, and insert that form into any web site. PayPal handles all the credit card info and places the money in your account. Their web site is secure! You will get an email showing who donated and how much. You can set up an email to go out to the donor to thank them. Best way to do it. If anyone decides they want the money back, or if a credit card turns out to be bad, then it's easy to refund and/or solve problems through paypal.

Let us know if you still need more information.

Thanks for the info! And we are currently using paypal, but want to switch to accepting cards ourselves. So I would need a secure site. Do you know if I would be able to accept donations without the use of the shopping cart software?

Yes you can. But you are correct. You want web hosting that is secured with SSL. I'm not sure if S-Drive is, someone else may chime in here to help out. If not, you will want to find a good hosting company that provides SSL security. I use GoDaddy myself, but it's not the cheapest!

If you do not want to use PayPal you will still need some way to handle credit card processing, and my understanding is that it is full of, um, disadvantages. Meaning charge-backs and other problems that come up will have to be handled by you. For the little bit of fee that paypal charges, it's really the better way to go. My opinion.

We already have a credit card processing company through authorize.net. I know about having to handle cards myself, but we are a small non-profit and I don't expect chargebacks since we don't sell any products. It's strictly donations. Thanks again for all your help and support. I hope I can find the answers I need. I don't want to purchase any software until I know for sure I can transfer our domain over and how to do that.

I know you can, just not how. If you don't get an answer here soon, then open a support topic. This is a user forum and they will be able to give you more direct answers. Just go to your name at the top right, then select 'Your Support Room' and open a support topic. Good luck!

webform builder has authorize.net already integrated for automatic set up

Never used it, so i would give the program a free trial run,

Setting up domain name is relitively easy, usually just a change in the cname records

if you have any problem open a support ticket and Scott or another CC member will help you set it up