Advice on e-commerce for a nonprofit group?

[Renegade Pawn]

Hey everybody... had this site recommended to me by a friend who said the worlds greatest geeks hung out here. Well, now I'm here too, so there goes the neighbourhood, I guess. Anyhow, enough blatant flattery, here's my questions:

I'm the tech rat for a food bank around here, and they asked me if I could set up their web site to take credit card donations online. Now I have been a W9X tech for a few years but have never done anything more complex than Geocities on the net... is this a fairly simple procedure for me to learn, or should I be seeking professional help?

If this is something learnable, I would appreciate any handy recommendations for where to go for knowledge. If it is something I should be paying someone to handle, I would appreciate any recommendations you have as to who is good.

I checked into a couple of "charity malls" and donation portals, and I have to admit I am kind of suspicious of them. <a href="http://www.charity.ca" target="_blank">www.charity.ca</a> looked good but it has been purchased by some company that is collecting a lot of information about donors and I suspect bombarding them with spam...

Has anyone got any good or bad experiences to relate about websites like that?

Oh yeah, P.S. I am Canadian? So any US tech rats answering this, I still appreciate your advice, but speak slowly and add an "eh" to the end.

Cheers!

[ScottieM3]

Hey.. this is fairly simple just find a hosting site that offers ssl or ssh (pretty much an ecomerce package, for dbase reasons also) and then decide if you want to use an online credit card processing agency or to just log the cc numbers and write an output program for the organization to manually process the donations. The second would be overall cheaper but if you wanted to go with the first Verisign.com is a decent cc processor.

also encrypt the cc numbers that you save <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

[Quasited]

I work for Eastern National in Fort Washington, PA. We are a non-profit organization that assists with the National Park Service. We have E-Commerce (www.eparks.com) and several other Web Pages (www.easternnational.org is one of them). We use a SQL based system that Uses MS Site Server. This stuff is not cheap even at Non-profit prices (about $5000 just for the software). If you are looking for ways to purchase software and hardware at lower prices look into Gifts in Kind (they themselves are Non-profit and organize the non-profit discounts for easy access) and other companies that sell Non-profit licensing. They will want to know asap if you are 503(c) (the non-profit IRS document). Insight and CDW both sell non-profit licensing for MS and you can get a 10% discount for CDW throughGifts in Kind.
You should really look into these.
Chat later

[confus-ed]

Ok Beam me up scottie, i trust ya...

I see Charity is not free merely 8% - very good <img border="0" title="" alt="[Eek!]" src="eek.gif" />

I can think of uk providers who do it for a set cost per donation for uk registered charities very cheaply like £1.00 but if the donations are only small that's pants!