👍

Don't know who Pennies are?

Find out more about this company and the service they offer here.

Introduction

The Pennies integration provides a MVP implementation that logs donations made by customers of your store with Pennies.

What can it do?

📘

Aurora's current implementation is only intended to provide an MVP and if the features on offer are missing something you need, just let us know and we can look into future feature support.

In the meantime, we hope the integration on offer allow you and your customers to do some good until a more complete offering is made available.

Currently, Aurora's Pennies integration will deliver your donations to Pennies once a week, based on the following conditions:

• The order (or its ordered items) either:
  • Are in the Dispatched status.
  • Were paid for a week or more ago.
• The order (or its ordered items) are not:
  • Cancelled.

It does this very simply by identifying donation products in your Store and when these are added to the basket and purchased, the value attributed to them for the order, is considered a donation and thus sent to Pennies.

🚧

Donations are final

Once a donation has been logged with (sent to) Pennies, they cannot be revoked. As such, there is up to a week's grace period to resolve order issues. If the order is cancelled before it is logged with Pennies, then it will never be sent and thus not need paying.

If the order is still valid after the grace period, the donations are sent to Pennies. After this, no further changes can be made to the donation. Refunds cannot be made for the donations made in this way, i.e. you may be able to refund the total value paid for the order if you wish, however Pennies will still require the donation be honored to them.

Enabling the Pennies Integration

There are three steps to enable the Pennies integration in Aurora:

• Configure the Pennies Integration.
• Create the donation product(s).
• Add the details to your Front-end (strictly speaking this is optional).

Configure the Pennies Integration

📘

Configure the Pennies integration in the Aurora Back-end under Store > Settings > Feeds > Pennies Donations.

You will be issued account details by Pennies during the onboarding process with their service. Once you have these details, you should configure the settings below in Aurora.

Create the donation product(s)

Aurora identifies donations very simply as a (or some) product(s) in your Store that are nominated to be donations.

When these products are purchased, Aurora will inform Pennies that a donation, of the value attributed to the product, has occurred.

As far as Aurora and its entire Order Management Workflow is concerned, there is no difference between a donation and any other product in your Store. As such, you can manage your donation products in the same way you do all other products. You may also set the donation levels you wish to support very simply by setting varying prices on the donation products themselves.

Loosely speaking, to create a donation product, please following these steps:

1. Create a Product Additional Field and name it "Is a Donation Product" (this step is only required once).
2. Create a product (following the usual means by which you achieve this in Aurora).
3. Set the "Is a Donation Product" field to 1 (this can happen during product creation in step #2 if you wish).

This product will now be logged with Pennies when it is purchased (assuming you have the integration enabled).

📘

Step #1 need only be performed once, after which steps #2 & #3 can be repeated as many times as you wish to have donation tiers/products.

Add the details to your Front-end (strictly speaking this is optional).

📘

This step is optional

Having created your donation product and enabled the Pennies integration, it should now be possible for customers to find and simply purchase your Donation product should they/you wish to make donations in this manor.

Any other means of adding the donation(s) to an order will need to be added by your Front-end Team(s).

By default, Aurora does not treat a donation product any differently than any other and so if you would like to allow your customers to 'opt-in' to donation during the basket and checkout journeys, you will need to add this to your front-end.

Doing this could be a simple matter of adding a "Donate Now" button to your checkout, which adds the donation product to the basket. The choice is yours and the process to do this using the Aurora Ajax Library can be see here.

How do we pay Pennies?

Aurora does not in any way deal with Donation reconciliation and so you will be required to negotiation payment with Pennies directly.