Setting up paypal to accept donations.

[skyhawk]

So yeah, I want to put a little donation link on my website to paypal so if people feel something is worth donating/paying for, they can drop some money into my little account. You know, kinda like the iDevGame one.

Any advice or links on how to do this?

[Frank C.]

Sign up with PayPal, login, hit "Merchant Tools" then "Donations" (might have to do a text search on that page for the link - IIRC, it's kinda buried). Fill out the forms and paste the resulting code on your site.

[Najdorf]

If you have a "personal account" you can only get donations through paypal (no transaction costs), if you upgrade to "premium" you can get also donations through credit card but you will pay 3%+$0.4 per transaction no matter if paypal or credit card. Upgrading from personal to premium is a matter of clicking a button, but you can't downgrade after.

[Malarkey]

Also, some people are mightily opposed to Paypal so in addition to accepting donations via them, I also use the Amazon Honor System (http://zme.amazon.com/exec/varzea/subst/fx/help/how-we-know.html/058-7903542-8184457).

[Najdorf]

Not that anyone donates really in my experience (well some of course do, just really few). Shareware, even with very naive protection systems, with cracks and working serials spread all over the internet, is 10x more profitable.

[Jake]

Not that anyone donates really in my experience (well some of course do, just really few). Shareware, even with very naive protection systems, with cracks and working serials spread all over the internet, is 10x more profitable.

I agree. I started charging "anything > $0.01" for escape, then increase it to $10, then $15. I never saw a decline in sales, but profit rose 50% each time.

There has got to be some good info still on http://forums.indiegamer.com/ . Basically it comes down to if someone is going to pay ANYTHING for a game, then the price doesn't matter (to a certain extent, most people found $19.95 was the sweet spot when I researched it before).

[skyhawk]

Not that anyone donates really in my experience (well some of course do, just really few). Shareware, even with very naive protection systems, with cracks and working serials spread all over the internet, is 10x more profitable.

how naive?

[Najdorf]

how naive?

Arbitrarily™

Stuff like "42 is the registration code" would be enough to get you 10x more than asking donations. My estimate is that less than 1 on 10000 donates for games (based on the time i kept rocky the monky donationware)

http://www.google.com/search?q=the+answer+to+life%2C+the+universe%2C+and +everything

[skyhawk]

*chuckles* thank you

[mac_girl]

Also, some people are mightily opposed to Paypal so in addition to accepting donations via them, I also use the Amazon Honor System (http://zme.amazon.com/exec/varzea/subst/fx/help/how-we-know.html/058-7903542-8184457).

Just curious why are some people mightily opposed to Paypal?

[Jake]

Just curious why are some people mightily opposed to Paypal?

I think you might be a little sarcastic... but I never will miss an opportunity to state how much I hate paypal.

http://www.paypalsucks.com/

And after I was screwed selling a laptop on ebay my brother asked me if I did this -
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=bomb+paypal+window&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

[mac_girl]

I think you might be a little sarcastic... but I never will miss an opportunity to state how much I hate paypal.

http://www.paypalsucks.com/

And after I was screwed selling a laptop on ebay my brother asked me if I did this -
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=bomb+paypal+window&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

No, I was honestly asking because I didn't know people hated paypal o.o
I can understand though if you had a bad experience with them you would not like them.

I recently signed up with plimus.com they seem really good. I've been searching a while now and I found out that Digital River owns almost all of them (ways to get credit card payments) but I don't like how Digital River seems. Now to actually finish my programs :blush: