How Oceana makes its storefronts unsinkable

04:04 PM Oct 29, 2009

Thanks to Jonathan Frank for the guest post on how his shop, Oceana, configures storefronts like its adoption center to get the most from its Salsa storefronts. Look for a few of these tips to appear in the next Holiday Fundraising webinar on Nov. 9.

When using the storefront for a premium-driven fundraising campaign, there are a few important things to be aware of.

1) Shipping information. Be sure to exploit the functionality allowing users to input separate billing and shipping (it's an automatic default on the storefront page). Using conditional triggers will also help deliver the appropriate receipt (i.e., Trigger A if ship to and bill to addresses are the same; Trigger B if not). Here's how to set that up:

• Under the "Options" tab of Trigger A, for use when there's no separate shipping address, enter this (including the quotes) in the Send Conditions field: "[[name]]"==""
• Under the "Options" tab of Trigger B, for use when the buyer has provided a different shipping address, enter "[[name]]"!=""
• Then, select both triggers (along with any internal alert triggers) in the storefront setup

2) Custom fields. Be cognizant of the custom fields you use to collect certain information. For instance, we have a "Name on Adoption Certificate" field that is merely a VARCHAR custom field. If someone makes multiple adoptions and wants a different name on each adoption, the field will be overwritten with whatever name was entered last. Merging custom fields on internal notification triggers can help insure that the information is preserved in the right hands.

3) Reporting. You're going to have to fulfill your premiums, so be sure to set up a clear, convenient report that meshes with your fulfillment vendor or that you can easily understand if you're doing your own fulfillment.

4) Stay organized. When premiums are involved, especially for holidays, donors will want to know when they're getting their premium. I suggest setting up an internal trigger for each sale and putting the order number in the subject line. (Oceana does this with a merge field, so the subject as configured in the Salsa trigger reads: Order #[[donation_KEY]] Details; merge fields in the message body record the buyer's information.) You can just push those triggers to a folder in Outlook, so if someone calls in about an order, you already have all their information conveniently stored in Outlook and arranged by order number (just don't forget to include the same [[donation_KEY]] order number on the donor's receipt).

5) For high-end customization... The best tip to thoroughly re-style the page is also to get someone involved who is fluent (or fairly knowledgable) in HTML, Javascript and CSS. There's a lot of flexibility possible.

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