Shopify for Nonprofits: Donations, Fees and Tax Receipts

A nonprofit that wants to collect money online arrives at the same three questions in the same order. Can our store take a donation when there is nothing to buy? What does that donation cost us once it clears? And who sends the donor the acknowledgment their accountant will ask for? This page answers those three, in that order.

Can a Shopify Store Take a Donation With No Product?

Shopify states the headline answer on its own nonprofit page, and it states it without conditions beyond one: the organization is registered. That is worth reading literally, because the registered status is the thing every rate, exemption and deductible receipt later in this page hangs on.

What sits behind that sentence is thinner than it looks. The Help Center pages we read carry no dedicated page on donations, fundraising or charities at all — the box under Who Issues the Donor's Tax Receipt lists the surfaces that were checked. Everything documented about collecting donations lives inside features built for something else, which is why the mechanics below have to be assembled rather than looked up.

If the store itself does not exist yet, our guide to building the storefront covers that part; from here on this page assumes the store and deals only with the money.

What Shopify Payments' Terms Actually Require

The US Shopify Payments terms include a restricted-use clause covering transactions that do not arise from your sale of goods or service to a customer, and a separate covenant in the representations section. Neither clause names donations. The same terms do send Restricted Businesses to additional review and approval, and take the categories from the payment processors in your country: for US merchants, Shopify's Payment Processor List names two, Stripe and PayPal. Stripe's restricted-businesses list files fundraising by nonprofits and charities under Restricted, and PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy requires pre-approval for collecting donations as a charity or non-profit organization — in both cases a review, not a ban. Outside the US, check your country's row in Shopify's Payment Processor List. The covenant itself reads:

Read alongside the routes in the next section, that covenant explains a design choice rather than a contradiction. Every mechanism Shopify documents for collecting a donation keeps the money inside a checkout: a tip on an order, an amount added to an order total, or a product with a price.

That is also why a donation behaves like an order everywhere else — in your reporting, in your payouts, and in what the customer receives by email. The mechanics of the payment layer itself are covered in our Shopify Payments guide.

The Four Ways Money Actually Reaches You

The choice between them is not a matter of taste. Each route puts the money somewhere different, hands the receipt to a different party, and stops for a different reason. The table is the short version; the four subsections under it are where each route's boundary actually sits.

Online Tipping: Shopify's Own Route

The feature was not built for nonprofits, but Shopify documents the nonprofit use explicitly, which is the difference between a workaround and a supported route. The labels are the whole mechanism: what the shopper reads is yours to write.

The boundary is in the feature's own definition: online tipping gives customers the option to add a tip to their order on the payment page when they check out. A tip is an addition to an order, so the route exists only where an order does. Customers can add it as a percentage of the order total or as a custom amount, but a tip cannot exceed 100% of the order total, and tips are limited to $1,000. It also produces no separate document — the donor gets an order confirmation, and the acknowledgment remains your job.

Donation Apps: What They Add at Checkout

Shopify's own blog describes the category clearly enough to plan against. Two capabilities come up repeatedly, and they are the reasons to pay for an app at all:

• A round-up — a standard donation option at checkout, or a “round up the change” choice for customers.
• A separate receipt — the app sends customized donation receipts to donors, so they can keep it in their records separate from their purchase.

One structural point is worth knowing before you shop. None of the donation and tip listings we checked shows Shopify as the developer, and Shopify's own index of the apps it builds contains no donation or nonprofit entry. Treat the list of apps in this article as what was found on September 19, 2026 rather than as everything that exists — the App Store renders its search results in the browser, so completeness cannot be proved.

Selling the Donation as a Product

The third route needs no app at all. Shopify's blog lists product-specific donations among the options of one donation app, Givz — every shoe purchase raises $5 for a specific charity — and a nonprofit can run the same mechanic without an app, with the product itself priced as the gift. It costs the card rate and no app charge, plus Shopify's third-party transaction fee when the payment goes through a third-party provider. It works on an empty catalog because it creates the catalog, and what the donor receives is an order confirmation; the written acknowledgment is a separate document, covered further down.

Where PayPal Giving Fund Fits — and Where It Does Not

This is the one route where the fee genuinely disappears, and the reason it disappears is that the donation never touches your checkout. It is worth knowing precisely, because a fee-free donation is exactly the promise a merchant hopes applies to their own store.

The trade is visibility for cost. Money raised there does not appear in your Shopify reporting, does not join the same donor list as your store orders, and does not feed the same thank-you flow. For a campaign that lives on social media it can be the right answer; for donations you want sitting alongside merch and ticket revenue in one admin, it is a parallel channel rather than a replacement.

What a Donation Actually Costs You

Separating the layers matters because only one of them is negotiable. The plan is a subscription you would pay with or without donations, the card rate is set by whoever processes the payment, with Shopify's third-party fee added off Shopify Payments: on a payment through a third-party provider, Shopify adds 2% on the entry tier, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced on top of the provider's rate. The third layer only exists if you chose a route that needs an app.

The third row is where the differences bite, because the published structures mix subscriptions and commissions. Zestard's Easy Donation carries 0.05% on collected donations on both of its tiers, on top of a $6.99 or $9.99 monthly plan — a third-party vendor's price for its own app, not a Shopify plan or a Shopify rate.

Where $100 Goes on a $100 Donation

Work it once and carry the number. At the entry tier's online card rate, a $100 donation costs $3.20 to process and leaves $96.80 in your account. Nothing about the amount being a donation changes that arithmetic — it is the same rate an order for a mug would pay.

The reason to hold that same $96.80 in mind is that every app comparison later is really a comparison of what comes out of it. A commission deducted from the donation lands on the $96.80; a monthly subscription lands on your budget instead, and is therefore cheap per gift at volume and expensive at five donations a month.

PayPal, Stripe and Third-Party Gateways

The payment-provider layer is the one most nonprofits get wrong. Two of the three providers below publish something a charity can apply for; none of it arrives automatically.

PayPal merchant fees, Stripe's nonprofit fee-discount and restricted-business pages, and Shopify's payment gateway availability and PayPal provider pages, read September 27, 2026. For US stores, Shopify Payments' terms take their restricted businesses from the payment processors' lists, and Shopify's Payment Processor List names two for the United States, Stripe and PayPal.

Two numbers above come with conditions. PayPal's charity rate of 1.99% plus $0.49 applies to domestic transactions in the US only, after the Confirmed Charity approval lands. A US store takes PayPal only as PayPal Wallet through Shopify Payments — PayPal Express isn't available to US merchants — and with Shopify Payments activated, PayPal payments carry no Shopify third-party transaction fee. No PayPal or Shopify page we read says the charity rate applies to Wallet payments, and PayPal says not all payment types are eligible for charity pricing. So if Shopify Payments won't approve a US store, PayPal isn't the fallback either.

Beyond registered nonprofit status with valid tax documentation and operating in an eligible region, Stripe's discount tests your payment mix: at least 80% of Stripe payment volume has to come from tax-deductible donations, and membership fees, tuition, ticket sales, registration fees and auction payments are each named as not counting toward it.

Those are terms for a Stripe account, which a store in a Shopify Payments country can't connect as its gateway: Shopify's payment gateway availability page says Stripe won't be available to activate there because it is Shopify Payments' banking partner, and that standalone Stripe isn't the fallback if Shopify Payments won't take your store — a third-party provider is.

Stripe's restricted-businesses list places fundraising by nonprofits and charities under Restricted, which means additional due diligence rather than a ban. The same Stripe list supports organizations fundraising for a charitable purpose only in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, and prohibits them in all other countries. Stripe's nonprofit fee-discount page lists wider eligible regions, including New Zealand and 20 European countries, so the two Stripe pages diverge; our FAQ on whether a nonprofit in Europe or New Zealand can get Stripe's discount covers what that gap means for a store on Shopify Payments.

If the gateway question is still open, our comparison of Shopify payment gateways covers the general trade-offs.

Does Shopify Discount Any of This? The NPO Lite and NPO Full Plans

Shopify's nonprofit page names two plans, NPO Lite and NPO Full, and describes the pricing only as great nonprofit rates with an instruction to contact support for more details. No figure we have found on Shopify's own pages — the nonprofit page or the pricing page — puts a percentage or an amount on either plan, so the discount cannot be budgeted from public information. Our FAQ on whether Shopify offers a nonprofit discount covers how to apply.

Tax on Your Shopify Bill Is a Separate Question

This one is easy to miss because it points the other way: not what the donor pays, but what Shopify charges you. The page opens the subject with a single sentence.

What follows that sentence is a list, and one of its items is the one nonprofits are looking for:

• Registered non-profit organizations (501(c)(3) in the United States)

After the list, the same page adds that the documentation required for a tax exemption varies by region — which is why this is a Support request with paperwork attached rather than a toggle in your admin. Ask for it separately from the nonprofit plan; they are two different requests answered by two different processes.

Can Donors Give Every Month?

Monthly giving is the single feature most likely to move a nonprofit from the free route to a paid one, so it is worth being precise about where it lives. Shopify documents subscriptions as a way to sell products on a schedule; the surfaces we read do not extend that to a donation with nothing attached, and they do not name a plan requirement for the subscriptions app either. The general mechanics of subscription billing are covered in our guide to recurring payments on Shopify.

Which Tier Actually Carries Recurring — and Receipts

Compare these by the line that carries your requirement, not by the headline price. The cheapest app in the table is not the cheapest route if the feature you need sits three tiers up, and the free tier that carries recurring includes only a set donation volume — its listing does not say what happens past it.

Who Issues the Donor's Tax Receipt?

Start with the rule rather than the tooling, because the rule does not move. The threshold at which a written acknowledgment becomes required in the US is $250 for a single contribution, and the acknowledgment has to come from the organization receiving the gift — not from the processor, and not from Shopify. The IRS puts the duty to request and obtain it on the donor, so in practice your donors need it from you.

The IRS page continues into the list of what that document has to contain, and that list is the specification your acknowledgment has to meet. What no Shopify page we have found does is name what produces it on a Shopify store — not the checkout, not the order confirmation, not a setting in the admin.

That silence is exactly the gap donation apps sell into: Shopify's own blog describes apps that automatically send customized donation receipts to donors, so donors can keep them separate from their purchase records, and the app listings put that feature on specific tiers.

What You Settle Before You Ask for Money

The second gate catches organizations that have already cleared the first one. Your payment provider decides whether you can accept the money; a different authority decides whether you were allowed to ask for it in the first place, and in the US that authority is the state rather than the IRS.

The condition is each state's own law on charitable solicitation, you check it with that state's regulating agency, and the consequence of skipping it is a compliance problem that no amount of store configuration fixes afterwards.

Which Donation Setup Is Yours?

The verdict table at the top answers by profile — find the organization that looks like yours and take its route. This answers by combination instead: registration status, whether there is anything to buy on your site, how your donors want to give and what has to happen after the money lands cross in ways a single row cannot show.

When Shopify Is Not the Right Tool

The honest comparison is not about features but about what each side charges for. Dedicated donation platforms lead with the two things this page has spent its length explaining: the fee and the receipt.

The receipt side has the same shape. Donorbox states that its Events product instantly generates tax-deductible and fair market values for each ticket and automates the receipting, which on Shopify is a feature you buy from a third-party app rather than one the platform provides.

So the trade is legible, and it goes both ways. Where the money is almost entirely donations and the merch table is an afterthought, the specialist platform wins on arithmetic alone — you are paying a card rate and possibly an app tier for capabilities another platform gives away. Where selling is a real part of the mission, splitting the operation across two systems costs more in reconciliation, duplicated donor records and staff time than the fee it saves. Our page on the honest disadvantages of Shopify covers the broader version of that trade.

Set It Up in This Order

Order matters more here than in most setups, because two of these steps are outside your admin entirely and have their own waiting times. Steps one and two run in parallel with everything else and should start first; step five is the one that decides your app budget, so resist installing anything before you have answered it.

The Bottom Line

Most of what goes wrong here is a mismatch between what the organization expects the platform to do and what the platform was built to do. Shopify is a selling system that donations can ride; it is very good at the selling half and silent about the paperwork half, and every cost on this page follows from that one fact.

Frequently Asked Questions