Saturday, July 12, 2014

I need help with PayPal and advice about donations

Dear friends,

I just hate PayPal.  For many reasons, but one of them is this recurrent problem: the "donate" button I created following the exact instructions given by PP (the one posted on the left side of this page) seems to redirect to a page to join PP and not directly to the page to enter the donation amount.  I tried several times to re-create that button, but each time I get the same result.  I get the feeling that PP uses *my* donation button to increase *their* membership.

Does anybody know the way to prevent that from happening?

Check out this guys's button: http://kenrockwell.com/

It works correctly and takes you to the correct page (also his button says "make a donation" while mine says "donate").  He also offers a "subscribe button".  Should I do that too (without, of course, restricting access to anything)?

Generally, the issue of donations has been a huge irritant for me because, alas, PayPal seems to be the only more or less working one.  Flattr was a complete failure (less than 10 bucks in many months), Bitcoin is way to complex for me and for most people (sorry, I do not have the time to research that topic), I even ended up suggesting Amazon gift cards by email and cash by snail mail as an option.

It really would help me tremendously if somebody could suggest a way to accept donations which would be easy and convenient both for donors and for me.  Initially, when I put up a donation button, donations were coming in more or less regularly, but apparently people are getting frustrated with PayPal as the number of readers is stable (or slightly going up over the past weeks) but the number of donations is going down.  Unless this is a case of "donor fatigue", which is possible, or unless people don't like the contents of this blog, which I doubt, I must be doing something wrong (as it painfully obvious, I am an extremely clumsy fund-raiser...).

So any suggestions would really be most welcome!

Thanks in advance,

The Saker