Selling Merchandise

In this article:

  1. Creating a merchandise form
  2. Adding items to your merchandise form
  3. Customizing your merchandise form
  4. Navigating the Fulfillment page

Selling merchandise can be a great tool for engaging supporters — they get to represent causes they care about, and you get to promote your work and establish an additional fundraising channel. That’s why ActBlue gives you the tools to easily sell merchandise to your supporters. Plus, your donors can buy merchandise using all the same payment methods they can use on regular contribution forms, including their debit/credit card, the saved card in their ActBlue Express account, PayPal™, Google Pay™, Apple Pay®, and Venmo™.


Creating a Merchandise Form

Once you’re ready to start selling merchandise, navigate to your Dashboard.  Clicking on “Create form” will lead you to the “Choose a form type” page, where you can select which form you would like to make as well as customize it. 

Click “Merchandise Form” and begin filling in the basic information about your form. 

First, give your form a title. Then finish the web address for your form by typing a simple word in the “Form link” box. This word (or phrase) will be part of the unique web address for your form, as well as the name of your form in your Dashboard. Pick a short word or phrase and make a note of it so you can locate your form on your Contribution Forms page quickly.

Next, enter the email address and phone number your supporters should contact for customer service. These will be displayed on the merchandise form and in your supporters’ receipts so they can get in touch with any merchandise fulfillment issues.

Finally, you’ll need to go to the “Shipping timeframe” section and estimate when donors can expect their items to arrive. This is a very important piece of the merchandise puzzle! It’s important to have a fulfillment plan in place before you start selling items so you can make an accurate estimate here. You don’t want your donors to get frustrated with longer-than-expected wait times. This will be set to “within 24 hours” by default, but you can choose from 3-7 days, 1-2 weeks, 2-4 weeks, 4-6 weeks, and 6-8 weeks.

You can always go to the form’s “Title, ask, and URL” and “Contact and shipping” tabs to make any edits to this basic information later. 

Once you publish your form, this will bring you to the “Success, your form was published!” page. There, you can copy the link to your form, as well as navigate to the form editor. Click “Edit your form” to go to your merchandise form. The form editor will be open on the left.

new merch form

In the “Title, ask, and URL” tab, you can edit your form’s title and add a description or message in the “Donation ask” section.

title ask and url

Adding Items To Your Merchandise Form

Next, go to the “Items” tab to add your merchandise. The first step is to click the “Add item” button and add merchandise in the pop-up. Here you can add an item’s name, description, price, and image so that donors clearly know what they’re buying. Images should be as high-resolution as possible, and you can upload your image by either clicking the “Upload an image” button or simply dragging the image file into the image upload area. When picking images to use in your fundraising, keep image vetting and consent best practices in mind.

If you have a limited supply of an item, be sure to uncheck the “Unlimited” box and enter the number of items you have available in “Stock.” Once you’re sold out, the item will disappear from your live merchandise form.

add item

Next you can add any variations that your merchandise may come in, such as different sizes, colors, or other options. You can create a variation by clicking on the “Add variation” button. Name the variation of your item, and add all of its options (i.e. The variation name would be Size and the options would be Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large). More information on variations is available if you click the blue, circular “Information” button.

variations

Once you’re done entering all information about your item in the pop-up, click the “Done” button. You’ll see the preview of your form with the item added. In the “Items” tab, you can drag and drop items to change the order they appear in on the merchandise form and choose to hide specific items from the live form so that supporters can’t buy them.

visible hidden

Now you’re ready to click the “Publish” button at the top of the form editor so your items go live!

When looking at the “Items” tab, watch out for an orange dot in the upper right-hand corner of an item’s entry. An orange dot tells you that you’ve made changes within that entry that you have yet to publish.

orange dot

Customizing Your Merchandise Form

Return back to the main menu of the form editor to add a branding or customize your contribution form in other ways. You can make changes to your merchandise form using the form editor like you would for any other contribution form!

Once you’ve published all changes, your merchandise page will be all set. Here’s an example of what a basic merchandise form with no branding might look like:

basic merch form

Donors also have the option of making a donation in addition to the cost of the merchandise when they visit your merchandise form.


To make the fulfillment process easier on your end, we provide a CSV of all the orders your form receives. You can view all of your orders and download an itemized CSV by navigating to your form’s Fulfillment page. The easiest way to get to a form’s Fulfillment page is by clicking the “More” button on the form navigation bar that is at the top of your screen when you are viewing your form. Click “Fulfillment” in the dropdown menu.

fulfillment in dropdown
csv

Some important notes to keep in mind when selling merchandise: You are solely responsible for producing and shipping any items offered through your ActBlue merchandise page, and your merchandise item is considered a gift in exchange for a contribution to your campaign or organization, so you’ll need to report these contributions as you usually would.


© 2009 PayPal, Inc. All rights reserved. PayPal and the PayPal logo are trademarks of PayPal, Inc. Other names, trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.

Google Pay is a trademark of Google LLC.

Venmo is a service of PayPal, Inc., a licensed provider of money transfer services (NMLS ID: 910457). All money transmission is provided by PayPal, Inc. pursuant to PayPal, Inc.’s licenses. © 2021 PayPal, Inc


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