How To Host A Raffle With Chip In

[Maniah]

I see this question get asked a lot here, so I figured it may be a good place to post it.

For all the folks looking to raffle off their customs, www.ChipIn.Com provides a somewhat safer alternative to the traditional PayPal method. What I normally see is people asking for donation in set amounts, and then warning people not to mention that it is for a Raffle, and HOPING that they pay attention. As most people know, running a Raffle on PayPal can get your account suspended. Chip In reduces this risk by eliminating the comment box from the equation.


What exactly is Chip In?

Chip In is a free resource that allows you to post a widget to your web page promoting the cause you are collecting money for, making it easy for people to donate. If you don't have a web page to put it on, Chip In will provide a web page for you to link to. It will record the Name, Email address and amount chipped in by each person, eliminating book keeping on your end.

Chip In doesn't charge you, but Pay Pal will still take out their traditional fees. In order to mitigate your losses on this, I strongly suggest you open a second PayPal account specifically for this raffle and apply for MicroPayments Pricing. (Be Logged into your PayPal account before clicking this link). It can take a couple weeks for approval.. I don't know how to tell when you get approved other than to keep checking your fees. I never saw any notice that I was approved, other than to notice my fees were lower.

OK, so What is Micropayment Pricing?

 For those of you not wanting to click the link just yet, this is a discount PayPal offers to sellers who do a lot of business in increments of $10 or less. They will charge you %5 + $0.05 as a fee. The example they use to demonstrate savings shows the typical fees on a $2 purchase.

NOTE: Micropayments pricing is more expensive than regular pricing once you pass the $10 mark on incoming payments. ALL incoming payments will be affected by this fee if you choose to sign up for it. You should only do this if the majority of you incoming money is in amounts of $10 or less.


Micropayment Fees= 5% + $0.05    
Regular Fees= 2.9% +$0.30
With a Payment size of $2
Cost to receive payment    is $0.15 with Micropayment Fees and $0.36 to receive it under the regular fees.
Total cost to receive 100 payments with Micropayment Fees it is $15  and with the Regular Fees it is $36

So, the savings do add up.


Ok, so what next?

Well, Now I guess it's time to set up your Chip In! Just got to WWW.ChipIn.Com and first enter your email address at the bottom of the page and click on Sign Up. It will walk you though setting up your account. I forget if it walks you through starting up your first Chip In, but just in case, here is what to do.

Once signed in, go to your Dashboard and you will see the form to create a new ChipIn. Just fill out all of the fields and hit submit. Take care here. Your event Title will be submitted to Paypal with every donation you get. So you do NOT want to mention raffle, or contest anywhere in your widget.

Once you hit Create, your ChipIn is live. But how do you get people to it? The next page that pops up will give you options to Create a Widget, or to Create a Page. If you already have a webpage that you can alter the HTML on, then your best bet is probably to Create a Widget, and then just insert the script it creates for you, into your web page. If you don't have a web page, you can take advantage of ChipIn's offer to create a page for you.

ChipIn will walk you through the steps of creating the page. You will choose a URL first, followed by an option to add an update to the page. Basically, you can use this as a mini blog and post updates.

You can then just give out the URL to your ChipIn page and they have all the info they need!

Once someone decides to donate, they just click the button that says ChipIn, and it takes them to a PayPal checkout page. Be sure to include info on how much they should donate to be eligible for tickets. Once on the checkout page, they have to enter the $$ amount themselves. But there is NO box whatsoever for them to leave any comments, which eliminates the "Hoping" part of running a PayPal raffle.

They MAY leave you a comment after they finish with paypal, but this comment just goes to your ChipIn page and not Paypal.


I really hope that this can be useful to others. I'm not sure if any Mods would deem this worthy making a Sticky anywhere, but if so, glad I could help. Lilacamy asked me to write this up after I helped her out with starting her ChipIn, so I thought I would get that done.

Any questions, anything I was not clear on. please feel free to ask!

[NoDivision]

Very helpful, thanks!

[WaePonies]

Wow very very helpful xD So glad you posted this since I'm holding my 1st Anniversary raffle soon

Xoxo

[Colorscapesart]

This is very helpful!  I'm gonna bump this over to trader support, there are several nice selling tutorials over there

[Diamond]

Interesting about the mirco payments, have you seen if it affects your larger dollar sales or does it say someplace if there is a cap on how much you can get paid under that?

[Ringlets]

Thanks very much for explaining that for us Maniah     

[Maniah]

Interesting about the mirco payments, have you seen if it affects your larger dollar sales or does it say someplace if there is a cap on how much you can get paid under that?

In Short, it looks like $10 may be the limit. If it isn't, then the limit is somewhere between $10 and $13.

In a longer answer..

This is a good question that I have attempted to solve... But it just leaves me with more questions.

In the example given on the Micropayments page, we can see that for the fee on the regular payment, the number has been rounded up to .36 if you were to do your own math.

2.9% of 2.00 + .30 = .35799 So, .36 rounded up.

I picked the first payment in my history that is over $10, which happened to be a payment for $13.
My fees are listed as .70
But if I do the math.. 2.9% of $13 plus .30 = 0.677 So.. .68 rounded up, right? No.. They rounded it on up to .70

Seems small and minor, but those pennies add up. They never mention on the Fees page that they do this.

Is my math just horribly wrong?



Post Merge: July 29, 2012, 06:08:43 PM

Doubly checked one of the smaller fees and it was done correctly.. Recieved $5.25 and was charged .31 The math adds up. 

Checked a $12 amount.. Fee was .65 That adds up.

In fact.. Looking back through the last Month.. Any transaction over $10 has the fee placed in increments of .05 where as any transaction under $10 uses an exact number.

They round up very differently and I cannot find mention of it anywhere in the Fees portion of the contract.

[Breyer600]

You're getting charged the micropayment rate even for the higher value transactions:

5% of $13 + .05 = .70

5% of $12 + .05 = .65 (Just happens to come out the same as the regular rates.)

I checked out the info it gives on the pricing for micropayments and it confirms that all transactions get charged that rate once you're signed up for it.

https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/?bn_r=m under detailed pricing:

PayPal's micropayments rate is 5% + $0.05 per transaction. This rate applies to all payments going through the account regardless of payment size. For example, with the micropayments rate, it would cost $0.25 to receive a $4 payment and it would cost $1.05 to receive a $20 payment.

The normal rate for that $20 payment in the example is $0.88.

So, if you get many payments over $12 (where the fees break even), having the micropayment rate will hurt.

[Maniah]

Ahh. Thank you for clearing up my math confusion! I must have missed the info about that applying to all transactions.

Thankfully I don't do many transactions at a higher amount. I need to do the math and figure out where it becomes more expensive. My math skills just suck.

When I get home I will edit my original post to include this new information.

Post Merge: July 30, 2012, 06:54:36 AM

Updated with that important info

[lovesbabysquirmy]

Hopefully this will help people wanting to hold raffles!