Your gift shop already rings up merchandise in Altru at the register. The harder question is what happens when someone on your website wants to buy the exhibition catalog, the plush penguin, or a holiday ornament without driving over. Altru’s online selling grew up around admission, memberships, and donations. Physical goods bring shipping, sales tax, inventory, and returns along with them, and that’s where most organizations end up having to make a real decision.
This guide covers that decision: what to confirm in your own Altru setup, the realistic ways to sell merchandise online, and how to keep your shop revenue reporting clean whichever way you go.
Start by confirming what your Altru setup supports
Before you shop for anything, find out exactly what your current Altru environment can do with merchandise outside the register. Capabilities and configuration vary, and we’d rather you confirm it than take anyone’s word for it, ours included.
- Check your web forms. Look at which item types your online sales and membership forms can actually offer. If merchandise items aren’t available there, you have your answer for native online sales.
- Test in a sandbox if you have one. Try building a form that includes a merchandise item and see how it records revenue and inventory.
- Ask Blackbaud support directly. Ask specifically about shipping addresses, shipping charges, sales tax on shipped orders, and inventory decrements for online orders. A form that can take payment for an item doesn’t automatically handle fulfillment.
Write down what you learn. Your finance team will need the same answers when you settle on an approach.
Four realistic approaches
1. Run a separate online store and reconcile to Altru
Many organizations put shippable merchandise on a dedicated e-commerce platform and keep Altru for admissions, membership, and fundraising. You get shipping rates, tax calculation, product photos, and returns handling that a ticketing system was never designed for.
The cost is a second set of books. Online shop revenue lives outside Altru, so decide up front how it reaches your general ledger (usually a periodic summary entry by finance) and whether buyers should become constituent records. If you want web shoppers in your CRM, plan a regular import and expect to clean up duplicates afterward.
2. Sell online, pick up on site
If shipping is the part that scares you, skip it. Sell items for pickup at the shop or admissions desk, ideally alongside a visit. This works well for timed products like event souvenirs, member pre-sale items, or a limited print. Inventory still has to be set aside, so agree on who pulls the item and how staff confirm pickup.
3. Bundle the item into something Altru already sells online
A membership level that includes a tote bag, or a special-event ticket that includes a poster, lets you sell the item through a channel you already run. The trade-off is reporting: the merchandise value is buried inside membership or ticket revenue unless you split it out. Talk to finance about how to allocate it, and decide how you’ll track fulfillment, since the item still has to reach the person.
4. Thank-you gifts on donations
Offering a premium (a mug, a book) at a certain gift level is common, but it isn’t really merchandise sales. The fair market value of the premium generally reduces the deductible portion of the gift, and your acknowledgments need to say so. Keep this approach for fundraising goals, not for moving shop inventory.
Questions that decide which approach fits
- How many items do you want online? Five signature products and five hundred SKUs are different projects. A small curated list often works fine with pickup or bundling.
- Will you ship? Shipping means packaging, staff time, carrier accounts, lost-package handling, and sales tax rules for other states. Be honest about who packs boxes in December.
- Where does inventory live? If the register and the website draw from the same shelf, you need a way to keep counts in sync, or you’ll sell the last catalog twice.
- What does finance need? Ask how they want shop revenue separated from admission and membership revenue, and whether online and in-person sales should be reported separately.
- Do you need the buyer in Altru? If online shoppers are a prospect pool for membership, getting them into constituent records matters. If not, a separate store is simpler.
Keep the visitor experience consistent
Whichever route you take, people shouldn’t feel like they’ve left your organization when they move from buying tickets to buying a gift. Use the same branding, the same receipt tone, and clear links between the store and your admission or membership pages. If merchandise lives on another platform, say so plainly on the product page (“our online shop is separate from ticketing, so you’ll check out twice”) instead of letting people find out at payment.
Quick answers
Can I just sell merchandise through my Altru web forms?
Check your own setup and confirm with Blackbaud support. Even where an item can be added, test how shipping, tax, and inventory are handled before you launch.
Do I need to move gift shop sales out of Altru to sell online?
No. Many organizations keep in-person shop sales in Altru and run only online orders elsewhere, then combine the numbers for reporting.
Where Social Good fits
Our tools don’t replace a full e-commerce store for shipped merchandise. What Checkouts does is give you a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that writes back to Altru. That’s useful if you take the bundling route in approach 3, since the membership or ticket that carries the item goes through the same checkout and lands in Altru. Its upsells option can offer membership and add-ons in the cart. If you have a specific item in mind, ask us whether it fits before you plan around it.
