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Schools and Parent Teacher Organizations often need to collect funds. Students benefit from improved facilities, new equipment, updated infrastructure, field trips, and more, but funding has to come from somewhere. Additionally, schools often sell items like yearbooks and apparel. If you're looking for a more convenient way to accept donations or sell products like school t-shirts and event tickets, an eCommerce website is right for you.
Whether for fundraising or for selling school-related products, an eCommerce website provides an easy solution for schools and PTOs. You may think it's hard to find a website builder for school PTAs, but it's easier than you think! Shift4Shop is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that makes it easy for a school to run a website with a minimal investment in time and money.
The PTA, or Parent Teacher Association, at any given school is a local parent group with a formal affiliation with both the state and National PTA organizations. Local PTAs must pay dues to the state and National PTA, with the required amount varying by state. PTAs are tax-exempt and have the responsibility to advocate for policies supported by the National PTA.
A PTO, or Parent Teacher Organization, is an independent group of parents and teachers that works to support and improve their community's school without being affiliated with the National PTA. Tax exemption isn't automatic, but many PTOs choose to pursue it.
There are many reasons a PTO might want to stay independent, such as the desire to operate under its own bylaws or to avoid the need to send money out of the school district in the form of membership dues. Either way, a PTO serves the same overall purpose as the PTA regardless of affiliation. PTO is an umbrella term, and many individual PTOs go by another name such as PTG (Parent Teacher Group).
Sometimes students are welcome to participate in a similar group alongside parents and teachers. This type of group is commonly called a PTSO or similar initialism with the "S" standing for "Student."
An eCommerce website, or online store, might not be the first thing to come to mind when you're thinking about raising funds for a school. As a website for a retailer, sure, but for a school or PTO? Actually, yes! Both school fundraising and product sales become much easier by centralizing the process on an eCommerce website.
Whether by selling products or accepting donations, an eCommerce website allows you to quickly and easily accept funding, track donations, and seamlessly process payments – anywhere, anytime. With Shift4Shop, you can securely and conveniently manage all donations from a single website. Increase your outreach and help your school acquire the funding it needs with an online store that takes the hassle out of collecting donations.
Yearbooks are a beloved tradition for students and parents alike. By selling yearbooks online, you eliminate the need for parents to send their kids to school with money for the purchase or to stop by the office themselves. You can even set up a Waiting List so customers can sign up ahead of time to receive an automatic email when the yearbook becomes available for purchase.
Help students get ready for Spirit Day or show their school pride year-round by selling t-shirts, keychains, stickers, and other gear branded with your school's logo or other imagery. Shift4Shop makes it easy to accept payments online or in person, and you can give customers the option of picking up their item on campus or having it shipped directly to them. School merchandise as a whole is even easier to create via our integration with print-on-demand services like Printful, a solution which means your school won't even need an upfront investment or storage space for products.
Holding a school raffle? Let participants enter online with no need to sell physical tickets. Simply create a raffle entry as if it were any other product. Detailed order history automatically compiles a record of all purchases, so you can track raffle entries with ease.
Schools hold a wide variety of events, from dances and competitions to field trips and theater productions. With a Shift4Shop website, you can raise money for different school events however is necessary. Sell tickets to school plays, collect admission fees for field trips to locations that require them, accept donations for other extracurricular activities, and more.
If your school has classes or clubs related to business and web design, an eCommerce website is a great way to give students some real-life experience. Business students can learn inventory management, payment processing, order fulfillment, and other aspects of running a business, while web design students can learn HTML, CSS, image optimization for the web, and more.
With Shift4Shop’s easy-to-use platform, you’ll have access to everything you need to easily accept and manage donations. Reports, donation history, and countless innovative tools are conveniently at your disposal, allowing you to focus your energy where it’s needed most: on improvin the education of your community’s children.
Drive donations to your school with an all-in-one eCommerce solution that’s designed for your school’s success. Whether your store will be managed by a parent volunteer or school employee, Shift4Shop is ready and capable to help your school build a stronger foundation for current and future generations.
Shift4Shop is more than an online store: it's a complete website builder. With Shift4Shop's Extra Pages feature, you can create as many pages as you need to provide a complete resource for parents and students. School policies, the dress code, a student handbook, and more can all have their own dedicated page that students, parents, and faculty can refer to at any time.
Post school updates like upcoming events, holiday schedules, news, and more with our integrated blogging platform. Or hand the reins to your school's Journalism program and give students the valuable experience of publishing their own content!
Let students and parents sign up for their own accounts on your eCommerce website so you can associate all their purchases with their customer record. This is a great way to track frequent donators, ensure the necessary dues have been paid, and more.
Shift4Shop integrates flawlessly with PayPal as well as over 160 other payment processors so your school can accept payments however is needed. You can even take old-fashioned methods like paper checks and still process the purchase through your online store.
Track all inventory in your Shift4Shop dashboard with automatic updates to ensure you never sell more t-shirts, yearbooks, or tickets than you have. In the event that a customer needs to make a return, you'll have the tools to support that as well.
Want to keep selling items face-to-face on campus? Shift4Shop makes this possible too, with POS integrations including our built-in POS module, Square Register, and more. Keep inventory synchronized across online and offline sales!
Offer different shipping methods as appropriate, so even your students' distant family members can buy school gear to show their spirit. Shift4Shop integrates with UPS, FedEx, USPS, and more complete with real-time shipping rates. Optionally, allow local pickup for any customers in your immediate area, configurable by distance.
