How to Accept Donations on Wix: All 4 Methods Compared

There are four ways to accept donations on a Wix website: the native Wix Donations app, a PayPal Donate button, a donation widget from the App Market, or an embedded third-party platform like Donorbox or Givebutter. Which one you can actually use depends on a single question most guides skip: are you a registered charity?

Wix’s own donation tools run on Wix Payments, which only supports registered charities. Everyone else — personal causes, school clubs, sports teams, community projects — needs a PayPal-based route. This guide walks through all four methods with their real fees and trade-offs, so you can pick the right one in a few minutes.

Before you start: two things every method needs

• A paid Wix plan with a custom domain. Wix Payments and custom-code embeds only work on paid plans, and PayPal redirects are known to fail on free wixsites.com subdomains because Wix blocks external redirects there. Whichever method you choose, budget for a plan that supports payments.
• Somewhere for the money to land. Either a Wix Payments account (charities only) or a PayPal account. For PayPal-based methods, a standard account is enough for widgets; PayPal’s own Donate button requires a Business or Premier account.

Method 1: Wix Donations — the native app, for registered charities

Wix Donations is Wix’s own donation app, and if you qualify, it is the most integrated option: donations show up in your Wix dashboard and settle through Wix Payments. The catch is eligibility. Wix’s own policy states that your cause must be registered as a charity in a country where Wix Payments operates, and that it does not support non-registered charities, crowdfunding, or collecting money on behalf of others.

Two more things worth knowing before you commit: the app has no fundraising goal or progress bar, and its App Market rating sits at 2.9 out of 5 as of July 2026 — donors can give, but there is little there to motivate them. If you are a registered charity that mainly needs a payment rail, it works. If you are running a campaign with a target amount, you will miss the goal tracking.

Method 2: Add a PayPal Donate button to Wix

The Wix Editor includes a PayPal button element: add it to your page, set it to “Donations”, and enter the email address of your PayPal Business or Premier account. No charity registration needed, and it is free beyond PayPal’s processing fee.

The limitations show up as soon as a real campaign starts:

• Donors are redirected away from your site to a generic PayPal page.
• No fundraising goal, no progress bar, no suggested amounts.
• Payments never appear in your Wix dashboard — Wix itself notes the site owner gets no notification.
• If the button’s email field doesn’t exactly match your PayPal account, visitors see an error and can’t pay at all.

As a quick way to test whether anyone wants to give, the button is fine. For a campaign you actually promote, the conversion cost of sending donors off-site usually outweighs the savings.

Method 3: Install a donation widget from the App Market

A donation widget keeps the whole flow on your site: the goal, the live progress bar, suggested amounts, and a checkout that accepts PayPal and all major credit cards. This is the category we build in — Targeted Fundraising processes donations through your own PayPal account, so the Wix Payments charity requirement never applies.

1. Install the app from the Wix App Market — installation is free.
2. Connect your PayPal account. A standard personal or business account works.
3. Set your fundraising goal so the progress bar has a target to fill toward.
4. Place and style the widget — colors, fonts, and button text adapt to your site, no code involved.

Honest costs: the Free plan covers your first $1,000 raised with unlimited campaigns; the Pro plan removes the limit for $12.99/month. There is no commission on donations on either plan — only PayPal’s standard processing fee. One trade-off to know: the widget is built for one-time campaign gifts, not automated monthly billing.

Method 4: Embed a third-party fundraising platform

Platforms like Donorbox and Givebutter are full fundraising suites — recurring giving, donor management, campaign pages — and both can be embedded in Wix with a copied code snippet. Neither has a native Wix app, so you paste the embed into a custom-code element, which itself requires a paid Wix plan.

Check the eligibility fine print before investing setup time: Givebutter supports organizations only (no personal fundraising) and works in USD with a US bank account, while Donorbox’s free tier adds a 2.95% platform fee on top of processing. If you need monthly recurring donations and donor CRM features, this route earns its complexity. For a goal-based campaign, it is usually more machinery than the job needs. We compare the options in detail in our guide to the best Wix donation apps.

How to add a donation progress bar (fundraising thermometer) to Wix

The classic fundraising thermometer — a bar that fills toward a goal — is one of the simplest proven ways to move donors to act: gifts visibly bring the campaign closer to its target. On Wix, though, most of the options are display-only. Wix’s native progress bar element needs Velo code or a CMS collection to update, and generic widgets from Elfsight or Common Ninja show a bar that you must edit by hand every time a donation arrives.

The distinction that matters: a fundraising widget that processes the payment can update its own progress bar. Because Targeted Fundraising handles the donation itself, the thermometer moves the moment a donor gives — no manual updates, no code. If the progress bar is the reason you are here, that auto-update is the feature to look for in any app you choose.

Wix donation fees in 2026: what collecting actually costs

Wix takes no commission on donations, and neither do PayPal-based widgets. What you pay is the payment processor plus your Wix plan. The current rates:

Rates from PayPal’s merchant fee schedule and Wix Payments service fees, as of July 2026.

In concrete terms: on a $100 US donation through a PayPal-based widget, $3.38 goes to PayPal and $96.62 lands in your account. Registered charities that apply for PayPal’s Confirmed Charity status keep $97.52 — slightly better than the $96.80 Wix Payments leaves after its 2.9% + $0.30.

No nonprofit status? You can still collect

Individuals and informal groups can accept voluntary gifts through PayPal in most countries — the charity requirement is a Wix Payments rule, not a law of the internet. Donations to individuals generally aren’t tax-deductible for the donor, and truthful fundraising is a condition of PayPal’s acceptable use policy, but no registration is needed to start. We cover the details, the legal fine print, and the setup in our guide to accepting donations on Wix without nonprofit status.

Frequently asked questions