TL;DR
Donation Platform for WooCommerce is built directly on WooCommerce to take advantage of its robust ecommerce infrastructure: products, payments, payment gateways, order handling, and more. Replacing this with a custom post type would require a complete rewrite and remove many benefits WooCommerce already provides out of the box.
Introduction
A common question from advanced users is:
“Why is WooCommerce a required dependency?”
The answer is simple: by building directly on WooCommerce, we gain powerful features for free—without reinventing the wheel.
Why WooCommerce Is the Foundation
Donation Platform for WooCommerce uses the WooCommerce product system for donations because it gives us:
✅ Payment Gateway Support
WooCommerce supports dozens of payment gateways—Stripe, PayPal, Paystack, Flutterwave, and many more. Using WooCommerce products means every donation automatically works with these gateways, no custom integration required.
✅ Reliable Order Handling
Donations are treated like orders. That means WooCommerce’s full order lifecycle (statuses, emails, logs, refunds, etc.) applies to donations too—saving us (and you) from managing custom transaction logic.
✅ Built-in Cart and Checkout
Rather than building our own donation flow from scratch, we rely on WooCommerce’s proven cart and checkout system. This ensures a familiar and secure donation experience.
✅ Tax, Currency, and Region Settings
WooCommerce handles complex ecommerce requirements like tax calculations, multiple currencies, regional settings, and more—making it ideal for international fundraising.
✅ Theme and Plugin Compatibility
By using WooCommerce products, donations automatically work with many WooCommerce-compatible themes and plugins (e.g., reporting, analytics, invoicing, PDF receipts, etc.).
Why We Don’t Use a Custom Post Type
While a standalone donation post type might allow for more custom layouts or templates, it comes at a major cost:
- 🔄 It would require a complete rewrite of the plugin architecture.
- ❌ We would lose all the ecommerce features listed above.
- 🧩 We’d need to rebuild payments, checkout, and order tracking from scratch.
- 🧪 It would introduce complexity for users, especially those already using WooCommerce.
Conclusion
Using WooCommerce as the base is what makes Donation Platform for WooCommerce powerful and future-proof. It handles the hard problems of ecommerce so you can focus on fundraising.
We appreciate all feedback and ideas, but moving away from WooCommerce products is not planned, as it would undo many of the strengths the plugin is built on.