League Online Store: Merchandise Sales & Collecting Fees

Your league can use the Online Store feature to sell merchandise to any member of a SwimTopia team in your league, as well as to collect fees owed by your teams. 

Detailed order reports allow you to track orders by team, allowing you to batch the orders for easier distribution of merchandise.

Covered in this Article:

• Online Payment Processor Requirements
• Setting up your League Online Store
• Collecting Team Fees - Scenarios and Setup

Online Payment Processor Requirements

>>Note: At this time, offline (paper) checks and private/club accounts cannot be used as a checkout method for store purchases. A secure online payment account is required and must be set up and verified before you can enable the Online Store. See ➞ the Stripe Account Setup tutorial for instructions on creating and connecting a Stripe account to your league website.

➧ Online Payment Account Status

The online store is automatically set to use Stripe for all teams/leagues with an active Stripe account. 

➧ Processing Fees

The seller (the league) is charged the credit card processing fees on purchases made through the online store. There is no way to designate otherwise, so you may want to consider an increase to your prices to account for the 3.4% + $.30/transaction processing fee.

Setting up your League Online Store

We offer a series of Help Center articles geared towards getting your Online Store set up.  Here are the steps you'll follow:

➧ Step 1: Set up your Merchandise Items

View our Help Center article with step-by-step instructions: See ➞  Setting up Merchandise

When creating merchandise items, you can include an image, a description, and the price. We also offer the flexibility to add various options such as shirt sizes or personalization.

Merchandise items can include league-wide gear and offerings including:

• League-branded merchandise, like a league t-shirt or sweatshirt
• Championship meet t-shirts
• Heat sheets for a championship or invitational meet
• Personalized ads in a league-wide meet program

Merchandise items can also be a useful way to collect fees from your teams including:

• Annual league fees
• Championship and/or Invitational Meet Entry Fees by team

➧ Step 2: Enable your Online Store

View our Help Center article with step-by-step instructions: See ➞  Setting up the Online Store

Any members from any of your league's SwimTopia teams will be able to place orders through your online store.

➧ Step 3: Manage your Online Orders

View our Help Center article with step-by-step instructions: See ➞ Managing Online Store Orders

Along with Pack List and Pick list reports listed in the above Help Center article, leagues can also run reports by team:  Pick List by Organization and Order Pick-Up Checklist. 

Collecting Team Fees - Scenarios and Setup

Many leagues find it useful to use Merchandise Items to collect fees online from their teams. Here are a couple of common scenarios and suggestions on how to set them up.

➧ Collecting Annual League Fees

If your league charges all teams a set annual fee, you can easily set that up as a merchandise item on your league website.  You can include this merchandise item on your league store page; however, since Merchandise Offer Snippets can be placed anywhere on the website, what many leagues do is post it directly on their home page to make it easy for team reps to find:

Important Note: for these types of fees, we highly recommend setting up the item to be personalized and directing your teams to fill in their team name in the personalization field for easy reference. 

➧ Collecting Fees for Champs or Invitational Meets by Team

This scenario requires a little more work initially as each team will need to be set up as its own Merchandise Item given that the amounts will vary from team to team.  After the initial setup, the "items" can be copied from year to year going forward which will make it much easier. 

>>Note: Merchandise items are not tied to seasons, so we highly recommend creating a new item each year rather than editing the existing one.  If you were to edit the item from the previous year, it would effectively change the amount for all past orders as well, affecting tracking and reporting.

Some leagues will include all the team fees due on their team store page, removing each team as they pay, while other leagues will create a specific page on their website for these fees to avoid mixing the fees with any merchandise offers they may have listed.