Items such as t-shirts, caps, team suits, sponsorships and donations for sale during registration and/or through the online store are created and managed in the Merchandise tab of the Manage Team admin console.

Covered in this Article:

Fundraising Through Your Team Site

Fundraising Through Your Team Site

➧ Blog Posts

Our Sales and Marketing team is hard at work researching and referencing their personal experiences in the sports arena to provide our customers with tips to make the most of their fundraising efforts.

Read more about fundraising in our previous blogs:

➞ How SwimTopia Pays for Itself…and Then Some!
➞ Merchandise Tips
➞ Setting up a Sponsorship Program

➧ Setting Up a SwimOutlet Store on Your SwimTopia Site

SwimTopia has partnered with SwimOutlet, the web's most popular swim shop, to streamline the management of your merchandise offerings directly from your SwimTopia team site!

As mentioned in our Merchandise Tips blog post, setting up a SwimOutlet Team Store not only saves your merchandise coordinators a ton of time and headaches, but your team can sell fundraising items and make cash back on every sale.

SwimTopia's mission is to ensure swim team management doesn't stand in the way of swim team fun! We hope this partnership alleviates this stress on your team volunteers and puts the F.U.N. back in fundraising!

➞ Check out our ▶️ Quick Feature Demo - Adding a SwimOutlet Team Store

➞ See the SwimOutlet Team Store Snippet article to set up your SwimOutlet Team Store

➧ Accepting Donations (Swim-a-thon, Coaches Gift, Family Sponsorship)

In addition to marketing your merchandise, you can take donations for a Swim-a-thon, EOY coaches gift, and provide an opportunity to donate to a family sponsor fund.

The merchandise items can be displayed on any web page using our Merchandise Offer Snippet, so it does not have to be on your team store to be visible.

»Note: This is the only option we currently provide for managing a "Swim-a-thon" fundraiser to accept donations from your team website. If you want a more robust solution, you may find an option like https://www.dojiggy.com/athon-software/ useful, but donations are managed outside of the team website.

Creating and Managing Your Items

Adding Items

To create a new item to be available for purchase, click +Add Merchandise Item.

Enter the details and an image to describe your item, including whether it can be personalized.

➧ Image Formats: png, jpg, and gif are accepted, but png is best for websites.

»Note: Gender-specific items such as team suits will automatically display for each athlete during registration according to his or her gender. SwimTopia will not calculate sales tax. If you need to include tax, add it to the item price.

Click Save to save your new item in the Merchandise list.

Adding Options

Options such as sizes, colors, etc. can be added to any merchandise item.
Each individual "option" offered can have its own price if it differs from the default you set when you created the item. (ex. XXL+ is usually $2 more)
You can also set each size/option to have its own order quantity limit. Once an option is sold out, it can not be ordered until that limit is increased.
» Note: This quantity limit feature is only enforced during registration. It was not designed to be used for the online store at this time (or when using the merchandise offer snippet on any page, since that uses the online store for processing).
To allow size or pricing choices, you will need to edit your new item and add options by clicking Edit or the item title from the catalog items list.

To edit the name, default price, image, or personalization settings for your item, click Edit item.

To add sizes or other options, click +Add Option for each option offered.

» Tip: The order of your options can be changed by clicking and dragging the items up and down.

For each new option, enter a name and whether that option requires a price override (a specific price for that option only) or an order limit. Items with limits will show as "sold out" during registration when all the options are gone.

»Note: To reiterate...online store orders do not enforce order limits which work only for registration orders at this time. An item may show as sold out on the store, but this will not keep the user from purchasing.

Click Save to go back to the item detail.

Updating Merchandise VS Creating New

"Merchandise" items are not tied to seasons, so if you need to make changes after sales have occurred or when setting up for a new season, it’s best to create a new item rather than edit an old one. If you were to simply edit the old item, it would effectively change the description of the item for all past orders, too, and would affect tracking and reporting.

Also, if you have any merchandise items with order limits, SwimTopia will see last season’s orders as accumulating toward the overall quantity ordered.

If the changes to an item are minor, it may be easier to make a copy of last season’s item and then make your edits (rather than create a whole new item). Go to Manage Team > Merchandise, then click on the item, and click on “Copy.”

Archived Merchandise

You can “Archive” a merchandise item and have it not show in your catalog. You can also choose to display archived items and restore them to the catalog. Archived items are not deleted, they just don’t appear unless you choose to show them. Archived items won’t be an option when setting up offers in registration or your team store and offers using archived items will be removed from registration and the team store. Offers using restored items will reappear when the item is restored.

Selling Options

Selling Merchandise During Registration

➞ See our article on the Registration: Merchandise Section on how to add your merchandise items for sale during registration.

Selling Merchandise Through your Online Store (or any webpage)

PREMIUM

This feature is available to our Premium customers.

Spiritwear helps teams proudly look and feel like a team. Our online store lets you fundraise through your spirit wear sales. By creating a way for teams to easily work with their choice of dealer, sell items, and manage inventory, SwimTopia allows you to stay in charge of both your items and your proceeds.

» Note: An online payment account set up from within your team site to our payment vendor is required. Standard credit card processing fees apply (3.4% + 30c per transaction), and there is no option to push that fee to the buyer as is possible during registration.

➞ See Setting up the Online Store for more details.

» Tip:Meet Entry Fees can be tracked but not collected online during meet signup. You can add this fee as a merchandise item to collect during registration or through the online store. For more information on Meet Entry Fees➞ See the Meet Templates article.

Linking to Another Vendor Site

If you have items for sale through a swim shop other than SwimOutlet, there are a few options depending on how you want to link to your vendor:

➧ Option #1: Text area snippet with link to vendor site

You can include a link on any page using a Text Area snippet - If you just have a link, you can put that in a text area anywhere on your site. You can also include it in your registration confirmation message.

➧ Option #2: Create a new page with an alias to the vendor site

Add an Alias on a merchandise page you create to lead to the vendor's online store - See the Alias section of our online help article Managing Menus and Navigation and ▶️ Training Videos: Your Site's Content and Appearance)

➧ Option #3: Use "embed code" or "widget" to link to the vendor site

If they provide “embed code” or “widget” ➞ See Embed a Widget—custom code from other sites

Let us know if you need help setting it up. Submit a support ticket with the information.

Reports

Merchandise Reports

Regardless of how you utilize the "Merchandise" feature, the reporting options you will reference will depend on where you are selling these items.

➧ Registration Orders: Viewable from the Registrations > Registrants# page, or from the Reports page

➧ Online Store Orders: Viewable from Merchandise > Orders (link to the page provided from the Reports page)

➧ SwimOutlet Team Store Orders: Viewable from SwimOutlet only

» Note: If selling via registration and the store, you'll need to run two different sets of reports to capture orders. (Integrated reporting is not available at this time, but has been requested. Separate reports are beneficial when teams sell via the store after registration or sell completely separate items in each location.)

See➞ our Merchandise Reports - Registration and Online Store Orders article for details.

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Merchandise and Fundraising

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