One often doesn’t realize how much the world has evolved, or how far technology has come in just the span of a few years. Looking back, it has roughly been a couple of decades since the world of monetary transactions on digital media was introduced to us. Two such platforms that enable these digital monetary transfers are PayPal and Qgiv.
PayPal vs Qgiv
The main difference between PayPal and Qgiv is that PayPal is an e-commerce company that facilitates digital transfer of money between parties. It is a platform that allows its users to send and receive money online, or pay for commodities and services over the internet. Qgiv on the other hand can roughly be defined as a digital fundraising platform. \\
PayPal is an online money transfer or payment system in the layman’s language. It facilitates the safe and secure transfer of money online. It can be used to make a purchase over the internet for an online commodity or even accept money or payments, which sit in your PayPal account on receiving.
Qgiv is a digital platform that acts as an intermediary platform to assist in organizing online fundraising and donation campaigns. The beauty of this non-profit fundraising online platform is the ease of creating events and managing them. Member engagement is also easy to track using Qgiv via the peer-to-peer engagement feature.
Comparison Table Between PayPal and Qgiv
| Parameters of Comparison | PayPal | Qgiv |
| Type of Platform | PayPal is a money transfer platform for personal or professional purpose. | Qgiv is a fundraising platform. |
| Market Accessibility | PayPal can be used to buy and sell things online. | Qgiv handles donations and generally does not indulge in buying and selling. |
| Ease of Use | PayPal is very easy to use regarding business transactions. | Qgiv has to focus on a lot of minute details in all transactions. |
| Role | All transactions are done through PayPal as the payee, and Paypal may charge a transaction fee. | Qgiv acts as an intermediary in the facilitation of money transfers. |
| Organizing Fundraisers | PayPal only offers basic donation forms for non-profits to raise online. | Qgiv provides customer support and expert assistance throughout the campaign. |
What is PayPal?
PayPal is a platform for online monetary transactions. It makes the digital purchase of things online safe and secure, with each transaction going through a series of security checks to guarantee maximum security. PayPal enables its customers to create an account on the platform which is then linked to the customer’s bank account and cards. Once the account is created and verified, customers can begin to send and receive money.
PayPal is one of the most popular choices of internet shoppers, including a wide range of customers, from auction shoppers to gamers and even customers using it for personal transfer of money. Although there are more options available to the ‘netizens’, PayPal is mostly preferred over them because it is much more established and widely accepted.
Initially, PayPal was the product of a merger between the companies X.com and Confinity. But it has been its own company since 2015, after serving as a subsidiary of internet auction giant E-Bay between 2002-2015. This vast expanse of time has allowed PayPal to establish itself in a much more reliable manner as compared to its counterparts. It has also given it ample time to evolve in a user-friendly fashion which has made it trustworthy for new and old users alike.
What is Qgiv?
Qgiv is an online platform that exercises expertise in the field of organizing fundraisers and managing donations. It largely enables non-profit organizations to raise and manage funds in an easy yet professional manner, engaging donors with facilities like flexible membership management, special fields in forms, user-friendly widgets and tools, and excellent customer support.
Qgiv offers a few options for branded donation pages as well, with similarly easy-to-access widgets and tools. But its use is focussed on fundraising and donation management for non-profit organizations. Thousands of organizations make use of this platform for fundraising initiatives due to its flexible pricing ranges.
The venture started with a couple of friends who wanted to provide a platform for non-profit, faith-based, educational, and political organizations to easily accept funds and donations. After almost a decade and a half, Qgiv continues to provide the facilities to more than 5,500 organizations not just in its home continent of North America, but all over the world.
One of the most appealing features is the peer-to-peer fundraising tool, combined with easy-to-implement event management tools, data transfer, and donor engagement. This offers a lot of flexibility in managing donor memberships, tickets, donations, special fields and forms, and managing receipts.
Main Differences Between PayPal and Qgiv
- PayPal largely focuses on online transactions among parties for business or personal use, whereas Qgiv is a software that provides a platform to organize fundraisers and donation campaigns.
- Paypal acts as the middleman between banks and sellers. Qgiv can embed donation forms to accept funds and donations directly on the organization’s website.
- There are not a lot of options and tools for organizing big non-profit fundraisers on PayPal. Qgiv, on the other hand, offers conditional custom tools and fields to not just small fundraisers, but even large-scale donation campaigns as well, with options like image support tied to donation amounts, social media integration, and gift assists, most of which PayPal lacks.
- PayPal is an established platform for personal transactions, with easy-to-use features and high acceptability due to its longevity in the field of digital money transfer. Qgiv is a great tool for companies and non-profit organizations looking for a user-friendly software to organize immaculate peer-to-peer fundraising.
- One of the best features of PayPal is that it offers currency conversion and the facility of scheduled payments. Qgiv shines in the field of ease of organizing any event, its management, immaculate reporting on transactions, and excellent customer service.
Conclusion
Both PayPal and Qgiv are giants in their respective fields. They appear to overlap at a point where PayPal also allows for non-profit organizations to set up fundraising events, but the lack of customized tools and fields is what drives the said organizations towards Qgiv.
Qgiv offers a much more detailed structure for organizing and managing fundraising events and campaigns. On the other hand, the ease of small-scale transactions that is provided by PayPal, both at professional and personal levels, is almost unmatched by any other contemporary platform. It also offers automated scheduled transfers that make it a great tool for online monetary transactions.
In short, both platforms provide different services to their respective customers, with a small gray area that coincides with both PayPal and Qgiv offering brand and non-profit fundraising opportunities to their consumers.
References
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4302-0353-7_1
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3213204