Public Wishlist
The public wishlist lets supporters see specific items your organization needs from your public shelter profile and full-profile embed. Public items appear as item cards with an image, priority badge, details, available quantity, price, progress, and available support actions.
Requirements
To show wishlist items publicly:
- Enable your public profile in Settings > Profile Visibility.
- Turn on the Wishlist visibility toggle.
- Open each wishlist item you want to share and turn on Public Visible.
Only items marked public are shown. Private wishlist items stay internal.
To let supporters fund wishlist items by card, also connect Stripe in Settings > Payment Methods, turn on Payments and Donations in Profile Visibility, and leave Accepts Monetary Donations enabled on each fundable wishlist item. See Set Up Public Fundraising for the full launch checklist.
Which Items Appear
The public wishlist shows items that are:
- Marked Public Visible
- In Needed or Partially Received status
- Still available after subtracting received, funded, and pledged quantities
Fulfilled and archived items are hidden automatically. Items are also hidden when every requested unit is already received, in an active checkout, tied to a pending external payment, or pledged for delivery. This prevents multiple supporters from claiming the same remaining unit.
When an item is still visible but no longer actionable, the card shows a fulfilled or no-longer-needed state instead of support buttons.
Funding Wishlist Items
If Donations and Payments are enabled, public wishlist items can show monetary support buttons. Stripe Connect enables card funding through Fund Item. Saved external methods such as PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, Bitcoin, or Ethereum enable Pay another way.
For fixed-price items, PawPlacer pre-fills the item's price, lets supporters choose how many remaining units to fund, and calculates the checkout amount. For items without a price, supporters can enter their own donation amount. Either way, the donation is linked back to the wishlist item.
When a Stripe checkout starts, PawPlacer creates a tracked donation and reserves the selected quantity while checkout is open. When Stripe confirms payment, PawPlacer marks the donation received and updates the item's received quantity when a quantity was included.
External payments create a pending donation with a reference first. The supporter sees the provider link or instructions, and staff should mark the donation received after matching the provider transaction. Until then, the selected quantity is reserved so it cannot be claimed twice.
Pledging Physical Items
Supporters can also choose Pledge Item to say they bought or will send a wishlist item. This creates a pending in-kind wishlist contribution with the supporter name, email, quantity, and message. The message is required and must include enough detail for staff to match the pledge to an order, tracking number, drop-off plan, or note.
PawPlacer does not count pledged items as received immediately. A team member should confirm the item arrived, then mark the pending contribution received from the Donations page. At that point PawPlacer updates the wishlist received quantity.
Product Links
If an item has a Product URL, visitors see View Product and can open the retailer page directly. This is useful for supporters who prefer to buy and ship the item themselves instead of giving money through Stripe.
If someone buys an item externally and submits an item pledge, confirm it from the internal Donations page when it arrives. If they do not submit a pledge, record it from the internal Donations page or update the wishlist received quantity manually so the public wishlist stays accurate.
Item-Level Controls
Each wishlist item has two public support settings:
- Public Visible: shows the item on your public profile wishlist
- Accepts Monetary Donations: allows the item to be funded through public Stripe checkout or a tracked external payment method
Use these separately. For example, you can show an item publicly but turn off monetary donations if you only want supporters to buy it from the product link or submit a physical item pledge. The pledge button can still appear for available public wishlist items even when monetary donations are turned off for that item.
Internal Follow-Up
Public wishlist support lands in the same internal donation workflow as other gifts:
- Stripe gifts move from Checkout Created to Received automatically when payment succeeds.
- External payments stay Pending until staff reconcile the provider transaction.
- Physical item pledges stay Pending until staff confirm the item arrived.
- Refunded, cancelled, failed, or expired records release the reserved quantity back to the wishlist.
Open the linked item profile to see contribution history, pending quantities, received quantities, donor messages, and reconcile actions.