Dear Supporters,
We regret to inform you that our eCommerce center is permanently closed. This decision was not made lightly, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
We wanted to address the two-year outage of our website, which began due to challenges related to TaxCloud payment fees that significantly impacted our budget at the Purple Martin Association of the Dakotas.
Initially, we anticipated only nominal transaction fees; however, these costs escalated due to multi-state tax reporting and filing requirements. This unexpected increase resulted in a substantial monthly financial burden, ultimately consuming our entire annual budget.
As a small nonprofit organization, we operate on a tight budget, and these unforeseen expenses pose serious challenges to our operations and programs. This situation also hinders our ability to run our eCommerce Center at shop.PurpleMartinDakotas.org, limiting our capacity to generate revenue and support our initiatives.
Access to the TaxCloud API and our involvement in the Streamlined Sales Tax initiative are crucial for managing our State sales tax obligations effectively. It is noteworthy that we do not employ any paid staff; our directors serve as volunteers. Therefore, every dollar allocated to these fees directly affects our mission to promote the conservation and research of purple martins and their habitats.
Additionally, we received a notification from PayPal requesting information to ensure we could fulfill orders, which led to significant restrictions on our account. This disruption severely affected our ability to process transactions and fulfill orders, profoundly impacting our operations and our mission.
In addition to our existing challenges, DreamHost, our web hosting provider and domain name registrar, identified that our website was incompatible with PHP 8.0, which resulted in a crash. Fortunately, the site continued to function correctly on PHP 7.4, which was only supported until the end of the year. Unfortunately, this limited timeframe did not provide us with sufficient opportunity to resolve compatibility issues and prepare for future updates, ultimately leading to a complete website failure.
Given these pressing challenges, we urgently sought solutions to mitigate these interruptions. It was critical that we resolved these issues promptly to continue our work in supporting purple martins without further disruption. We actively reached out to partners and explored every possible avenue to stabilize our operations and maintain our services.
Thank you for your understanding and support as we navigated these challenges. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need further clarification.
We appreciate your patience and continued support over the years.
Sincerely,
Perry Vogel
Purple Martin Association of the Dakotas