WePay's statement is simple. "Collect the payments without the hassle."
What is interesting about WePay is that it is built on a "crowdsourcing" mentality. You can set up and start collecting money online in under a minute. There is no merchant account, website, or programming required. To set it up, you visit WePay.com and create an account. You then add the information about what you are raising money for, how much is needed, and the time frame across which the money will be collected. Because it is so easy to use, it can be a highly effective format for raising money for missions trips and special projects. It is even an easy way to collect money when a group of people are going in to give a gift. The meter shows in real time how much money has been collected, and there are buttons to set appropriate donation amounts or to allow the person to write their own dollar amount.
They also make it easy to share status updates via Twitter or Facebook or to add a widget to your website.
WePay makes its money by keeping a small percentage for handling the transactions--3.5% of whatever is collected. There is a dashboard that shows what has been donated and allows you to withdraw the funds as needed.
Being a bit confessional--I recently used WePay for a purely selfish reason. For my birthday, I set the limit of the cost of a painting I wanted with $20 and $5 contributor buttons depending on if you were the type of friend who would buy me a gift card or the type of friend who would just send a card. I loaded an image of the painting so that people could see what they were contributing to. As it turned out, not only did my friends get excited looking each day to see if the painting was funded, but the artist did too. Once we got to 100%, I simply ended the ability for people to donate. Who would have thought the digital world would result in a crowdsourced birthday gift?
