It is not uncommon for shelters and rescues to partner with local retailers, like pet stores, to showcase animals for adoption. Many times these facilities have retail staff complete the adoption who do not have access to Shelterluv.

Using Mobile Checkout

With a connected Shelterpay account, you can process adoptions entirely contact-free using mobile checkout. If your adopters have submitted an application, you’ll already have all the necessary contact information you need to text an adoption contract and collect a debit or credit card payment from anywhere! Adoption documents, such as system-generated medical history as well as your configured Digital Adoption Packets, can be emailed to your adopter when completing the transaction in Shelterluv.

What if the adopter pays with cash or check?

We built the mobile checkout feature around our integrated credit card processor Shelterpay, so today there unfortunately is not a way to text a contract to an adopter who would like to pay with cash or check. In the meantime, if your organization has connected a Shelterpay account already you can update the pet’s adoption fee to $0 in order to use the mobile checkout feature for the adoption transaction, allowing you to collect a digital signature.

First, you’ll need to reduce the pet’s adoption fee to $0, then use the blue “Continue with Payment" button to process the adoption virtually using the same mobile checkout process described above. 

When you’ve collected the cash or check payment, you'll need to process a non-adoption shopping cart item in the amount of the original adoption fee by clicking the “New Purchase” button on the Purchases tab of the adopter’s Person Record. This will ensure your accounting reports have a cash/check transaction in the correct amount. You will likely want to note the animal name and/or ID in the transaction memo field so you know which adoption the transaction should be associated with.

What if the adoption occurs after hours or I do not know the adopter’s name yet?

Adoption outcomes can now be backdated to ensure the event history is recorded accurately. (See: How can I edit the date of an intake, outcome, or foster event?) Until you have the necessary information from the adopter to process the adoption outcome, you may wish to update the animal’s status to “Pending Adoption” or something similar, that is configured not to publish to your website and aggregator accounts. You can also add a pop-up memo to the animal’s record to denote that the animal has been adopted offsite and needs to be processed.

Alternatively, when your shelter/rescue is notified that an animal at an offsite location has been adopted but you don't yet have the adopter's information, you can opt to create a placeholder person record, possibly with the animal's name and 'Adopted at Pet store' (e.g. Theo - Adopted at Pet store) and your shelter's contact information. You can then process the adoption outcome using this placeholder person record and a $0 adoption fee.

To do this, you can create a $0 adoption price group to use at the time you record the adoption outcome for the placeholder person record. Then when the money is received and a transaction for that dollar amount should be recorded, you can process a second transaction using a non-adoption shopping cart item that represents the adoption fee.

Once the adoption information (application/contract) and payment have been received from the off site partner, you can edit the person record with the correct contact information and scan/attach the application and contract to the animal's record. After the person record information has been updated, all reports will reflect the new contact information rather than the original placeholder data. 

You can also consider using an outcome subtype or attribute to identify and differentiate these offsite adoptions in reporting. For additional information, please review: Setting up your outcome forms and subtypes.

If you need help configuring this on your account or have questions relating to implementing this at your organization, please email help@shelterluv.com and we'll be happy to help!