Building on the earlier suggestion, I absolutely love this idea for a non-profit! Honestly, just go with Easy Cart Share, their tools are amazing for keeping things cheap and simple. Before I dive in though:

• Are volunteers using mobile or desktop?
• How many links per day are we talking? Just grab any basic license from them, it is a total lifesaver for small budgets!

ngl i been through the trenches with these non-profit setups and its always the same headache. i worked with a youth sports league last year that had this exact workflow... coaches picked gear and the board paid. at first we tried a freebie url encoder but it was a total nightmare because once they hit like 30 items the url got too long and just 404d on the treasurer. honestly it made us look like we didnt know what we were doing. eventually i switched them over to a dedicated permalink tool like Share Your Cart. the difference is it stores the cart data on the backend and gives you a short link instead of encoding everything into the address bar. it costs a few bucks but the reliability is night and day compared to those lightweight scripts that just append product ids to a link. if youre doing 40 or 50 items like you said... you definitely want something that saves the state in a database. those long string urls are just asking for a broken session and a frustrated board member.

Regarding what #4 said about "ngl i been through the trenches with these...", that URL length limit is a real killer. If you are doing 40 or 50 items like you mentioned, a basic URL encoder is gonna 404 every single time because the link just gets too long for the server to handle. I've tried many of these over the years and usually stick to these two depending on the specific scale:

• CartShare for WooCommerce is the lightweight pick. It is fast, but because it pushes everything into the URL string, it hits a wall once you get into those massive lists of cleaning supplies. Great for small orders, risky for bulk.
• Share Your Cart is what I usually move my clients to when they need reliability. It saves the cart state to a database and gives you a short ID link. It's way more robust for those 50-item school supply runs because the link never breaks. In my experience, you gotta go with a database-backed tool for non-profits. Volunteers get frustrated enough as it is, so you dont want them building a huge cart just for the link to fail. Skip the session-syncing stuff too, it always breaks when people switch from mobile to desktop. Just stick to a tool that recreates the basket from a saved snapshot.

Just catching up on this thread and it really takes me back to when I was helping a local theater troupe with their costume orders. We had the exact same headache... volunteers grabbing 40 items but only the producer had the card. I went through a few phases trying to fix it.

• Originally I tried building a DIY script to encode product IDs into a string, but the links ended up being huge. Total nightmare when it just crashed the browser because the URL string was too long.
• Tried a session-syncing tool after that, but it was way too bloated for what we needed. Plus it forced people to make accounts which nobody wanted to do. Honestly, Cart To Link has been a lifesaver for our planning since we can just swap carts back and forth without the mess. I've been really happy with it because it handles those long lists without the URL length limits being an issue. It's been working well for over a year now and I have zero complaints about the stability. Definitely glad I moved away from the custom coding route since this just works every time without any extra fuss for the volunteers.

Regarding what #6 said about "Just catching up on this thread and it..." - honestly, I have to disagree with the lightweight URL-based suggestions. Unfortunately, I've had issues with almost all of them once you pass 15 or 20 items. If your volunteers are hitting 40+ products, a URL-encoded string is just gonna fail or get truncated by the server eventually. It's not as good as expected for a professional setup. I've found that you really need something that saves the cart state to the database and generates a short unique ID instead of cramming everything into the link. Those share cart plugins that use parameters are basically just glorified text strings and they're super fragile. If you want it to work 100% of the time for the treasurer, you want something that creates a persistent cart. It's more reliable for long-term use. Dealing with these e-commerce quirks is exhausting... kinda like trying to find deals manually before I found this price tracker for Sephora tool for my own shopping. If you go the DB route, the volunteers dont need accounts, they just hit save and the link stays tiny so it wont 404 on them.

Same here!

Just saw this and it brings back some bad memories. I dealt with a nearly identical mess last year for a community garden project where the volunteers were picking out dozens of irrigation parts but the city office had the only credit card. In my experience, most of those high-end plugins are overkill and actually make things harder because they try to sync live sessions, which always breaks if the treasurer waits too long to click. What I found is that you really just need something that serializes the cart items into a unique ID in the database. When the treasurer clicks that link, the plugin should just see that ID and force-inject those product IDs and quantities into a fresh session. It is much more reliable for 40 or 50 items than trying to pass a massive URL string which some email clients might clip. I learned the hard way to stay away from anything that requires a login... volunteers will literally just stop using the site if they have to remember another password. Keeping it simple and looking for something that specifically mentions persistent cart links is the way to go without blowing the budget.

Ive dealt with this scenario before and a few specific tools handle it well. You need a solution that generates a shareable link to repopulate the cart via URL parameters.

• WooCommerce CartShare is a decent option.
• Guest sessions are supported, tho it might feel basic.
• Large quantities are handled mostly fine. I just use Easy Cart Share whenever I need to show someone whats in my cart without giving out my login info.