A zero-inventory fundraising platform where a group launches a branded store in under 24 hours — print, ship, and payouts handled end to end.
Fundraising carries a tax that has nothing to do with the cause. Order forms. Boxes in a garage. A volunteer chasing down payments and handing out product one person at a time. Project Fundraise removes all of it — and replaces it with something that feels like ordinary online shopping.
We set out to make fundraising work like modern e-commerce. A group shares one link, supporters shop a store branded to that group, and every order is printed, shipped, and paid out without anyone on the group's side touching inventory. The hard, unglamorous back end — fulfilment, logistics, splitting the money — was designed from the start to be invisible.
The commerce runs on Shopify: branded storefronts, checkout, and catalog, with print-on-demand fulfilment behind it. That decision is what makes "zero inventory" real — nothing is bought up front, nothing is warehoused, and no one packs a box. A supporter checks out like they would anywhere else, and the order routes straight to production.
On top of that we built a custom React dashboard — the product the group actually lives in. It is where a team spins up a campaign, picks the merch that gets branded to them, shares the store link, and watches orders and earnings land in real time. The fundraising-specific flows that Shopify was never meant to handle live here, shaped around how a school, club, or team actually runs a drive.
Firebase is the glue underneath: authentication, the realtime campaign and order data the dashboard reads, and the automated revenue-share logic that splits every sale and pays the group its cut on its own. Mature commerce, a bespoke dashboard, and a realtime serverless backend are what let a group go from logo to a live store in under a day.
RFD owned the whole arc — planning, design, development, and delivery. There was no seam between the people who scoped the product and the people who shipped it, which is exactly why the model holds together end to end rather than in three disconnected pieces.
The result is a link-and-share fundraiser where the hard parts are hidden. A group tells us who they are, picks their products, and goes live the same day at zero upfront cost. From there the money and the merchandise take care of themselves — which is what a fundraiser was always supposed to do.
