Do i have to register with government for a Charity initiative site?

By profession I'm a software developer and recently me and my friend have thought of creating a web application that totally focuses on charity to underprivileged or providing things to the needy.

Basically my application would have 2main modules Admin and User

The user will be further subclassified as
Money Donor, Product Donor and Receiver (Which they will have to specify during registration)
Here the receiver can be either an individual or an organisation (such as orphanages or old age homes).

The plan is that the Product donor can upload the description as well as the image of the things(such as books, dresses, old bicycles) in my site. Which will later be viewed by the receiver as the view of a shopping cart with various things( such as books etc) on display. From which they can choose the one which is necessary for them. There are few things that I'm gonna limit in the Receiver side like restricting to receive just one thing in a week(the restriction part i will modify later as the application goes on).

Now lets assume if an Orphanage asks for few Old Bi-cycles donated to them, we would have it in the cart and can immediately get them from the Product donor's residence and then ship it to the Receiver's location, but as we cannot spend our own money every time for shipping so we created the Money Donor (a typical donor who will donate money instead of things). So that we can bear the charges of shipping and transportation from the Money that would be stored in the stack and would be publicly displayed in the website.

Now here's the biggest turning point. We can get people who can donate physical things, but will people be ready to donate money? Apart from that is there anything that we have to do to prove that out site is not a fraudulent one. Also do we have to register with the government to take this initiative? I dont know if we are missing any other thing. Any suggestion would be really appreciated.

The money that is stored in the stack will only used for the shipping and transportation as well as the maintenance of the site. Rest if we have enough money we would donate it for various purposed but we wont be using it. The only profit that we are looking to gain is by monetizing the site by getting some ads on it. Apart from that we are not looking for any profit.

Any suggestion how to go about in this initiative would be really helpful.

Thanks and Regards
S. Vikneshwar

The main advantage of donating to a charity is that you receive a tax receipt equal to the value of the goods/cash donated.

Only charities registered with the government can issue tax receipts. To run the business smoothly, you would need to register with the government. They would then also want to make sure that the lovely advertising revenue you hope to earn doesn't get paid out as profits. (That's fine, unless you make a lot of revenue, you can pay it out in salaries instead and as long as the salaries are reasonable that shouldn't be a problem.)

It is hypothetically possible that the end charity who receives the, e.g., bicycles, could issue a tax receipt which would go directly back to the donor or the bicycles. You may not need to be a registered charity to pass tax receipts back and forth (I'm not an accountant or lawyer). In that case, you would not be able to give a tax receipt to the 'money donor' ... making it harder to get that donor.

Yes, you'd likely have to register with your state (in the US) and the IRS.