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New site offers UK charities percentage of giftware sales

Howard Lake | 3 April 1999 | News

Yehi.com is a new Solihull-based site that offers to donate up to 50% of sales of UK giftware merchandise to participating charities. Read UK Fundraising’s report.

US charities have been benefiting from affinity programmes with online shops since 1997. Now UK charities can benefit from a new UK-focused site. Solihull-based Yehi.com sells giftware items such as brief cases, travel baggage, cutlery, crockery, clocks, ornaments and barometers, from established UK manufacturers. When fully operational, Brian Cook, developer of yehi.com, anticipates that 50% of the value of purchases will benefit the nominated charities – with the cost of running and developing the service funded entirely by advertising revenue. “Even the current start-up system diverts 40-45% of sales to charity” said Cook, “with costs met through a small levy on sales (eventually to be replaced by advertising income).”

Current items on the site cost anything from £20 to over £1000. Typical examples of the donation element of purchases are:

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Cook told UK Fundraising that “because no discounting is involved, manufacturers also like the service because it does not unfairly disadvantage their regular customers who have to continue to compete despite the higher overheads of traditional retailing.”

With an initial service up and trading, development is now shifting to cloning the home page to provide a custom-designed service for those charities willing to provide a hyperlink from their own web pages. By routing their visitors directly to ‘yehi.com’ they are ensured of a donation of the profits on all sales made on that referral.

Cook also plans to allocate shares in the company to participating charities. Then, should the company eventually become tradeable in its own right, “the charities benefit yet again”, said Cook.

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