Shopgood.org launches online shopping mall to raise funds for DEC

Howard Lake | 27 November 2002 | News

The site claims to be the first UK shopping portal to give 100% of all income to charity.

Shopgood.org says that it will be donating all its income to the Southern Africa Crisis Appeal run by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC).

The site consists of links to a wide range of online stores from companies such as Allders and Woolworths. Each will pay between two and 15% of any sales generated by visitors from Shopgood.org. Shoppers pay the same prices and receive the same service directly from the merchant.

The site has been created by Kevin Frea. “We’re a bit late for Christmas,” he says, “because we’ve all been working on our own sites too, but this site has only been possible thanks to the goodwill and commitment of a number of webmasters and suppliers offering time, resources and free publicity.”

He adds that Shopgood already has plans to expand rapidly to other parts of the world. “We are all involved in Affiliate Marketing and our websites earn income from Germany, Australia, the US etc. Using our extensive knowledge it would not be difficult to expand Shopgood into those markets too.”

Online charity shopping malls are a well-established model, so Shopgood.org enters the market very late. Also, it does not appear to have negotiated special deals with the stores, like other charity malls such as free2give.co.uk. Instead, it has signed up with a variety of merchants through the major affiliate networks run by Commission Junction, UKAffiliates, Tradedoubler, and BeFree, together with those such as Amazon which run their own affiliate programmes.

As such the site is a very good example of what can be achieved by almost any charity. There are so many affiliate programmes available that there is almost certainly one that is relevant to your charity’s donors. Even if you can’t find one, then signing up with Amazon.co.uk as an affiliate to generate income from selling books and CDs is a very straightforward process.

Shopgood.org says that all its site expenses will be met from sponsorship and webmasters own resources.

One of the major problems that charity shopping portals have had to address is how to promote their site and drive customers to it on a regular basis. This is made more difficult by the fact that customers details are only made available to the merchants, not to the shopping portal. As with any affiliate scheme, the merchant can interact directly with the customer after the first purchase, and thereby sidestep the charity shopping portal.

There are ways around this, but it usually involves the shopping portal gathering visitors’ contact details through registration. The role of the charity in regularly promoting the shopping mall is also essential. Given the DEC is an umbrella body fundraising for a group of international aid charities, this might prove more difficult for them than it would for one of the individual aid charities themselves.

Still, although the site does not intend raising funds for other charities like the other charity shopping malls, it does demonstrate what can be done with some knowledge of Web site design, the affiliate marketing sector, and the various free Web tools such as Coollist.com’s e-mail newsletter system. As such, it could yield some useful lessons for fundraisers.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.