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

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2002/11/27/shopgoodorg-launches-online-shopping-mall-raise-funds-dec/
- Published: 2002-11-27T00:00:00+00:00
- Author: Howard Lake

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.”

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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.

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