School dinners outperform goats in sales at Oxfamunwrapped
Howard Lake | 21 December 2005 | News
Last year the goat was the ethical Christmas present of choice at Oxfamunwrapped.com and some of the other ‘alternative’ charity gifts catalogues. This year the most popular gift at Oxfamunwrapped is a pack of vouchers for 100 school dinners.
So far Oxfamunwrapped has sold 89,000 of the £6 pack of vouchers for school dinners. Goats are still popular gifts: in second place, over 55,000 of them have been sold at £24. The next most popular gifts are a pack of seeds to plant 50 trees: 30,000 of these £16 gifts have been sold. In fourth place comes the gift of planting an allotment: 15,000 of these £24 gifts have been sold. In fifth place is the donkey at 9,500 orders for £60 each.
The above statistics cover online, phone and post orders, but exclude sales at Oxfam’s 750 shops.
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According to Oxfam, the alternative or ethical gifts market this Christmas, what it terms “conscience shopping”, will grow from £230 million last year to £360 million this year. According to Chris Coe, Oxfam’s trading director, this still represents only 2.5% of the total £14.7 billion that will be spent at Christmas, so the market could still grow.
Oxfamunwrapped.com has enjoyed a major rise in traffic over the past three weeks, according to independent monitor Hitwise UK. The site jumped 315 places from 495th in the week ending 19 November to 180th in the week ending 10 December.
This jump means “unprecedented market share” for the charity’s trading site, according to Hitwise UK. “For the week ending December 10, market share of visits to the site were up 244% year-on-year, with the site also taking the #1 ranking within the Community – Humanitarian category for the first time”, reports Hitwise.
Indeed, Oxfam Unwrapped is “performing well” against mainstream retailers as well. In 2004 the site peaked at a ranking of 369th based on visits to Hitwise UK’s Shopping & Classifieds category for the week ending 18 December 2004, whilst this year the site had already climbed to rank 180th for the week ending 10 December 2005.
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.