Click Collection opens donated clothes market to all charities
Howard Lake | 21 May 2012 | News
Six charities are participating in the business at launch but it will be expanded to others.Online multi-charity clothes retailer Click Collection has opened for business, enabling charities without shops to generate income from donated clothing. The site lets multiple charities benefit from an aggregated clothing collection and single online shop.
Click Collection offers a national collection service from donors’ homes, currently excluding Northern Ireland and Islands. Each item is tracked to its supporter and the charity they wish to support, so sales are credited appropriately. Donors get to see exactly how much their items raised, and charities receive summary reports. Costs and profits are therefore shared according to their sales.
Click Collection charges a 5% management fee on sales generated. Its founders say that they expect to generate a similar profit for participating charities to that achieved by average High Street charity shops. It makes no charge to charities for joining the service.
Clothes are sorted into retail and wholesale streams in order to maximise charities’ income. Items are then added to the service’s online shop. Purchasers are given the option to make a donation with Gift Aid as part of the payment process.
Given that the range available will always be different, shoppers can use the site’s My Shopper service to request to be notified when an item in the right size or of the right kind is added to the site.
Click Collection believes it is extending the opportunities of fundraising from donated clothes to a wider range of charities and to a larger audience of shoppers, who will no longer be restricted by the items available in charity shops where they live. It also hopes to overcome the widespread problem of theft of charity bags from the pavement.
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.