Shopping sites with proceeds to charity

What are the implications?

[instinct]

There are a lot of 'shopping mall' type sites out there that give all or part of their affiliate commissions to one or more charities. This sounds like a good idea for affiliate marketing (with the great side effect of doing something positive) but I'm sure there are pitfalls, anyone have any experience with this?

I also noticed that while signing up for certain affiliate programs, I was asked to indicate if some/all of the affiliate proceeds were going to charity. Why do they ask this? Does answering yes invite more scrutiny, or does it mean they will be more likely to accept you?

What about legal issues? Can anyone just *say* they are giving x% to charity 'y' without it being independently verified?

Thanks all

[instinct]

Anyone have any comments? thanks much!

[jim2003]

Hello,

My answers to your questions are in part speculation but I think accurate.

You are less likely to be accepted into programs if you are giving away part of the proceeds to a charity. Especially programs that pay bounties for clicks, leads, or large upfront commissions for items like credit cards. From some merchants point of view,I believe, these look like incentivised clicks. They don't want to encourage people to fill out lead forms or apply for credit cards, that they don't intend to use just to help out a charity.

Other retailers are hopeful getting customers to come directly to thier websites without going through an affiliate link in the future, and don't necessarily want to encourage customers to always go through the customers favorite charity website instead of directly to the retailers website.

But there are lots of merchants who have no problem with strategy and I think that their is real potential in that business model.

Best regards,

[instinct]

Thanks Jim, that is pretty much what I thought.

I think that here is potential as well, but like anything with huge potential on the web, it will likely attract scammers and other un-professional types in spades.

We'll see...

[Dynamoo]

IMO, a lot of the shopping sites that claim to make charitable donations are actually using it to mask unethical activity. For example, there are a few that donate an unspecified portion of funds to charity in exchange for the visitor downloading some spyware-infested software that sits in the browser and tries to cream off affiliate commissions where they're not strictly due.