Online Malls Go Beyond Retail Stores

Nonprofits regularly contact supporters, and those supporters usually go shopping. Online retailers for the past decade have been trying, with varying degrees of success, to marry those ideas.

It's finally starting to take root.

Shop.org drew in $107,000 just during the 2006 holiday

"The results exceeded our expectations," said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org. "The online mall can be a very effective fundraiser where supporters help fund an organization just by doing what they usually do each day--by shopping."

Shop.org points to the concept of affiliate marketing, where the organization hosts more than 500 retailers on the site and viewers can click to the retailers of their choice.

The organization is recognized by the vendor running the site because a cookie on the person's browser identifies that traffic originated from the location. That way the organization obtains a commission from sales.

Most stores give a percentage of the purchase price back to the vendor. The vendor then sends a percentage to the nonprofit. On average, the nonprofit sees around 4 percent, although the amount can range between 3 and 25 percent.

"It's a turnkey online mall. We do very little work on our part because we're not experts at running online malls," Silverman said. "We help promote through public relations while the vendor manages the relationship with the merchants and handles the custom service."

The e-mall product is a combination of a custom brand Web site and support. Usually no software needs to be downloaded onto a "users" computer. The vendor plugs the code unique to each client into the vendor's generic back-end structure, which is varied to create a brand for the nonprofit.

The vendor seeks the nonprofit's audience from the nonprofit's Web site, which is linked to the individual retailers. In exchange, the vendor looks to the organization for promotion such as emailing or newsletters.

With Shop.org, the organization coordinated CyberMonday as a promotional vehicle. "We dubbed the Monday after Thanksgiving as CyberMonday to be the ceremonial kickoff of the online holiday shopping season," Silverman said. "We reserved the URLs in 2005 and worked with the vendor to turn CyberMonday into a mall event."