Archive for September, 2009

In order to test the links on this rel­a­tively new Web site, I’ve done a num­ber of small sam­ple pur­chases from var­i­ous stores found on our church and char­ity part­ners’ pages. Up to this time, I had never per­son­ally shopped at BookCloseouts.com. Here’s my impres­sion of their site and service.

While you won’t find the newest and hottest titles at a close­out retailer, Book­Close­outs does have a nice selec­tion of books of all types from a vari­ety of authors, some well-known and oth­ers obscure. They typ­i­cally sell their books at 50% — 70% off the full retail price, so it can be well worth your time to sift through their rapidly chang­ing inven­tory to find some real bargains.

I was drawn to a sale that they were pro­mot­ing at the time in their “Reli­gion & Spir­i­tu­al­ity” sec­tion, where they were offer­ing books at 50% off their already deeply dis­counted prices. As you can guess from the name “Reli­gion & Spir­i­tu­al­ity,” they had all kinds of books in this sec­tion from every imag­in­able reli­gious per­spec­tive, but it wasn’t hard for me to find a num­ber of titles that cap­tured my interest.

I placed two orders. The first was for ten copies of a small group Bible study guide on the Gospel of Luke, writ­ten by Max Lucado. List price was $8 per copy — I got them for $2 each. The sec­ond order was for four indi­vid­ual books, two hard­backs and two paper­backs. I got all four of them for just over $10. All books were well pack­aged and received in excel­lent condition.

I’m happy to report that Book­Close­outs doesn’t inflate their ship­ping rates to squeeze some extra profit from each sale, like some mail-order ven­dors do. The set of ten Bible study guides cost $5.25 to ship, while postage on the four books that made up my sec­ond order was a lit­tle under $5.

Book­Close­outs offers a num­ber of ship­ping pri­or­i­ties and prices. I was in no hurry to receive my orders, so I went with the cheap­est option both times. Both ship­ments arrived in about two weeks.

Based on my expe­ri­ence with BookCloseouts.com, I am happy to rec­om­mend them to dis­cern­ing bar­gain hunters. As of this writ­ing, they have a new sale on “Scratch & Dent” books from every cat­e­gory at 85% off the retail price. If you can live with a less-than-perfect vol­ume, you can find some crazy deals on books while this offer lasts.

I got an ad from my Web site host­ing ser­vice recently offer­ing to sell me an add-on pack­age that they claimed would improve the secu­rity of my Web site and would pro­tect my vis­i­tors’ per­sonal data. I turned them down. Here’s why.

Did you notice that nowhere on this site do we ask you to reg­is­ter, or log in, or use a pass­word? Nowhere do we ask you for any per­sonal infor­ma­tion. When you click on one of our ads, the online retail­ers will ask you for per­sonal data (kinda makes it hard to sell you some­thing and ship it to you with­out the per­sonal data), but you aren’t on this Web site at that point — you’re on the retailer’s site.

Shop­ping here is totally anony­mous. There is noth­ing built into this site to enable me to know who any of my vis­i­tors are, hence no need for “secu­rity soft­ware.” There’s noth­ing here to pro­tect. The only thing that gets tracked here is which page on this site did each sale orig­i­nate from. That enables me to accu­rately track how much com­mis­sion goes to each of the char­i­ties that has a shop­ping page on this site.

I’ve made the point before that I am not a “mid­dle­man” in your trans­ac­tions with our online retail part­ners — not in any way, shape, or form. I don’t mark-up the prices of the goods and ser­vices you buy from our online retail­ers. (In fact, you are more than wel­come to use any coupon codes or spe­cial offers to get the absolute best price you can from any of our retail­ers.) I’m not involved in tak­ing your orders, main­tain­ing inven­tory, ship­ping your mer­chan­dise, or any other aspect of the sales process. My job is merely to intro­duce shop­pers to sell­ers, and then politely step out of the pic­ture and let you do busi­ness with each other.

And when you do, the retail­ers send me a com­mis­sion, which I split 50–50 with the char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion from whose page you started your shop­ping adventure.

It’s a thing of sim­ple beauty and is part of the rea­son that we are able to give such a high rebate per­cent­age to each of our part­ner charities.

So shop here with con­fi­dence, and in the immor­tal words of chef Julia Child, “Don’t be afraid!”

OK, I men­tioned in one of the Retail Part­ner blurbs (to see a short descrip­tion of all our Retail Part­ners, click on the Retail Part­ners tab in the menu bar near the top of the page) the fact that I like refur­bished equip­ment. Here’s why.

Man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies do qual­ity con­trol inspec­tions on their prod­ucts before they ship them out. That’s a good thing for me and you, because no one wants to buy junk.

A poten­tial prob­lem with man­u­fac­tur­ers’ qual­ity con­trol is that many com­pa­nies make so many prod­ucts that they aren’t able to inspect each and every piece they pro­duce. Or if they do inspect them all, it’s just a cur­sory inspec­tion. For those who don’t inspect every prod­uct, often­times what they will do is per­form a thor­ough spot-check of a few parts ran­domly pulled off the assem­bly line.

OK, enough about inspec­tions and new mer­chan­dise. What about refurbs?

Peo­ple return mer­chan­dise for all kinds of rea­sons. Some­times it’s because the prod­uct didn’t work like it was sup­posed to, but a lot of times it’s because of issues that don’t have any­thing at all to do with the prod­uct being defec­tive in any way. Some prod­ucts are returned on account of buyer’s remorse, or because the buyer just got laid off from their job and can’t afford the prod­uct now, or because their wife found out they bought it and made them send it back. So a whole bunch of prod­ucts get sent back to the man­u­fac­turer for rea­sons that have noth­ing at all to do with prod­uct quality.

The man­u­fac­ture wants to resell all of their returned mer­chan­dise, but they have to inspect it first to make sure that it goes out in excel­lent con­di­tion. This means that EVERY piece of returned mer­chan­dise gets inspected — not just a ran­dom sam­pling of prod­ucts, like when the stuff was first shipped out to retail­ers. So Rea­son #1 for why I like refurbs is that they have been indi­vid­u­ally inspected at the factory.

Another prob­lem that manufacturer’s have with returned mer­chan­dise is that they can’t sell it as new, because it isn’t new. You’ve heard that as soon as you drive a new car out of the show­room it drops in value by about 25%. That’s because it can no longer be sold as new. It may be very lightly used, but it’s used nonethe­less. So that takes me to Rea­son #2 why I like refurbs — you get a nice dis­count on them.

What’s not to like about a nearly-new piece of equip­ment that has been indi­vid­u­ally fac­tory inspected and marked down in price?

As of this writ­ing, I have two Retail Part­ners that have a good selec­tion of refur­bished equip­ment. The first one can be found in the Com­put­ers / Elec­tron­ics sec­tion and is called Refurb Depot. Lots of stuff at good dis­counts, but it doesn’t last long because they don’t get many of any indi­vid­ual item, so if you see some­thing you like, you bet­ter jump on it.

The other good refurb dealer is found in our Tools / Hard­ware / Auto­mo­tive sec­tion. The ven­dor is called Tool King. They have a really nice sec­tion of returned and refur­bished tools from a lot of major man­u­fac­tur­ers. If you want a high-quality brand name tool, but you don’t want to spend top dol­lar for it, this is the place to shop.

You can thank me later.

Like I said in my pre­vi­ous post, we have lit­er­ally thou­sands of online retail­ers avail­able to us and we are con­stantly adding good ones to our list. Then why are some of the really pop­u­lar online stores not already included on this site?

That’s an excel­lent ques­tion. Thank you for asking!

Just as we’ve cho­sen to not part­ner with many of the online retail­ers who’s sites we’ve reviewed, there are a lot of the big name retail­ers who have rejected us. I do a lot of my shop­ping online (even before start­ing this site) and I have a lot of favored retail­ers who have (so far) rejected my offer to include them on our char­ity shop­ping pages. It’s a real heart-breaker to get a rejec­tion let­ter from a com­pany that I des­per­ately want to include on this site.

The main rea­son for our rejec­tion by these lead­ing com­pa­nies is that this site is new and doesn’t have much traf­fic on it yet. The retail­ers eval­u­ate every Web site that applies for a con­tract with them and weed out those that don’t match their cri­te­ria. For a lot of the big name retail­ers, they’re look­ing part­ner with sites that get a lot of “hits” each month. So how many is “a lot?” It seems like the Magic Num­ber for many of these guys is 1,000. They want to see a track record of 1,000 unique vis­i­tors to this site every month before they will con­sider doing busi­ness with us.

We’re get­ting there. We’re brand new, but we’re work­ing hard to sign new Char­ity Part­ners with mem­bers who are moti­vated to con­tribute to their orga­ni­za­tion by shop­ping online. As we get more Char­ity Part­ners signed up with us and their peo­ple start vis­it­ing this site, we’ll get closer and closer to hit­ting that Magic Number.

Once we hit each retailer’s Magic Num­ber, you can expect to see the big guys here, like Wal­mart, Land’s End, Dell Com­put­ers, Sta­ples, Apple, Cold­wa­ter Creek, Macy’s, Dillard’s, and on and on. So please come back often to visit this site, even if it’s not to shop. We would really like you to leave com­ments on our posts, rec­om­mend retail­ers, do prod­uct reviews, let us know of spe­cial events hap­pen­ing with your orga­ni­za­tion, etc. This is more than just a fundrais­ing page — it’s a com­mu­nity. I’m excited about the com­mu­nity aspects and poten­tial of this site, as well as it’s abil­ity to help finance char­i­ties through the shar­ing of our online sales com­mis­sions with each of them.

As you browse through our ever-growing list of online retail­ers, you’ll find lots of brand names that you’ve heard of and known for years — com­pa­nies like Ace Hard­ware, 1–800-PetMeds, Priceline.com, Reader’s Digest, and many more.

There are also many smaller, less well-known online retail­ers that we are fea­tur­ing on our shop­ping pages. To help you get acquainted with all of our retail­ers, we’ve cre­ated a lit­tle blurb on each one of them. To find these retailer descrip­tions, click on the Retail Part­ners but­ton in the menu bar near the top of the ShopOnline4Charity Web page.

We want you to know that we have access to lit­er­ally thou­sands of online retail­ers that we could include on our shop­ping pages. We don’t list all of them, for many rea­sons. First of all, we’re look­ing out for you, our val­ued shop­pers. We visit and eval­u­ate the site of every hun­dreds of retail­ers before we include them on our char­ity shop­ping pages. We’re family-friendly here. We don’t want to include any retail­ers that offer unsa­vory mer­chan­dise. (For exam­ple, we had to look at sev­eral mag­a­zine ven­dors before we found one that didn’t have an “adult” sec­tion.) We also try to gauge the qual­ity of the mer­chan­dise offered and the pric­ing. We’ve rejected many retail­ers because it looked to us like their prod­ucts weren’t com­pet­i­tively priced.

Just because we’ve screened the retail­ers that we’ve allowed to be included on this site, that doesn’t mean that we endorse every prod­uct that they sell. For instance, there are books that are car­ried by some of our book deal­ers that we con­sider to be a waste of time and money, but we don’t have the lux­ury of being able to con­trol their entire inven­tory. So as always, use your best judg­ment in select­ing prod­ucts that you’re not famil­iar with.

If you have a favorite online retailer that you would like to see included in our pro­gram, please email us at Phil@ShopOnline4Charity.org, give us the Web address for the retailer, and some infor­ma­tion about why you like them, and we’ll see if we can add them to our list. We are con­stantly grow­ing and adding good, new retail­ers, so come back often to check our list. And thank you for shop­ping at ShopOnline4Charity.org.

Let’s face it — there isn’t much “fun” in fundrais­ing. Not for any­one. Let me count the ways:

• It’s not fun for the per­son who has to ask their friends and fam­ily for money.
• It’s just not pos­si­ble for a lot of peo­ple to give “above and beyond” what they are already donat­ing right now.
• It’s not fun to be asked to buy over­priced prod­ucts that you don’t really want or need.
• Fundrais­ing can strain your finances and your relationships.
• Fundrais­ing projects that sell prod­ucts don’t have a very broad range of mer­chan­dise to choose from.
• Fundrais­ing cus­tomers are usu­ally required to pay up front, some­time wait for weeks to receive what they ordered, and have  lim­ited recourse if they are unhappy with the prod­uct once it’s received.
• And when the fundrais­ing event is (finally!) over, so is the rev­enue stream.

Let me show you a more excel­lent way — a way that puts the “fun” back into fundraising.

When your char­ity or non-profit orga­ni­za­tion becomes a Char­ity Part­ner of ShopOnline4Charity.org, you can intro­duce your mem­bers (and their net­works of friends and fam­ily) to a fundrais­ing oppor­tu­nity that over­comes all of the neg­a­tive aspects of fundrais­ing listed above.

We offer vis­i­tors to this site a huge selec­tion of prod­ucts and ser­vices from a grow­ing num­ber of online Retail Part­ners — some that you’ve known and trusted for years, oth­ers that are new to you and ready to be dis­cov­ered. Because vis­i­tors can shop from their favorite online retail­ers, there’s no pres­sure to spend money they don’t have for prod­ucts they don’t want from ven­dors they wouldn’t buy from oth­er­wise. And they don’t pay a sin­gle penny more than if they had gone to the Web retailer’s site directly. Besides that, this is a fundraiser that doesn’t end. As long as we’re here (and we plan on being here for a very long time), we’ll be open for busi­ness. And best of all, 50% of all our com­mis­sions will be shared with your charity.

If your char­ity is already on-board with ShopOnline4Charity.org, thank you. You may begin shop­ping to raise funds for your group. If your orga­ni­za­tion is vis­it­ing to check us out, feel free to kick the tires, click on one of our exist­ing Char­ity Part­ner links to visit some of our Retail Part­ners’ sites, and maybe do a lit­tle shop­ping while you’re here. To con­tact us about includ­ing your orga­ni­za­tion on our site, email us at Phil@ShopOnline4Charity.org.

And now abides faith, hope, char­ity, these three; but the great­est of these is char­ity.

— 1 Corinthi­ans 13:13

ShopOnline4Charity.org is really easy to use:

• Select the char­ity or orga­ni­za­tion that you want to help sup­port by click­ing on either the Char­ity Part­ners but­ton at the top of this page or the Char­i­ties list­ing in the left side­bar
  
• Shop at online stores by click­ing on the ads on the charity’s page
• Place your order directly with the online retailer
• We share half of our com­mis­sion with your char­ity
  

Remem­ber to do all your online shop­ping from the ads on your charity’s page. Book­mark this page now to make it easy for you to remem­ber to come back to this site as a por­tal for all your online shop­ping needs. Come back often, as we are adding new online retail­ers on a reg­u­lar basis.