Charitable Shopping Startup

As consumers continue to boost online shopping to new heights, a new company has found a way to turn holiday shopping sprees into a philanthropic endeavor.

ShopGiveLove.com, which calls itself “The Shopping Cart With A Heart,” launched Wednesday (Nov. 26) as a way for shoppers to donate to charity without any additional expense. The site makes donations to Habitat for Humanity, the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and the American Cancer Society. The site, connected to the Amazon shop-sphere, vows to donate half of all of its revenue to the charities.

Online shoppers can search for any product using the Amazon search bar, and without any added effort, a donation will be made whenever a purchase is. The company assures that while the site may be different, the experience is no different than shopping on Amazon.com.

In a note to consumers, ShopGiveLove.com says it “is essentially a digital gateway to all of Amazon’s product offerings, with a technology twist.” The idea was launched by Remarkable Technologies founder Eric Knight, who says for 14 years he has explored a way to increase charitable donations through shopping without extra charges to the shopper. He launched ShopAndGive in 2001 in the UK, for example, with a similar mission to ShopGiveLove.com.

“Unfortunately,” Knight says, “it does not look like the site ever achieved significant traction” because of “razor-thin margins in online retail” that have revealed significant speed bumps for philanthropic e-commerce efforts.

But with the emergence of AmazonSmile, those efforts gained a footing. Through AmazonSmile, 0.5 percent of every purchase is given to a charity. But Knight says he wanted to take the idea one step further. Last October, the entrepreneur came up with the idea to sell products through Amazon as is normally done, but this time, with a significant portion – 50 percent – of revenue going directly to those charities.

As expected, significant challenges emerged – including those thin margins – but ShopGiveLove committed to offering a streamlined e-commerce site, increasing efficiency and reducing unnecessary costs. Now, Knight says he is looking to the future, one step at a time, to put 2014’s record-breaking holiday shopping season to good use.