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About Us Purestores is a division of Purepages Group whose primary business objective is the creation of fund raising shopping portals for charities. The many varieties of branded shop provide a completely FREE entry point to your favourite online stores where you can browse their latest products and online-only special offers. But the best part of connecting to these shopping portals is that as well as buying as normal from all your regular online retailers and services, you raise funds for your designated charity at absolutely no extra cost to yourself. What is Affiliate Marketing? All the major online retailers have affiliate marketing schemes whereby they pay fees or commissions to ‘aggregators’ or major entry points for community-inspired consumers. An online retailer such as Tesco.com or Waterstones.co.uk is grateful for traffic (i.e. consumers) to be pushed through to their website as the more traffic they get, the more likely they are to increase their sales – simple. For this affiliate marketing service that theYshop provides, i.e. funnelling traffic to Tesco or waterstones for example, the retailers pay an ‘affiliate fee’ or commission on the sale. This fee varies between 3-15% of the ex-VAT price, depending on product types and profit margins. Thus if you bought a £1000 Plasma TV from Amazon, you can create £100 of funds for your charity at absolutely no extra cost to yourself. According to 2007 USwitch research, 8 million UK households spend on average two hours a day shopping online, with the average household spending £980 a year on online goods and services. This represents 10% of their £9,630 total annual shopping bill. The most popular products bought online by over half of adult internet users are holidays, music and films. But how can these retailers afford to ‘give away’ this money you ask? Well, it’s quite simple really. Online retailers, unlike physical high street stores, have no expensive shop to pay rent on (typically £30 per square foot or more rent per year), no expensive high street business rates, no shop fittings, no staff uniforms and the list goes on. Online retailers generally only spend money on online marketing - in two forms. One is to pay for clicks on Google or similar search engines and the other is affiliate marketing. Further articles on affiliate marketing are at: http://www.12manage.com/methods_affiliate_marketing.html http://www.wnim.com/archive/issue3404/emarketing.htm http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=22927 Do I have any liability over consumer purchases? And when do I get paid? Purestores is deliberately one step removed from the retailers. We communicate, or more correctly, trade electronic information with an intermediary, which means that liability for any purchase via your charity website lies with the retailer and not us, nor you the charity. In effect, legal and privacy implications are nil; things are kept very simple. The downside, however, is an initial protracted financial cash flow. These intermediaries or aggregators (Trade Doubler, Commission Junction, Affiliate Window, for example) who interface directly with the retailers (Asda, John Lewis et al) generally do not authorise a sale for up to 3 months after the initial sale. In turn, this means that we cannot send the affiliate commissions back to you for up to 3 months either. This time delay is very much focused on reducing any chargeback costs - costs incurred when the consumer has received a faulty product, or is in dispute over some matter. The UK clearing banks are highly nervous about chargebacks and many industry sectors are obliged to pay large bonds upfront before receiving an Internet Merchant Account (IMA) which is a statutory requirement for any online trading. In practice, your very first payment could possibly arrive in Month Four of operations, though it might be sooner. Interestingly, the longest period we currently have to wait for a payment to be authorised is 36 days. Once the initial period is over, then payments come through on a regular monthly basis, usually on the fifteenth of the month. A final consideration is that the intermediaries will not send out cheques for small amounts. The normal threshold for payment is £800, though we have negotiated to have this reduced to £100. This parameter to trading means that if only a small number of purchases or transactions are going through, you could wait even longer. Patently, it is up to you, the charity, to maximise sales through the shop system to ameliorate any threshold issues. For our part, we at Purestores are happy to advise you for free on marketing communications regarding the shop portal at any time. Further, we will supply every month a trading statement, which will itemise what is pending to be processed and what value is expected to be cleared in the time before you actually get paid. Trading with Us TheYshop and all its variants have just one sole purpose - to raise funds for your favourite charity by offering that community, friends and family an un-paralleled range of online retailers and their products to choose from. In working with these Internet retailers we want to portray and market their products in the very best possible formats of design and functionality that make purchasing both a true pleasure and inherently simple. If you are a retailer who wants to trade with us and have access to a community of several hundred thousand consumers plus, then please contact the company at the address below mikep@purepagesgroup.com or telephone Mike Phillips on 01204 375500 for an exploratory discussion