Like everyone, I’ve got a fist clamped around my spending habits, but when the economy tanks, it’s not just my travel budget and scotch collection that gets hurt. Nonprofits are facing a triple threat with their donations and investments sharply down just as demand for their services has peaked, and even though I know how worthy the work is, I’m having a hard time giving money to any nonprofitable thing that isn’t me (Don’t you dare call me, Ira Glass!).
That’s why I really liked the idea behind GoodShop.com, a new online coupon service that claims it will help me save money on things I buy and at the same time donate to charity, all from the comfort of my kitchen table. But would it live up to that lofty promise? I had some travel to book and some gear to buy over the weekend, so I decided to give it a whirl.
It’s a pretty simple process, adding one additional step to my usual shopping routine. I headed to the GoodShop.com homepage, selected a nonprofit from the thousands in the database (you can even support your local school or cause, by applying to add it to the list before shopping), typed my vendor into the search function, and clicked the link to take me to its page. Unlike other charitable shopping sites I’ve seen, you make your purchases through the vendor’s own website, not GoodShop’s, which means you still have access to their inventory and discounts and can still use your own rewards cards or accounts.
When you access the vendor site through GoodShop’s link, your purchase is tracked, and the vendor pays a commission of that total to GoodShop, which then applies it to your selected charity. It all sounds a bit Big Brother, but hey, if my shopping habits are being tracked anyway (and they are) that info might as well be used for something I care about instead of just to target more advertising my way.
The best part is that certain vendors will list coupon codes on their GoodShop page below the link, which you can apply to your purchases. By GoodShop-ing Travelocity, for example, I could have saved $100 off a package to Central Europe, in addition to the 1 percent of my airfare purchase that would go toward the nonprofit I selected. A full 4 percent of my Backcountry.com bill was donated, and I got free shipping to boot. I found myself shopping among vendors to find the ones offering the biggest percentage donation as well as the best coupons. So despite feeling penny poorer at the end of these exchanges, I feel a little richer in virtue.
There are lots of familiar names in GoodShop’s travel section: Expedia, Delta, Fairmont, Magellan’s, Avis for starters. If you, like some people I could mention, are addicted to Ex Officio’s underwear and won’t go anywhere in anything else, you can donate 7.5 percent of the cost of your next pair to some doogooders. But GoodShop.com is not just for travel-related purchases—almost every biggish company I could think of that I shop from online was somewhere in its database, and quite a few that were new to me. What is this Amazon.com, for instance?
