How shopping at the Local Solutions shop helps Local Solutions?
The Local Solutions shop provides 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 the Local Solutions shop is that as well as buying as normal from all your regular online retailers and services, you raise funds for Local Solutions at absolutely no extra cost to yourself.
How does this work? Well the secret is explained by the concept of affiliate marketing and the paying of ‘affiliate fees’. All the major online retailers have affiliate marketing schemes whereby they pay fees to ‘aggregators’ or major entry points for community inspired consumers such as you guys that buy via Local Solutions shop. 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. The more traffic they get, the more likely they are to increase their sales – simple. For this affiliate marketing service that Local Solutions shop provides, i.e. funnelling traffic to Tesco or waterstones for example, the retailers pay an ‘affiliate fee’. 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.
And 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
How the Local Solutions helps and supports people?
Local Solutions is a unique and dynamic social enterprise that improves the quality of peoples lives.
For over thirty years they have been meeting the needs of vulnerable people in the community through a number of diverse services that support:
People seeking training and employment
Young homeless people
Lone parents
Ethnic minority groups
Unpaid carers
Older people
People who have an illness or a disability
People affected by domestic violence or bullying
Vulnerable people to live independently in their own homes
People with mental health issues
Carers who support people with mental health issues
So shopping via this shop helps generate vital funds, at NO COST TO YOURSELF, to carry out the support work so necessary in today’s complex society
About Trading with The Local Solutions shop
The Local Solutions shop’s sole purpose is to raise funds for Local Solutions, 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, then please contact the company at the address below
mikep@purepagesgroup.com or telephone Mike Phillips on 01204 375500 for an exploratory discussion