Singapore’s ShopForSocial Lets You Shop Online For a Good Cause
Socially-conscious online shopping is not new, but it certainly is fresh around Asia. This week in Singapore, ShopForSocial was officially launched. The social shopping platform is backed by five social enterprises: Mother and Child Project, Gift and Take, Friends of the Disabled, Handmade Link and Mama Shoppe.
ShopForSocial is basically an online shop that channels social enterprises, entrepreneurs, and non-profit organizations that wish to sell their products to benefit a good cause. We talked to Serene Ow, one of the founders of ShopForSocial, and she told us:
Basically Shop For Social’s goal is to raise the profile of social enterprises/non-profits and their social mission, and to help to increase their sales through the marketing and value-add of their product offerings. Through ShopForSocial.com, we also hope to support these social enterprises in improving their designs and pricing, and streamlining their products. Our long term vision is to become a well-known e-commerce store for social enterprises - a one-stop shop for interesting, high-quality and competitively-priced products with a social cause.
We further asked Serene about ShopForSocial’s plan to monetize to cover the maintenance and the expansion of the site, and she told us:
Yup, for our online sales, we take a percentage cut of the transactions on our site. We’re going extremely lean at the start as we do not want to unduly tax our partners, and we know the sustainability will come only after we expand and acquire corporate clients.
ShopForSocial basically operates in two ways: online and offline. Its online strategy is comprised of online sales campaigns (facebook pages, pinterest and twitter , blogger engagement), a showcase of products (the online shop), and features about social enterprises on the website. Currently it is only featuring the five previously-mentioned social enterprises, but we were told that more are in the pipeline. Its offline strategy, on the other hand, is comprised of consignment sales (e.g. collections of products hosted in cafes or stores), corporate gifts (working with partners to come up with gifts suitable for any specific event), corporate tie-ups (e.g. marketing), and CSR (e.g. sponsorships).
ShopForSocial currently only works with social enterprises in Singapore, or those that have local distributors in Singapore, but it does intend to expand its reach internationally both in shipping and product listings from social enterprises outside Singapore. To become a partner, Serene told us that the key consideration is for the organization to have a clear social mission, and to have good products suitable for online sales.
(Editing by Charlie Custer)
The post Singapore’s ShopForSocial Lets You Shop Online For a Good Cause appeared first on Tech in Asia.
