Originally posted at http://www.maatiam.com, the retailer pays a referral fee, which varies from company to company and sometimes from product to product. Shoes.com pays 12 percent, for instance, while Office Depot pays 5 percent.
Maatiam takes 30 percent of the fee and the rest goes to charity. The company’s Web site features a searchable Guidestar database of roughly 800,000 nonprofits across the nation.
Charitable groups can also create their own Web pages on Maatiam to advertise their presence on the site.
Jerri Barrett, director of marketing for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in Palo Alto, said Maatiam has proven to be a “very painless way for our supporters to donate to us simply by shopping online.”
The organization raised $483 through Maatiam in October and November and expects a spike in those numbers for December, Barrett said.
Bernadi and her business partner, co-founder Jonathon Xu, have gotten the company off the ground without any venture-capital funding. They are currently looking for angel funding to help expand the business, which was called FreePledge during beta testing earlier this year.
The ultimate goal, said Bernadi, it to “turn online shopping into philanthropy.”
Staff writer Aaron Kinney can be reached at 650-348-4302 or at akinney@bayareanewsgroup.com.