Rovr wugs the dog

In my recent post on wugging, I neglected to bring up one weakness shared by all the e-commerce sites I mentioned: they require you to go to them.

That may sound obvious and trivial, but the fact is, Alonovo, FreePledge, and GoodSearch Shopping don’t have the name recognition of Amazon or Buy.com. It can be hard to train yourself to start using them and even harder to persuade others to do so. Habits are hard to break.

Rovr solves that problem. It’s a Firefox add-on that takes advantage of the same referral-based affiliate marketing programs as the other sites while somehow sidestepping the whole referral part.

Rovr recognizes when you’re on a participating e-commerce site—such as 1-800-flowers.com, CompUSA, and Gaiam—and sees to it that the referral commission, usually 4 to 10 percent of the revenue associated with any given purchase, goes to your chosen beneficiary (there are currently 27 nonprofits to pick from) without your ever having to visit another site.

It’s as if you’d been on Rainforest Action Network’s website and found a link that said, “Need to do some shopping? Click here to go to Amazon, and we’ll receive the referral commission from your purchase.” The effect is the same as if you’d clicked the link and bought something, but the beauty is that you don’t need to visit the nonprofit’s site (Rainforest Action doesn’t even have such a link); you merely need to designate the group as your Rovr beneficiary.

I asked Brad de Graf, who created Rovr, what’s in it for the retailers. I mean, doesn’t Rovr make it a little too easy for consumers to get them to make all these costly donations? “Ultimately, loyalty is why the merchants will accept it,” he replied. “If I as a consumer opt for Rovr merchants over non-Rovr ones, they’ll want to be one of the former.”

He also told me that Amazon’s program was originally intended only for first-time referrals, “but they evolve to meet changing landscapes.” And it seems that affiliate marketing programs have been around for long enough (about 13 years) to become embedded in the online retail landscape, which makes companies comfortable with a shortcut like Rovr.

Whatever the conditions that let Rovr exist, it’s a pretty cool tool. I also like Rovr’s ethos, reflected in its tagline—“Buy less, buy local. But online, make every purchase count.” That figures, since it’s a project of the citizen-consumer gurus at Seattle nonprofit Interra, which I’ve blogged about before.

The only downside to Rovr I can find is that it only works on computers where it’s installed. So if you have to shop on a machine where you can’t download a Firefox add-on, I suggest using one of the wugging sites mentioned at the beginning of this post. Personally, I’m partial to Alonovo because of the social-responsibility ratings of vendors that it provides. (Hmm, wouldn’t it be cool if Rovr could do that too?)

Comments

[Aaron]

The next thing Rovr should fetch is a professional designer. Another great idea hampered by clip art someone seems to have found on a 100 MB Zip disk!