New Website Offers Daily 'Green' Discounts
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ethicalDeal's Annalea Krebs. Photo Courtesy of ethicalDeal. |
Small-business owners offering sustainable and eco-friendly products and services to consumers may soon have a new tool: ethicalDeal.com.
Site founder Annalea Krebs, seeing the popularity of deal-of-the-day websites such as Groupon.com and LivingSocial.com, hopes to use the same principle to steer consumers toward "green" products.
EthicalDeal.com plans to tap into the power of group buying by e-mailing to its subscribers one coupon each day regarding “green” things to do, see and buy.
While the concept of delivering green-buying incentives is not entirely new — San Francisco-based Blissmo also provides green savings through a weekly e-mail — ethicalDeal would be the first to present daily offers.
In a recent TerraChoice Marketing study, 91 percent of consumers reported they would patronize companies that sell eco-friendly products.
“Some consumers resist buying ethical products because they think they're too expensive, the quality isn't as good, or they don't know where to buy or what to trust,” Krebs said.
“We wanted to give consumers extra incentive to buy from local, sustainable companies and also raise the profile of companies offering green products and services.”
The daily coupons for ethicalDeal subscribers include 50 percent to 90 percent discounts for a green product or service from businesses including Salt Spring Coffee, Dao Tea, vegan restaurant Gorilla Food, organic food eatery Ethical Kitchen, organic food-delivery service Green Earth and cleaning service Aspen Clean, Krebs told BusinessNewsDaily.
EthicalDeal’s coupons will start hitting subscribers' e-mail inboxes in September. The site will begin with businesses in Krebs' home area of Vancouver, reach Ontario in October and then expand to more North American locales, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Krebs said.
“We’re on a mission to make green mainstream by making it easy and fun for people to try out the best green stuff their city has to offer,” Krebs said.