Wednesday 19 October 2011

Charity Begins...

...with hours and hours of reading through incomprehensible waffle on the Internet!  Or, at least, that's what it seems like to me.

I wanted (still want) to find a way to list my knitted cakes - on an Internet site or on my blog - so that I could raise money for breast cancer research.

I had no idea it would be so complicated.

After hours of reading about PayPal's policy toward donating to charity and then eBay's,  I decided to list a trial cake on eBay.



However, even after all that reading, I am still not sure how much of the £2.75 selling price will go to the charity.  You see, eBay claims to 'refund' the fees if 100% of the proceeds is donated to charity, but I'm not sure if this includes the  final fee (in this case 27p) if the item finally sells.  Mission Fish (an eBay partner that administers the donations to charity) also takes a cut - of 3.75%, and it is impossible to work out how to add this to the item exactly - given that, as a percentage, it changes each time you add to the price!

So I reckoned that the only way to proceed was to run a trial.  What I need now is some kind person (could this be YOU?) to actually BUY the cake, and then I will know what the final costs are.

Mission Fish collects the money from my PayPal account (which is a little scarey) and hands it over to Breast Cancer Care so, if it all goes well, this should be a neat way of doing it!

4 comments:

Stocki said...

Yipee...I have a cupcake... hope this works for you.. I'll keep an eye on the blog to see how it goes. I want more :)x

Elizabethd said...

I would buy it, but I dont have a paypal account. Would an English cheque work?

Laura said...

Could you set it up through Ravelry like the Mason-Dixon Knitters did with their pattern for Japan? I don't know how it works, but I know Ann or Kay would give you the info.
Good luck with your charity!

French Nanny said...

Hi Laura
I don't think you can sell products through Ravelry - patterns are OK, but not the finished article - as far as I know. But the eBay thing is looking good...