When you buy something after clicking a product on ShopForTerra, a small commission flows from the retailer to us. We don't keep all of it. As a matter of company policy, 30 percent of what we earn — from affiliate commissions and from ads — is redirected to environmental organizations. The remaining 70 percent keeps the lights on. This article breaks down the split, why it's structured this way, and where to verify the running numbers yourself.
The 30 percent donation share
We donate 30 percent of our total revenue to a small, vetted list of environmental organizations (see our Organizations page). The percentage is set at the company-policy level rather than tied to any purchase — so a donation happens whether you bought a portable power station, a single roll of insulation, or only browsed.
Setting the share at the policy level matters. Per-purchase pledges sound friendlier, but they tie the donation to specific commerce events and create a quiet incentive to recommend items that maximize the donation count. A fixed, policy-level share keeps the recommendation and the donation separable.
The 70 percent operating share
The remaining 70 percent covers what it actually costs to run a site like this:
- Hosting, databases, and content delivery
- Site development and ongoing maintenance
- Research, writing buying guides, and building tools like the calculators
- Tax, accounting, and the admin overhead of running a company
- A modest amount for the people doing the work — this is a for-profit business, not a charity
We publish a Transparency page showing running totals: total revenue earned, the policy share, and an estimated donated-to-date figure. The page is fed from real click and donation data, not a static screenshot, so it updates as the site is used.
Are the numbers audited?
Not by a third party yet. At our current scale, audit fees would exceed the donation total, which would defeat the point. What we do is publish the methodology and the running totals so they can be checked against the published policy. As the platform grows, we plan to introduce independent verification.
If you want to dig in, the Transparency page lays out the policy in plain language and shows the current revenue split by organization. Anything that doesn't add up is something we'd want to hear about.
What we do with the donated money
Nothing. The 30 percent share is sent to the partner organizations and they decide how to use it. They work on specific focus areas — climate, ocean, wildlife, forests, clean energy, and sustainable agriculture — and they make their own calls about how best to use unrestricted funding.
That separation matters too. If we controlled how the donation was spent, project selection would become another place where our recommendations could be quietly influenced. Keeping the donation as unrestricted funding to organizations whose work we trust is cleaner.
What you do
If you want to contribute, the simplest version is: bookmark the site, use the calculators to plan home upgrades, read the buying guides before you purchase, and start your shopping trips here so any commission the retailer was already planning to pay gets a portion routed to environmental work as a byproduct. You don't pay anything extra. The donation is a fixed policy side-effect, not a sales tactic.