Holiday Commerce Reminders!

December 4, 2015 11:14 AM

It's that especially gift-giving time of year, so don't forget: you can support your fellow community members by buying MeFite-made merch at the MeFi Mall, and if you're buying stuff at Amazon you can be sure to visit using our referral link to help support the site itself.

A little more detail on both:

The MeFi Mall is a running tradition for a few years now, featuring stuff made by members of the MetaFilter community; it's a neat way to do the diffuse-online-community equivalent of shopping local, so if you want to have a little more MeFi in your gift-giving this year head over and take a look at what folks have got for sale. And if you're a MeFite who makes stuff and sells it online, you can get yourself listed as well.

Our Amazon referrer code gets the site a fraction of the purchase cost on stuff folks purchase there after having visited the site via a referrer link; if you're already planning on doing some shopping on Amazon, you can visit via this link (also always findable on the Fund MetaFilter page) to be sure the site gets that little slice.

posted by cortex (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 11:14 AM (12 comments total)

I have used the Amazon link a few times, but gads: it's buried quite deep in the site, hard to find and hard to remember how to find. (Find the Fund Metafilter link at the bottom of the page; find the Amazon link at the bottom of the Fund page.)

Could it be a little more prominent? Maybe a "support MetaFilter by shopping at Amazon" line under the "Join 4000 readers in helping fund Metafilter" text in the footer?

(and hey, somebody kicked in to roll the 3999 to 4000, yay!)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:42 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

*Homer Simpson voice* Mmmm, stuff ...
posted by Melismata at 11:48 AM on December 4, 2015

Yesterday, I ordered several wonderful looking prints from Lou Stuell's etsy shop! Thanks, Mefi mall.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:02 PM on December 4, 2015

You can just put the MetaFilter tag into your Amazon bookmark, then MetaFilter always gets the little kickback. (Or, simpler, just bookmark that link above.)
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 12:46 PM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

Man, I just did an Amazon order, and I always forget to use the referral link.

I will be better at that from now on.
posted by hippybear at 2:35 PM on December 4, 2015

Gads, I feel like the actual MeFi Mall both isn't publicized well enough for vendors to participate nor well enough for most MeFites to notice it.

I know this basically isn't true, but it just FEELS like that to me.

I'm allowed to have feelings. Shut up.
posted by hippybear at 3:18 PM on December 4, 2015

Yeah I mean there's a flip side which is those GIANT BANNERS that Wikipedia has and then which the Internet Archive decided also to use. However, even though they used the A/B research that Wikipedia did (and has made available which is cool) IA decided to put the banner on every page on the site including all the admin pages which means as I'm doing my job for them, I'm being hit up for money with a giant begging banner that I Can Not Close. Also they ask for "Just $50" instead of "Just $5"

So I feel your feels, at the same time, it could be worse?
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 5:57 PM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Is there a referral link for us internationalsl who would use Amazon.country?
posted by jeather at 7:40 AM on December 5, 2015

Not a the moment, unfortunately, but I plan to take a closer look at that to see what's manageable in a non-silly way. The core issue is, last I looked, they essentially manage each country as a wholly separate affiliate setup, which means it's not "set up a non-US referral link", it's "set up a referral link for each individual country domain you want to support".

I'm hoping this has improved or will turn out to be just plain more manageable than it looked like when Matt last checked it out; but if nothing else we can probably at least look at the top few non-US destinations and set up account stuff for those.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:52 AM on December 5, 2015

Gads, I feel like the actual MeFi Mall both isn't publicized well enough for vendors to participate nor well enough for most MeFites to notice it.

I feel you, but Jess' example points to the balance issue here: right now for the Mall we're doing about the most aggressive NO REALLY YOU SHOULD GO LOOK AT THIS things we ever do on MetaFilter, with a dismissible top banner and multiple MetaTalk posts and sidebar/bestof coverage.

In the long run, we may decide to create a little more of an overall shop.metafilter.com destination or something for both site merch and Mall type stuff. And more generally there could be a more front-and-center kind of thing that would be good for raising visibility about something on the site; I've had a couple specific ideas related to that previously, not about the Mall per se but just about having a home on the front pages of the site to point to neat stuff elsewhere on MeFi. But both of those are "let's put in a bunch of work and thought and try to get this right" things that rushing or just hacking around with Really Obnoxious Banners or something would be a bad way to handle.

So for the moment, what we've got is what we've got. This is MetaFilter at its most pestery, which is with the use of the top banner for non-emergencies already somewhat more pestery than it has historically been.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:58 AM on December 5, 2015

I always manage to find something for someone on my list at the MeFi mall. This year it was obloquy's Supernatural History Series.
posted by maurice at 8:27 AM on December 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

I would like to thank jjjjjjjijjjjjjj for having a fantastic website-- I have used the downloads in the past, and this year I bought amazing maps that I can't wait to hang up.
posted by jetlagaddict at 7:59 PM on December 8, 2015