I’m very excited to share with all of you that CatCentric now includes a shopping page that will allow you to purchase all the goodies – the nutritional supplements, upset tummy soothers, favorite toys and gotta have hairball remedies – recommended by the CatCentric experts! AND… almost everything you purchase through these links will generate a small commission that will help support the CatCentric mission, without costing you a single extra cent. It’s a total win-win! 🙂
As the site has grown over the years, I’ve received many requests to provide links to the various toys, books, and health care products mentioned in some of the articles (especially in the Health Care section). I’ve been resisting this because I didn’t want new visitors to think CatCentric was “selling” stuff, or recommending certain products for profit. And I most definitely didn’t want anyone to discount the importance of the topics we discuss based on the erroneous perception that our opinions are influenced in any way by money.
Two things overcame my resistance. First… the number of times people ask for direct links to products we talk about is so high, we started creating documents to refer to so we wouldn’t have to keep looking the products up. Clearly, this is something you really want.
And, secondly… the costs to maintain this site have grown along with its size and daily visitor count. This is a good thing, but it’s getting harder to swing on my little ole’ admin salary. Furthermore, CatCentric was hacked about a month ago, necessitating I add a couple of robust (read: not free) security measures. By themselves, none of these costs are unmanageable. Taken all together, however… well, let’s just say it’s no longer an inconsequential amount.
Rather than give up on the site, or start pushing donation requests (something for which I’ve neither the time nor the desire), I decided to give you all what you want, and to do so with affiliate links which might, hopefully, provide enough in commission fees to nicely off-set the costs of running the site. Or at least put a dent in them.
This does NOT mean you will soon see ads overrunning CatCentric. I can promise you that will never happen! I will be very select in the programs with which I contract, and, for the most part, I’ll be keeping all of the links relegated to the shopping page.
So far, I’m only working with two vendors, Cozy Cat Furniture and Amazon.com.
Cozy Cat Furniture provides high quality products, but their philanthropic efforts set them above other vendors. The company does a lot of work with rescues, donating products and sponsoring events on a regular basis.
In other words, they’re our kind of people! 🙂
I’ve joined Amazon’s affiliate program because it’s well developed and allows me to create a CatCentric store that includes only the items I specify. I can’t actually limit what’s bought through the link, but I can definitely make it clear which products CatCentric recommends, and that was a deciding factor for me. I could never sleep if I thought CatCentric in any way promoted or encouraged a cat owner to purchase, say, a kibble product. *cringe* (See “No Kibble!” if you’re not sure why that’s such a bad thing.)
Eventually, I plan to make it even easier to buy these products by embedding their individual links into the articles that actually discuss them, but for now, our little store will have to do. 🙂
Note: Not everything we mention on this website has been posted to our store yet, but I’m working on it as fast as I can.
So there you have it; CatCentric now offers a way to buy much of the stuff we recommend and use ourselves. Happy shopping, everyone!
