MakeHappy.in: Germany based Christian W. Atz merges E-commerce with Social Entrepreneurship!

Chris (27) is a law school graduate from Germany, participating at the iAccelerator program right now to kick-start their web project in India. His startup runs some cash-back portals with the difference that the commission money is not given partially back to the user, but is forwarded to charitable NGOs to support good causes. This product for the US and European markets is called “bioddicted”, from the Greek word “bios”, meaning life, and the English word addicted. Bioddicted helps user to offset their carbon emissions by forwarding commission money to NGOs, who plant trees, build water or solar power plants to reduce their carbon footprints.

Coming to the Indian side of things, the project is called ‘makehappy’ and uses affiliate commissions, which are forwarded to multiple NGOs, who care about the major causes in India.

Makehappy.in is a website that features online partner shops, who signed an affiliate contract with them. So when they link customers from their website to the website of their affiliate partner, they receive a certain commission, a fixed amount or a certain percentage of the transaction done by the user. This commission is split and largely forwarded to a single NGO until Rs. 50,000 has been “donated”. Afterwards a different NGO comes in and gets a similar amount and so on and so forth. And how does the NGO get chosen? Users decide that via a Facebook voting.