To ask small businesses to create an online presence with vouchers I can buy

[lubeybooby]

I want to support small businesses, and the repeated begging for people to visit their shops on social media is making me really sad.

I'm not about to put myself or my family at risk to support you by being in public and physically being in your establishment

But if you have online vouchers I can buy now for an 'in person' visit another time, I'm absolutely going to get behind that

It's something I've done for my business and it was really easy with selz.com/ as you can create a site selling an instant digital download with an automatically generated serial number for things like vouchers so they can't be faked

all REALLY easy

I am not affiliated with them it's just one example of an easy way to do it, there are other ways too. I looked into shopify but at the time i was doing it, they didn't do instant digital downloads with serial numbers - this may have changed.

Please do this if you own a cafe, bar, deli, restaurant, boutique, crafts... anything really and encourage your fellow business owners to do it. Better to do this than end up needing a gofundme or continuing to ask people to break social distancing

another idea I just heard is creating merchandise and selling via threadless or other similar places. Then you have no initial outlay, they print and send the stuff. Just another option for those out there wanting to support you but isolating

While it's very good of you to support small businesses, you should also point out to people not to buy vouchers unless you can potentially afford to lose the money. Unfortunately, not all businesses will make it through, and vouchers don't have to be honoured. Lots of people lost out when Mothercare, for example, went bust. While it may be easy to honour a coffee, it might not be so easy to honour £50 worth of goods if you have had no income for months.