And now abides faith, hope, char­ity, these three; but the great­est of these is char­ity.

— 1 Corinthi­ans 13:13

ShopOnline4Charity.org is really easy to use:

• Select the char­ity or orga­ni­za­tion that you want to help sup­port by click­ing on either the Char­ity Part­ners but­ton at the top of this page or the Char­i­ties list­ing in the left side­bar
  
• Shop at online stores by click­ing on the ads on the charity’s page
• Place your order directly with the online retailer
• We share half of our com­mis­sion with your char­ity
  

Remem­ber to do all your online shop­ping from the ads on your charity’s page. Book­mark this page now to make it easy for you to remem­ber to come back to this site as a por­tal for all your online shop­ping needs. Come back often, as we are adding new online retail­ers on a reg­u­lar basis.

The AeroG­a­r­den is an indoor, com­pact, self-contained hydro­ponic gar­den­ing sys­tem. They come in a vari­ety of sizes and col­ors with prices start­ing at only $49, includ­ing free ship­ping. They call it a “kitchen gar­den” because it can eas­ily fit on most people’s kitchen counter tops or any small space, allow­ing you to grow fresh veg­eta­bles, herbs, or flow­ers all year long.

Ever since we first saw this prod­uct adver­tised, Sandy and I have wanted one. We finally took the plunge when Sandy saw a good sale price on one of their mod­els. If you’re inter­ested in this prod­uct, visit their site every week to shop for sales. AeroG­a­r­den looks for any excuse to run a sale. (Don’t for­get to jump there each time from your favorite charity’s shop­ping page on ShopOnline4Charity.)

The sale that Sandy found was so good that she bought two units, both of them the AeroG­a­r­den Space­Saver 6 model, in an appro­pri­ately space-age sil­ver color. Both came with a Gourmet Herbs seed pod set (a com­bi­na­tion of basil, thyme, oregano, dill, mint and chives). She also wanted to grow salad greens, so she ordered one of those seed pod sets separately.

Assem­bly and plant­ing of our new AeroG­a­r­dens was a snap. The whole process took just a few min­utes. Then the wait­ing began…

For­tu­nately, we didn’t have to wait long. Within just a cou­ple of days the salad greens started to sprout. We were advised in the plant­ing kit that the herbs are slower grow­ing and would take longer, and we’ve found that to be true. It’s been a real hoot for us to check our gar­dens every day to see how much they’ve grown. The salad greens lit­er­ally dou­bled in size every day for sev­eral days in a row!

Main­te­nance is a piece of cake. The units we bought have sen­sors that tell us when to add nutri­ents and water, but even if you buy mod­els that don’t fea­ture this, all you do is remem­ber to add nutri­ents every two weeks and water as needed. The nutri­ents are pro­vided with your kit, either as tablets or pack­ets of liquid.

Yes­ter­day, less than four weeks from plant­ing day, we enjoyed our first har­vest of salad greens. Instruc­tions advise never har­vest­ing more than one-third of the growth at a time. Our first har­vest pro­vided enough let­tuce for a huge din­ner salad for both of us. Today we’re hav­ing spaghetti for lunch, sea­soned with fresh basil from our herb gar­den. (See our photo below.)

Like I said ear­lier, AeroG­a­r­dens come in a wide vari­ety of sizes and con­fig­u­ra­tions, rang­ing from 3-pod mod­els to extra-tall 7-pod units. They offer lots of seed pods for each type of unit allow­ing you to grow many dif­fer­ent types of herbs; veg­eta­bles such as cherry or heir­loom toma­toes, green beans, dif­fer­ent kinds of pep­pers; and sev­eral kinds of flow­ers. They even have a pod set for grow­ing your own tea plants! What’s more, they have kits for using your AeroG­a­r­den to start seedlings for trans­plant­ing to your out­door garden.

We’ve been thrilled with our AeroG­a­r­dens. They are ideal for apart­ment dwellers, fam­i­lies with kids, class­room projects or home school­ers, shut-ins, dorm rooms, or any­one who’s become con­vinced that they don’t have a green thumb but want some home grown fresh­ness in their diet. Grow­ing some of your own food is fun and is a great idea. AeroG­a­r­den makes it fool-proof. Highly recommended.

by guest blog­ger Sandy Hov­at­ter
You can visit Sandy’s blog at www.ApprehendingGrace.com

Near the bot­tom of the list of ven­dors, nes­tled in the “Soft­ware and Web Devel­op­ment” cat­e­gory, you’ll find a jewel when it comes to cost effec­tive, high qual­ity com­puter train­ing. In today’s job mar­ket, most peo­ple need up-to-date com­puter train­ing, either to be more mar­ketable to a new employer or to become more valu­able to your cur­rent one. Lynda.com is the best, most con­ve­nient, and least expen­sive way I know of to upgrade your com­puter skills.

Whether you want to learn how to get the most out of sophis­ti­cated, com­mer­cial soft­ware like Adobe® InDe­sign® or learn how to use Twit­ter or Face­book, you’ll find what you need at Lynda.com, at a great price. More about price later. First, about the training.

Courses, Courses, Courses
So far, I’ve taken courses in InDe­sign (9 hours), and Word­Press (5 hours). I took both courses after I had been using both prod­ucts for a cou­ple of years. And I learned a great deal! On my list for future train­ing are:

• Quick­Books (6 hours)
• Microsoft Access (5 hours)
• Acro­bat Pro (9 hours)
• Sev­eral Pho­to­shop courses (Lynda.com offers 21 dif­fer­ent Pho­to­shop CS3 courses rang­ing in length from 1.25 hours to 20.75 hours!)
• I might even take the Face­book course (3 hours).

It’s not like I have tons of time on my hands for train­ing, but Lynda.com makes train­ing easy. Each course is bro­ken into short video seg­ments – usu­ally 3–8 min­utes long. You can eas­ily watch a seg­ment or two dur­ing lunch, while wait­ing for a phone call, or sim­ply when you need a short break. The qual­ity is very high, the con­tent is very good and the breadth of offer­ing is phenomenal.

The Lynda.com train­ing library includes more than 730 courses that are avail­able 24/7. You can eas­ily search through the courses by sub­ject, soft­ware, ven­dor, or author.

Did I Men­tion the Great Price?
Every one of their 730 courses offers free video tuto­ri­als so that you can get an idea of the course. The free mod­ules might be as much as half an hour of train­ing. That’s plenty to leave you want­ing more. So when you’re ready to learn more, you can sub­scribe for the low price of $25/month or $250/year. Pre­mium mem­ber­ships, which include exer­cise files so you can prac­tice along with the instruc­tor, are $37.50/month or $375/year. Per­son­ally, I sub­scribe on a monthly basis when our work­load is light or when we have an imme­di­ate need for train­ing. Over the course of a year, I might pur­chase four to six one-month memberships.

I’ve taken pro­fes­sion sem­i­nars on sev­eral dif­fer­ent soft­ware pack­ages. A great price is $149 for a one day course. $1,499 for three days is not uncom­mon. That would be any­where from six months to six years worth of Lynda.com train­ing. And with Lynda.com, you have train­ing in more than 730 courses, not just one.

A final thought: A sub­scrip­tion to Lynda.com is a great gift for just about every­one who uses a computer.

Don’t for­get to jump to Lynda.com from your favorite charity’s shop­ping page on www.ShopOnline4Charity.org.

Seri­ously, folks, when you start to see Christ­mas dec­o­ra­tions in all the stores, you can tell that Hal­loween can’t be far away! It used to be that retail­ers waited until Thanks­giv­ing to roll out their Christ­mas sales, but every year it gets ear­lier and ear­lier. With well over 100 retail­ers on our Sho­pOn­line shop­ping pages, my email box is flooded every day with announce­ments from stores about their pre-Christmas sales that are going on right now.

I have two objec­tives with this site. The first is that I want to earn tons of com­mis­sions for all of my part­ner char­i­ties. I want  com­mis­sion checks to be rolling through here on their way to the wor­thy orga­ni­za­tions that we sup­port through shop­ping on these pages.

But my sec­ond objec­tive is that you, the shop­per, get the absolute best deal that you can when you shop online here. I appre­ci­ate you using this site to help fund these char­i­ties, and I know that the char­i­ties them­selves are thank­ful for the rev­enue that comes their way as a result of your shop­ping, but we all want you to not spend a penny more than you have to when you shop here, so I want to tell you about these sales.

The num­ber of sales that are run­ning online now are just too numer­ous to list. You can pretty safely assume that almost every­one is hav­ing a Christ­mas sale of some kind right now. The best time to shop seems to be on Sat­ur­days, Sun­days, and Mon­days. More stores run spe­cials on these days than any other time of the week. Another way to save while you shop here is to find online dis­count codes, write them down, and come back to your charity’s shop­ping page here at Sho­pOn­line and use them at check­out with your retailer. You get the check­out dis­count, but your char­i­tys­till gets the com­mis­sion from your purchases.

Here’s another smart money tip — save some of your Christ­mas shop­ping money for after Christ­mas. This is a les­son I have to re-learn every year. After-Christmas sales are even bet­ter than before-Christmas sales. All the retail­ers are look­ing to dump their over­stocked mer­chan­dise as quickly as they can after Christ­mas. You can really scoop up some great deals in the cou­ple of weeks fol­low­ing Christ­mas. We were able to give late gifts to sev­eral friends and busi­ness asso­ciates that we didn’t think we could afford to buy for at Christ­mas, because we got at really deep dis­counts by wait­ing a week (or two or three) after Christmas.

So if you’ve got to have the lat­est and great­est Christ­mas wish list gizmo, by all means, buy it now before the stores run out. But if you’re the kind of per­son who can delay grat­i­fi­ca­tion (espe­cially if delay­ing brings the oppor­tu­nity for even more grat­i­fi­ca­tion), here’s a bright idea for you — the Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian church cel­e­brates Christ­mas on Jan­u­ary 6th. Not being Ortho­dox myself, I’ve always thought this to be strange (most likely because I’ve never heard their rea­son for it), but from a shop­ping per­spec­tive it just sounds down­right smart. So buy presents for the lit­tle kids on your list so they have some­thing they can tear open under the Christ­mas tree on Christ­mas morn­ing, but strike a deal with the grown-ups on your shop­ping list to cel­e­brate Ortho­dox Christ­mas this year — and save a pile of cash.

Have you vis­ited our part­ner char­i­ties’ shop­ping pages lately? We’ve grown to well over 100 online stores. It’s got­ten so that we can hon­estly say that if we don’t have it, you don’t need it. Many of the stores that we offer are com­pa­nies that you’ve bought from for years, either online or in their “brick and mor­tar” stores located in shop­ping cen­ters and malls.

So why should you shop online here at “Sho­pOn­line” with stores like Wal­mart or Best Buy or Men’s Wear­house or Sally Beauty Sup­ply or…? Well, you get the idea. We offer a lot of stores that might be right down the street from you. So why buy from their online site instead of just pop­ping into their store?

There are sev­eral good answers to that ques­tions. The most obvi­ous from the stand­point of Sho­pOn­line is that when you buy from the store, they don’t pay a com­mis­sion to the char­ity of your choice. This site exists to gen­er­ate com­mis­sions from online shop­ping for char­i­ties. You’ll pay no more for hav­ing shopped online, but your char­ity will receive a com­mis­sion on all of your pur­chases from this site.

The sec­ond rea­son is that you can often find the same prod­uct cheaper online than from the same vendor’s brick and mor­tar stores. The cost of doing busi­ness is less online, so the retail­ers can often offer bet­ter prices to online cus­tomers. I’ve read lots of let­ters to the edi­tor of com­puter mag­a­zines say­ing that they have shopped online at (fill in the name of a store that sells con­sumer elec­tron­ics prod­ucts here) for a com­puter or a cable or what­ever, and then gone to the phys­i­cal store to buy the item, only to find that it is con­sid­er­ably more expen­sive in the store than on the store’s web­site. The leader of one of the orga­ni­za­tions sup­ported by Sho­pOn­line told us that when he was in the mar­ket for an auto part this sum­mer, he found it online for almost half what it cost in the parts store. So shop­ping online can save you money, even if you have to pay for ship­ping (which a lot of times you don’t). Com­par­i­son shop at your charity’s shop­ping page before you buy some­thing at a store.

The next rea­son is that there is a greater selec­tion of prod­ucts online. I have a Super Wal­mart just a cou­ple of miles from me and it is crammed full of “stuff,” but they don’t have as much “stuff” as Walmart.com (one of our retail part­ners here on Sho­pOn­line) offers on their web­site. Walmart.com has more than one mil­lion prod­ucts for sale on their site — far more than they could stock at a local store. Their web­site doesn’t have every­thing that the store has (for instance, you can’t buy many gro­cery items online), but they have lit­er­ally tens of thou­sands of other prod­ucts avail­able online that they don’t stock in their stores. Walmart.com isn’t the only store this is true of. Any of our online retail part­ners carry more prod­ucts on their web­sites than they stock in their stores. So shop for hard-to-find items on your charity’s shop­ping page. You might be sur­prised at what you can find.

The last rea­son I’m going to lay out for you can save you a lot of money. Local stores might have a small sec­tion of close­out mer­chan­dise, but many of their web­sites have a ton of deeply dis­counted close­outs. I’ve bought some brand new mer­chan­dise for pen­nies on the dol­lar in the close­out sec­tions of some of the retail­ers fea­tured on Sho­pOn­line — and every time I did, not only did I save a pile of money, I also earned a com­mis­sion for one of our charitypartners.

I used to work in a com­puter store near Chicago. Many, many times I would give a great prod­uct demon­stra­tion and sales pitch to a cus­tomer, only to lose him to a dif­fer­ent store that sold the same thing cheaper than we did. We called those peo­ple SHABEs — Shop Here And Buy Else­where. I encour­age you to become a SHABE (to some extent). Browse the aisles at local stores, then come back to Sho­pOn­line and com­par­i­son shop the same prod­ucts from the same store’s online sites. (I do not rec­om­mend you take the time and build up the hopes of a com­mis­sioned sales­per­son at a store only to order online to save some bucks. If some­one gives you great ser­vice and depend on a sales com­mis­sion for all or part of their income, do the right thing and buy from that person.)

Sho­pOn­line can be a pow­er­ful tool for rais­ing money for your char­ity. I works every time you use it. Buy­ing from the online sites of some of your favorite retail stores can help your char­i­ty­fi­nan­cially. Book­mark your charity’s shop­ping page and check it first for all of your shop­ping needs — those things that you have always bought online, and a sur­pris­ing array of things that you’ve never thought of shop­ping online for before.

When I started build­ing this site in the sum­mer of 2009, I asked many of my friends who shop online where they shop and what they buy online. One of the most enthu­si­as­tic responses that I got was from Lesa who is a big fan of a par­tic­u­lar pre­mium tea ven­dor (who will remain unnamed until they agree to be listed on this site). I pushed Lesa’s “tea but­ton” and got about an hour’s worth of infor­ma­tion about the virtues of pre­mium tea — not the kind of stuff you buy at the gro­cery store, but the really good stuff. As a result of Lesa’s pas­sion for good tea, I signed a num­ber of high-end tea deal­ers as par­tic­i­pat­ing ven­dors for “ShopOnline.”

Your hum­ble Web­mas­ter fell in love with the tea sites that signed on with us and promptly placed an order with Mighty Leaf Tea for a green and white tea sam­pler assort­ment. The price for this 30-teabag assort­ment was $21.95, plus $7.95 for ship­ping and han­dling. With every order, Mighty Leaf lets you select two free teabags of your choice, so I received 32 teabags in seven dif­fer­ent vari­eties stored in an attrac­tive tea tin.

It was love at first sip.

The first vari­ety I tried was Green Tea Trop­i­cal, a health­ful, low-caffeine green tea infused with a melange of sweet, fruity fla­vors. Rocked my world. I’ve now tried all the vari­eties in the sam­ple assort­ment, which also included Moun­tain Spring Jas­mine, Organic Hojicha, White Orchard, and Mar­rakesh Mint. I have to be hon­est with you, some of these fla­vors didn’t appeal to me — until I actu­ally tasted them. Jas­mine is too flo­ral and per­fumy for me, but I like this tea in spite of that. Mint tea has never been “my cup of tea,” but I love Mighty Leaf’s Mar­rakesh Mint. It pleas­antly sur­prises me every time I taste it.

So what’s the dif­fer­ence between “the good stuff” and the gro­cery store stuff? A good tea is like a fine wine — it has lots of “com­plex­ity.” Dif­fer­ent parts of your tongue reg­is­ter a rain­bow of com­ple­men­tary fla­vors. It’s a party in your mouth. After I’ve had a cou­ple of cups of gro­cery store tea, my tongue feels like Astro­turf. Not so with the good stuff. The teas I’ve tried from Mighty Leaf have a smooth, almost creamy, con­sis­tency. Bye-bye “turf tongue.” And the huge vari­ety of teas avail­able from the pre­mium ven­dors offer some­thing for every palette. I’ve now got a tea wish list as long as my arm.

Suf­fice it to say that I look for­ward to a cup or two of tea every day now. It has become my 15-minute vaca­tion to peace­ful, exotic lands.

If you did the math in your head when I laid out the price of the pack­age that I bought, you prob­a­bly came to the con­clu­sion that I’m pay­ing almost a dol­lar for each cup of tea. I’m happy to point out that you would be quite wrong! I’m a big guy and I brew a big cup of tea, about 16 ounces each. Every Mighty Leaf teabag (excuse me, they refer to them as “silken, hand-woven, biodegrad­able tea pouches”) is good for a min­i­mum of two of these mega-mugs of tea, some­times three. That cuts the price per cup to less than half of what you would have guessed at first. If you brew normal-sized cups, you might be able to get even bet­ter mileage.

Some­times, for the third time that I use a “tea pouch,” I’ll use two of dif­fer­ent fla­vors. Tonight I enjoyed a blend of Mar­rakesh Mint and Moun­tain Spring Jas­mine. An out­stand­ing pair­ing! As a for­mer Diet Coke addict, I am happy to bliss­fully sip a cou­ple of mugs of tea per day, rather than mind­lessly gulp down vast quan­ti­ties of unhealthy soda pop. Another of our tea ven­dors, Ada­gio Tea, charges much less for ship­ping and offers free ship­ping on orders of $50 or more, and with all of our ven­dors, loose tea is a more eco­nom­i­cal option than teabags.

So now I’m a pre­mium tea con­vert. I recently read an inter­view with a man from Eng­land who was in Aus­tralia for a con­fer­ence he was speak­ing at. The inter­viewer asked him if he would con­sider relo­cat­ing to Oz. The Brit replied that the coun­try was gor­geous and the weather was incred­i­ble, but he couldn’t find a decent cup of tea in the whole coun­try. Tea was the deal breaker. I’m not that far over the edge yet, but I spend a lot of time brows­ing the tea site here on Sho­pOn­line, plan­ning my next purchase.

I encour­age you to take the plunge into the world of pre­mium teas. They make out­stand­ing gifts and they are a real treat for your­self, as well. Plus, all of the tea ven­dors at Sho­pOn­line pay a nice com­mis­sion for the char­ity of your choice, so place your order, brew a cup, put your feet up, and pre­pare to get cozy.

In order to test the links on this rel­a­tively new Web site, I’ve done a num­ber of small sam­ple pur­chases from var­i­ous stores found on our church and char­ity part­ners’ pages. Up to this time, I had never per­son­ally shopped at BookCloseouts.com. Here’s my impres­sion of their site and service.

While you won’t find the newest and hottest titles at a close­out retailer, Book­Close­outs does have a nice selec­tion of books of all types from a vari­ety of authors, some well-known and oth­ers obscure. They typ­i­cally sell their books at 50% — 70% off the full retail price, so it can be well worth your time to sift through their rapidly chang­ing inven­tory to find some real bargains.

I was drawn to a sale that they were pro­mot­ing at the time in their “Reli­gion & Spir­i­tu­al­ity” sec­tion, where they were offer­ing books at 50% off their already deeply dis­counted prices. As you can guess from the name “Reli­gion & Spir­i­tu­al­ity,” they had all kinds of books in this sec­tion from every imag­in­able reli­gious per­spec­tive, but it wasn’t hard for me to find a num­ber of titles that cap­tured my interest.

I placed two orders. The first was for ten copies of a small group Bible study guide on the Gospel of Luke, writ­ten by Max Lucado. List price was $8 per copy — I got them for $2 each. The sec­ond order was for four indi­vid­ual books, two hard­backs and two paper­backs. I got all four of them for just over $10. All books were well pack­aged and received in excel­lent condition.

I’m happy to report that Book­Close­outs doesn’t inflate their ship­ping rates to squeeze some extra profit from each sale, like some mail-order ven­dors do. The set of ten Bible study guides cost $5.25 to ship, while postage on the four books that made up my sec­ond order was a lit­tle under $5.

Book­Close­outs offers a num­ber of ship­ping pri­or­i­ties and prices. I was in no hurry to receive my orders, so I went with the cheap­est option both times. Both ship­ments arrived in about two weeks.

Based on my expe­ri­ence with BookCloseouts.com, I am happy to rec­om­mend them to dis­cern­ing bar­gain hunters. As of this writ­ing, they have a new sale on “Scratch & Dent” books from every cat­e­gory at 85% off the retail price. If you can live with a less-than-perfect vol­ume, you can find some crazy deals on books while this offer lasts.

I got an ad from my Web site host­ing ser­vice recently offer­ing to sell me an add-on pack­age that they claimed would improve the secu­rity of my Web site and would pro­tect my vis­i­tors’ per­sonal data. I turned them down. Here’s why.

Did you notice that nowhere on this site do we ask you to reg­is­ter, or log in, or use a pass­word? Nowhere do we ask you for any per­sonal infor­ma­tion. When you click on one of our ads, the online retail­ers will ask you for per­sonal data (kinda makes it hard to sell you some­thing and ship it to you with­out the per­sonal data), but you aren’t on this Web site at that point — you’re on the retailer’s site.

Shop­ping here is totally anony­mous. There is noth­ing built into this site to enable me to know who any of my vis­i­tors are, hence no need for “secu­rity soft­ware.” There’s noth­ing here to pro­tect. The only thing that gets tracked here is which page on this site did each sale orig­i­nate from. That enables me to accu­rately track how much com­mis­sion goes to each of the char­i­ties that has a shop­ping page on this site.

I’ve made the point before that I am not a “mid­dle­man” in your trans­ac­tions with our online retail part­ners — not in any way, shape, or form. I don’t mark-up the prices of the goods and ser­vices you buy from our online retail­ers. (In fact, you are more than wel­come to use any coupon codes or spe­cial offers to get the absolute best price you can from any of our retail­ers.) I’m not involved in tak­ing your orders, main­tain­ing inven­tory, ship­ping your mer­chan­dise, or any other aspect of the sales process. My job is merely to intro­duce shop­pers to sell­ers, and then politely step out of the pic­ture and let you do busi­ness with each other.

And when you do, the retail­ers send me a com­mis­sion, which I split 50–50 with the char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion from whose page you started your shop­ping adventure.

It’s a thing of sim­ple beauty and is part of the rea­son that we are able to give such a high rebate per­cent­age to each of our part­ner charities.

So shop here with con­fi­dence, and in the immor­tal words of chef Julia Child, “Don’t be afraid!”

OK, I men­tioned in one of the Retail Part­ner blurbs (to see a short descrip­tion of all our Retail Part­ners, click on the Retail Part­ners tab in the menu bar near the top of the page) the fact that I like refur­bished equip­ment. Here’s why.

Man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies do qual­ity con­trol inspec­tions on their prod­ucts before they ship them out. That’s a good thing for me and you, because no one wants to buy junk.

A poten­tial prob­lem with man­u­fac­tur­ers’ qual­ity con­trol is that many com­pa­nies make so many prod­ucts that they aren’t able to inspect each and every piece they pro­duce. Or if they do inspect them all, it’s just a cur­sory inspec­tion. For those who don’t inspect every prod­uct, often­times what they will do is per­form a thor­ough spot-check of a few parts ran­domly pulled off the assem­bly line.

OK, enough about inspec­tions and new mer­chan­dise. What about refurbs?

Peo­ple return mer­chan­dise for all kinds of rea­sons. Some­times it’s because the prod­uct didn’t work like it was sup­posed to, but a lot of times it’s because of issues that don’t have any­thing at all to do with the prod­uct being defec­tive in any way. Some prod­ucts are returned on account of buyer’s remorse, or because the buyer just got laid off from their job and can’t afford the prod­uct now, or because their wife found out they bought it and made them send it back. So a whole bunch of prod­ucts get sent back to the man­u­fac­turer for rea­sons that have noth­ing at all to do with prod­uct quality.

The man­u­fac­ture wants to resell all of their returned mer­chan­dise, but they have to inspect it first to make sure that it goes out in excel­lent con­di­tion. This means that EVERY piece of returned mer­chan­dise gets inspected — not just a ran­dom sam­pling of prod­ucts, like when the stuff was first shipped out to retail­ers. So Rea­son #1 for why I like refurbs is that they have been indi­vid­u­ally inspected at the factory.

Another prob­lem that manufacturer’s have with returned mer­chan­dise is that they can’t sell it as new, because it isn’t new. You’ve heard that as soon as you drive a new car out of the show­room it drops in value by about 25%. That’s because it can no longer be sold as new. It may be very lightly used, but it’s used nonethe­less. So that takes me to Rea­son #2 why I like refurbs — you get a nice dis­count on them.

What’s not to like about a nearly-new piece of equip­ment that has been indi­vid­u­ally fac­tory inspected and marked down in price?

As of this writ­ing, I have two Retail Part­ners that have a good selec­tion of refur­bished equip­ment. The first one can be found in the Com­put­ers / Elec­tron­ics sec­tion and is called Refurb Depot. Lots of stuff at good dis­counts, but it doesn’t last long because they don’t get many of any indi­vid­ual item, so if you see some­thing you like, you bet­ter jump on it.

The other good refurb dealer is found in our Tools / Hard­ware / Auto­mo­tive sec­tion. The ven­dor is called Tool King. They have a really nice sec­tion of returned and refur­bished tools from a lot of major man­u­fac­tur­ers. If you want a high-quality brand name tool, but you don’t want to spend top dol­lar for it, this is the place to shop.

You can thank me later.

Like I said in my pre­vi­ous post, we have lit­er­ally thou­sands of online retail­ers avail­able to us and we are con­stantly adding good ones to our list. Then why are some of the really pop­u­lar online stores not already included on this site?

That’s an excel­lent ques­tion. Thank you for asking!

Just as we’ve cho­sen to not part­ner with many of the online retail­ers who’s sites we’ve reviewed, there are a lot of the big name retail­ers who have rejected us. I do a lot of my shop­ping online (even before start­ing this site) and I have a lot of favored retail­ers who have (so far) rejected my offer to include them on our char­ity shop­ping pages. It’s a real heart-breaker to get a rejec­tion let­ter from a com­pany that I des­per­ately want to include on this site.

The main rea­son for our rejec­tion by these lead­ing com­pa­nies is that this site is new and doesn’t have much traf­fic on it yet. The retail­ers eval­u­ate every Web site that applies for a con­tract with them and weed out those that don’t match their cri­te­ria. For a lot of the big name retail­ers, they’re look­ing part­ner with sites that get a lot of “hits” each month. So how many is “a lot?” It seems like the Magic Num­ber for many of these guys is 1,000. They want to see a track record of 1,000 unique vis­i­tors to this site every month before they will con­sider doing busi­ness with us.

We’re get­ting there. We’re brand new, but we’re work­ing hard to sign new Char­ity Part­ners with mem­bers who are moti­vated to con­tribute to their orga­ni­za­tion by shop­ping online. As we get more Char­ity Part­ners signed up with us and their peo­ple start vis­it­ing this site, we’ll get closer and closer to hit­ting that Magic Number.

Once we hit each retailer’s Magic Num­ber, you can expect to see the big guys here, like Wal­mart, Land’s End, Dell Com­put­ers, Sta­ples, Apple, Cold­wa­ter Creek, Macy’s, Dillard’s, and on and on. So please come back often to visit this site, even if it’s not to shop. We would really like you to leave com­ments on our posts, rec­om­mend retail­ers, do prod­uct reviews, let us know of spe­cial events hap­pen­ing with your orga­ni­za­tion, etc. This is more than just a fundrais­ing page — it’s a com­mu­nity. I’m excited about the com­mu­nity aspects and poten­tial of this site, as well as it’s abil­ity to help finance char­i­ties through the shar­ing of our online sales com­mis­sions with each of them.

As you browse through our ever-growing list of online retail­ers, you’ll find lots of brand names that you’ve heard of and known for years — com­pa­nies like Ace Hard­ware, 1–800-PetMeds, Priceline.com, Reader’s Digest, and many more.

There are also many smaller, less well-known online retail­ers that we are fea­tur­ing on our shop­ping pages. To help you get acquainted with all of our retail­ers, we’ve cre­ated a lit­tle blurb on each one of them. To find these retailer descrip­tions, click on the Retail Part­ners but­ton in the menu bar near the top of the ShopOnline4Charity Web page.

We want you to know that we have access to lit­er­ally thou­sands of online retail­ers that we could include on our shop­ping pages. We don’t list all of them, for many rea­sons. First of all, we’re look­ing out for you, our val­ued shop­pers. We visit and eval­u­ate the site of every hun­dreds of retail­ers before we include them on our char­ity shop­ping pages. We’re family-friendly here. We don’t want to include any retail­ers that offer unsa­vory mer­chan­dise. (For exam­ple, we had to look at sev­eral mag­a­zine ven­dors before we found one that didn’t have an “adult” sec­tion.) We also try to gauge the qual­ity of the mer­chan­dise offered and the pric­ing. We’ve rejected many retail­ers because it looked to us like their prod­ucts weren’t com­pet­i­tively priced.

Just because we’ve screened the retail­ers that we’ve allowed to be included on this site, that doesn’t mean that we endorse every prod­uct that they sell. For instance, there are books that are car­ried by some of our book deal­ers that we con­sider to be a waste of time and money, but we don’t have the lux­ury of being able to con­trol their entire inven­tory. So as always, use your best judg­ment in select­ing prod­ucts that you’re not famil­iar with.

If you have a favorite online retailer that you would like to see included in our pro­gram, please email us at Phil@ShopOnline4Charity.org, give us the Web address for the retailer, and some infor­ma­tion about why you like them, and we’ll see if we can add them to our list. We are con­stantly grow­ing and adding good, new retail­ers, so come back often to check our list. And thank you for shop­ping at ShopOnline4Charity.org.