Archive for the ‘Retail Partners’ Category

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.

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.

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.