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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.