Don’t you hate it when you have to unplug one appliance to plug something else into your power strip? Maybe you want to charge your phone and dry your hair at the same time—and sometimes that “strip” design isn’t so friendly, is it?
That’s why I was excited to learn about this bendable power strip. It’s a cool new invention made possible by a cool new website, Quirky.com.
The company’s founder and CEO, Ben Kaufman, came to speak at our first ever ShopSmart summit earlier this year, and I was so impressed with his website that I made a note to include it in our annual shopping feature.
Over the next months, I kept collecting snippets about cool shopping sites I’d never heard of, and so did our contributing editor, Kenrya Rankin. The result is our huge online shopping roundup, “50 fabulous shopping sites,” on page 22 of our November issue, on sale now.
Funnily enough, Quirky.com is the first site you’ll read about. And one of the last is Amazon.com, the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, the keynote speaker at our SS summit. His site has gone so far beyond its beginnings as a virtual bookstore; read what’s new there, and at a few more of the big shopping sites. And learn more about 49 other sites you may not have heard of—but will want to click to immediately, we’re betting!
It’s a great place to start your holiday shopping, plus you’ll get great info to help you spot sales and stay safe online all year long. Happy shopping!
Liz Mattioli
05:12:48 PM on Fri Nov 4 2011
I just wanted to comment on Addoway.com. This is one site that is user friendly, I feel extremely safe making purchases on the site and I am so happy that is is very easy to navigate and the home page makes me feel that I am actually shopping at a mall (cyber mall of course).
Ella
08:00:07 AM on Thu Nov 10 2011
It was such an honor to have I-ELLA.com included in the top 50! Who knew raiding your friend's closet (while giving to charity) could be so much fun. Thank you so much. We heart Shop Smart ;)
Terry Haaga
12:54:50 AM on Fri Nov 11 2011
Question: I have a paid subscription coming to my home. How do I get it on my iPad?
Robin Melen
05:58:23 PM on Wed Nov 16 2011
You'll have to be patient! We're working on an iPad app!
Doug
11:58:09 AM on Mon Dec 5 2011
RE: 50 fabulous shopping sites
Hi Jody,
I discovered the cheapism web site when doing some product research and found their advice to be quite spotty. In looking further, quite a bit of their info was misleading and some just plain wrong. To their credit, they did provide sources. When I followed those, they led to other sources and so forth until finding the ultimate root source to be of questionable credibility and sometimes intent. To be fair, I did not research all of their content, just a few areas where I have a good depth of knowledge.
I don't think the cheapism writers had any bad intent. It appeared that they just did not have previous subject matter expertise on the topic at hand, did some fairly quick research on the web, and tried to give good advice based on what they found, not knowing enough to know that the quality of their sources were questionable. Then you pass it on from them. Everybody just makes the assumption that if they have a nice web page, they know what they are talking about.
It reminds me of recent incidents with political/new stories where somebody puts something totally bogus on the web, it goes viral, then goes up through so many layers (none being fact checked) that the legit news media reports the story as real.
Cheapism is promoting Shop Smart and this article as (in effect) validation of the quality of their site. As a Consumer Reports long time reader and current subscriber, I was very disheartened to see an affiliated publication at the top of this chain. Being a trustworthy source of information is CU's biggest asset and I hate to see that being eroded...
Sandra Johanson
03:21:01 AM on Tue Jan 31 2012
Thank you for this informative post! I like very much online shopping as it helps me to save a lot of time and also money. There are a lot of discounts especially on San Diego classifieds and I am very satisfied of their products.