Purple Book The Definitive Guide to Exceptional Online Shopping

Foreword thepurplebookexists to provide consumers with an internet shopping directory that is at once comprehensive, objective, incisive, entertaining, reliable, easy-to-use and, above all, informative. It is our sincere hope that the sites listed within these pages will offer some of the best online shopping experiences available, and that our humble book will contribute in some small way to the many conveniences and advantages of e-commerce. In years to come, we plan to continually improve the book with updated editions, so as to expand and improve our unique collection, both with the addition of new sites and the inclusion of new categories. Hopefully, by cultivating the awareness of discerning shoppers, our books will encourage existing sites to better serve the online shopping population, and we welcome this growth. We believe that the American economy is best served if a wide variety of large and small businesses can fairly compete on a national and global level, and withthepurplebookour intention is not only to bring the best available products and services to deserving consumers, but to direct customers to deserving retailers as well. Introduction Have you everactuallytried to find a needle in a haystack? Of course not. The expression only exists to highlight the futility of such pursuits. And yet, every day, tens of millions of people turn to web search engines to help them find the information and merchandise that interests them most. However, suppose you enter a query for the word 'needle' on the internet's most powerful search engine. The resulting list features more than 1,200,000 online pages to sort through. Welcome to the world wide web. With more than one billion pages already, and that number expected to double each year, it's no longer just a matter of finding the needle; the problem is finding the right haystack. It gets worse. If you type in 'shirts,' you get almost four million responses. 'Wine' gets you nearly six million. Type in 'gifts,' and you will be presented with more than seven million pages, each of whichmightcontain what you're looking for, if you're willing to take the time to find it.... WE TAKE THE GUESSWORK OUT OF ONLINE SHOPPING thepurplebookis the solution to your search engine woes. The way we see it, why waste valuable time looking for an online shop, then waste more time looking for the item you want to purchase, only to discover that you shouldn't have bothered in the first place? Isn't the promise of the internet that it has the power to make our lives both easier and more efficient? Then why must we spend entire afternoons scouring through dozens or hundreds of web sites instead spending that time at the beach? We spent over a year cataloging and reviewing every e-commerce site we could track down, whether we found out about it through search engines, advertisements, links from other web sites, community bulletin boards, magazine articles or word of mouth. Of the tens of thousands online stores we discovered, we had to toss a few out for being detrimental to humanity. The rest we subjected to our own rigorous set of standards, scrutinizing each aspect of the site:Is it easy to use? Does it have a good selection? Are the prices good? Will it download in less than an hour? By the end, we'd whittled down the selection to include only the finest catalogs, the most beautiful web designs, the best bargains and that occasional ingenious purveyor of a product or service of such unique charm that we couldn't possibly leave it out. Our final tally includes brick-and-mortar stores that have established a viable online presence, manufactMendelsohn, Hillary is the author of 'Purple Book The Definitive Guide to Exceptional Online Shopping' with ISBN 9780553382785 and ISBN 0553382780.