Foreign Perspectives

When you’re online shopping it’s not really a good move to use a debit card and you certainly wouldn’t want to be bandying about your bank account details outside your own banks website. But what if you don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use one?

Up to now the options have been quite limited but that’s changing which is handy with the biggest holiday shopping event of the year (ie Christmas) just around the corner.

One of the latest entrants to this field is ebillme.com which shields your personal details a whole lot more than any other similar sites that I’ve seen. There’s a two step process to purchasing via them: 1) order something from one of their retailers (there’s a reasonable selection now and you can expect that to grow) and then 2) use your own banks bill payment facility to pay ebillme.com . Needing to log into two sites to buy something might sound a pain but it gives a major increase in the security to you.

To spread the word they’re even running a contest with some pretty respectable prizes. If you refer to the URL of this post I might even win something too

Popularity: 5% [?]

I’ve been looking at our booking stats covering the last year and wondering if we can go about running the place somewhat better in the coming year.

Thanks to the recession rolling around the world at the moment particular categories of guest don’t turn up much anymore. In particular, those looking for cheapo short breaks are obviously fairly thin on the ground in that the euro is pretty high compared to just about all the other currencies and also the flight prices from the various discount airlines are way up too (around five times the price in June 2008 compared to June 2007). That combination clearly has an effect on the booking patterns.

Now, on the whole we figure that whilst we’re here, we may as well be open. Fairly logical really. However, in that outside the main April to September season this makes for very few guests checking in we’ve been thinking that it would make more sense for us to be elsewhere over that time and we’re looking into the logistics of such a thing at the moment.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Shopping comparison sites seem to breed like rabbits, don’t they? Yet, the odd thing is that no two seem to come up with the same prices for products. Or is it odd? Well, in fact the majority of price comparison sites don’t really scan the market quite so intensively as you might reasonably expect which goes to explain some of the differences in prices that come up but, of course, there’s an element of commission payments in there as well.

One site that claims to be different is ShopWiki which aims to scan all the prices available online and offer them to you. In reality it’s probably not going to be able to scan every site as some, regettably, block access to automated price grabbers but it’s a long way forward from those that only offer up results from sites that pay to get placed on the comparison site.

Does it work though? Well, taking a slightly oddball of car seats you’ll find a fairly full page of basic information about them and the regulations that apply to them which is a great deal more than you’d find on the equivalent page of a conventional comparison site. Following that line on down to a Cosco Summit Deluxe and you’ll find one of the best prices around. It’s not the best ticket price around (that’s 5c less) but it comes with free shipping so it is the lowest price that you’ll pay.

Although it picked up the lowest price for the searches I did, that won’t always be the case as sometimes shops offer discounts to some comparison sites that aren’t commonly available but, in principle, this site should offer more consistently low prices than most others on the basis that it’s looking at more shops than the others do.

Don’t always expect an an article to have been written about what you’re searching for though. For instance, whilst you’ll currently get quite a comprehensive writeup about laptops, you drop right down to a straight price comparison if you start hunting around for one of the new netbooks. Having said that, you’re no worse off than you’d be if you went to a normal comparison site for the same stuff but because this site works quite differently, you might find that the prices are better.

Popularity: 5% [?]