Product Trends Magazine

About the company: Getting quotes on car insurance, medical insurance, home insurance and more has never been easier. With our free service, enter your information once and you are instantly matched with the most competitive companies in the business. You’ll get back up to five quotes so you can compare and save. At InsureMe.com, we shop your insurance so you don’t have to.

The big pitch: When you want a complete picture of the best health insurance, auto insurance, medical insurance and home insurance rates available to you, fill out our form now. You’ll find the insurance you need at a great rate.

InsureMe is one of many websites devoted to the business of health insurance, life insurance, business insurance, car insurance and long term care coverage that tell you they’ll get you a great rate, but in reality send your business to other providers.

We don’t have any great problem with that, let’s be clear. There are many websites out there that will do a fine job of helping you find the lowest rate possible, after taking your details and figuring out the specifics. The catch here is that, when we tried it, we were only given one option, and no quote. If we wanted an ‘online quote’, we were told to hit a button which took us elsewhere.

Now, let’s be very up-front about this - InsureMe.com is not a scam . They do what they claim, and help you find better insurance than what you might have, but with all the information they ask for, we expected a little more from the result.

Perhaps it was just our case where the options were one - perhaps you’ll get a whole page of options. But it wasn’t like we were asking for something that is difficult to find a lot of options on… health insurance for a 35 year old in New Jersey. We would have expected at least a dozen options, with prices. And we got one.

So, in reality, if you’re looking for something simple, where an insurer will call you with the relevant details later in the day and you don’t have to do much thinking about it all, InsureMe.com is a good option. But if you’re looking to shop around a little…

The Product Trends rating: 2.5 stars. In the end, we expected to have a list of options and prices, and all we really got was the name of an agent who will probably be calling us real soon. That’s not a bad thing, per se, InsureMe.com is a good option, but there are other insurance services out there that we’ve got more out of.

To try InsureMe.com for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: Intelliflix is the world’s largest combined online movie and game rental destination, offering more than 40,000 titles of movies and games to customers in all 50 states. In 2004, we surpassed Netflix with the largest number of distribution centers in the continental United States. This allows us to provide our customers with typically 1-2 day delivery to most areas of the country. We are the only online company to provide both unlimited subscription programs and individual pay-per rental (PPR) plans.

The big pitch: 3-out Unlimited Rental subscription plans for just $8.25!3-out Unlimited Rental subscription plans for just $8.25! Pay-per-rental plans are also available, starting at $3.95 per movie/game.

Netflix hit the movie industry like a hurricane, bringing online movie rental into the population’s mindset at such a fast rate that established bricks and mortar chain stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video have seen their profit margins severely slashed.

Intelliflix is just the latest of many upstarts to have entered the market seeking to take back Netflix’s crown, but it’ll be a hard road to hoe if they have any ideas of beating the original - the company that created the industry from scratch. Thankfully, Intelliflix does a lot of things well, and indeed does some things better than Netflix does - and some that Netflix doesn’t do at all.

The way online DVD rental works is simple. You choose the movies you want on Intelliflix’s website, put them in order of preference, and wait. That day, the Intelliflix staff will send the movie you asked for out to you by mail, for you to watch whenever you want. If you watch it right away and stick it straight back in the post (using the free postage-paid return envelopes that they supply you), as soon as they receive your returned movie, they send out the next one on your queue and you receive it the next day.

The best part? Hard to say - it could be that you can keep the movie as long as you want with no late fees. Or it could be that they send you out 3 movies at a time, so you should always have something waiting to be watched. Or it could be that you never have to get to the video store, fighting traffic and queues, to return a movie that sucked. Whatever you think is the best reason to rent online, take it from us, a group of people who are all heavily addicted to online movie rentals - it rules.

Intelliflix is a good option to begin your online rental experience, for several reasons. For starters, their 3-out online DVD rental subscription plan is just $16.95 per month, which is dirt cheap. In fact, at the time of writing, Intelliflix was offering an incredible $8.25 discount price on that plan, and though that can’t last long, it’s the sort of discount that makes people sit up and take notice. If you prefer to pay per rental, which works better for casual renters, you can do so for $3.95 per title, for a five-day-rental, with up to four movies at a time, again with free shipping, which matches any video store that I know of.

To help you decide if Intelliflix is right for you, they’ll give you one free month trial with every new account, and not only will that get you three movies, free of charge, delivered right to your mailbox, but you can also choose from video games as well. In fact, Intelliflix has over 40,000 video games and movies waiting for you to rent, right now - including mature/adult movies. Alternately, Netflix doesn’t offer adult titles OR video games.

Another great forward step for Intelliflix is that they’re integrating their service into actual bricks and mortar stores across the US, which will mean you’ll be able to order your films and pick them up later that day, rather than waiting for the mail, if you choose to do so.

Lastly, Intelliflix processes orders on Saturdays - not just Monday to Friday like Netflix does, which means you’ll get more discs per month, and have your weekend turnaround times slashed by a day. Great stuff.

The Product Trends rating: We didn’t think that anyone could beat Netflix, which is a truly great, innovative, dedicated to customer service kind of company, but Intelliflix gives them a real run for their money. Four and a half stars.

To try Intelliflix for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: FindMyInsurance.com is a pioneer in instant term life insurance quotation services with over 300 products from top-rated affordable life insurance companies. We can provide you with a free life insurance quote as well as provide a wide range of insurance information to make an informed decision.

The big pitch: Our free insurance rate comparison service gives you access to over 550 low cost life insurance policies from over 175 top-rated life insurance companies to provide you with the best insurance rate prices in the country. Get an easy term life insurance quote online!

One of the hardest things about reviewing insurance options is that there are so many different features, add-ons, extra charges, deductibles and fees, that you really don’t have much of a clue whether you’re getting a good deal until you have to claim.

FindMyInsurance.com changes the landscape a little when it comes to figuring out the cost of life insurance, by bringing together over 550 low-cost life insurance policies from 175 of the best-rated insurance companies in North America.

FindMyInsurance.com keeps things really simple - all you need to do is fill in your date of birth, home state, your gender, whether or not you smoke, your health classification (we’ll talk you through this), the level term period you’re looking for, the coverage amount you’d like, and your email address. All told, this process took us less than one minute, and the FindMyInsurance.com policy database gave us a full page of different policy options, ranging from $407 per year with Protective Life Insurance Company, all the way down to $266 with West Coast Life Insurance’s ‘Golden Guarantee’ 15-year program.

Learning your health classification is easy enough - simply look over the information provided by FindMyInsurance.com, and you can determine what category you fit in - preferred plus, preferred, or standard.

The difference between them is pretty simple - if you’re overweight, you’re on the standard plan. If you’re a good weight but engage in the occasional dangerous activity, or have a history of medical issues in the family, you’ll end up on preferred. If you’re a clean living fool with no reason to die - then you’re on preferred plus, and you’ll save a packet of cash on your policy.

What makes FindMyInsurance.com worth a look is that they don’t assume that everyone qualifies for preferred plus coverage, like some of their competitors. Preferred plus policies are far cheaper, and so some companies advertise a rate that, in reality 80-90% of customers won’t qualify for.

The Product Trends rating:
FindMyInsurance.com plays it squarely, and keeps things simple. They’ll help you find a good policy, and they’ll do it quickly and easily. For that, we give them a hearty recommendation, and four stars.

To try FindMyInsurance.com for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: During the past five years 123InkJets has sold more than 5 million printer cartridges. What does this mean to you? It means, we know how to do the job quickly and efficiently ensuring you will receive speedy delivery; Indeed, most orders are actually shipped out the very day they are received. As the industry leader we can bring all this to you at very substantial savings, usually 40% to 70% off the typical retail price found at your local discount office supply super-store.

The big pitch: Free shipping with every order, a full 1 year guarantee, and free software on any order over $50.

We’ve all been there – you have something important to print out, you finish your work, you hit ‘print’ and you get nothing but an error message… “your cartridge is out of ink.”

Infuriating! And it’s even more infuriating because the replacement cartridges for inkjet printers of any brand cost so darn much. In fact, printers themselves have come down so much in price that, quite often, a replacement printer cartridge will cost more than the machine it fits into!

If you’re one of the millions of people still being duped by the great ‘you must use an officially licensed printer cartridge’ scam, it’s time you wised up, because there is another option. Irrespective of what the instruction manuals say, YOU DO NOT NEED TO USE BRAND NAME CARTRIDGES!

Honestly, you don’t. And why would you, when an official Epson, Apple, Brother, Compaq, Canon, Hewlett Packard, Lexmark or Xerox cartridge will cost you $30, $40, or even $60 – and generic replacement cartridges can cost you as little as $4.95?

Nobody needs to pay ridiculous prices for a mere piece of plastic with ink in it, and 123InkJets gives people a fast, easy to use option that can save them big dollars, with a one-year guarantee on the products they sell, and FREE SHIPPING!.

If you want to buy only one color ink cartridge, 123InkJets can deliver it to your door, with most orders being sent out the very day they’re submitted by the customer. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a bulk purchase of 4 or more cartridges, the per unit price through 123InkJets is even cheaper!

123InkJets also sells peripherals, such as Hi-Speed USB printer cables, keyboard covers, cleaning wipes, photo paper – and they also supply laser and copier toner, among other things, and they’ll accept payments through Paypal, as well as major credit cards.

And if that’s not enough, you can actually recycle your old empty cartridges for cash!

The Product Trends rating: A great company with a ton of great products at great prices - this is a big four stars.

To try 123InkJets for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: AbeBooks makes it simple and safe to find and buy—or list and sell—new, used, rare, and out-of-print books online. Book buyers love the variety of over 70 million books offered by more than 13,000 booksellers. This great selection delivers value for all: readers find bestsellers, collectors find rare books, students find textbooks, and treasure hunters find books they’ve been seeking forever.

The big pitch: The best deals on new and used textbooks, free shipping, no minimum purchase.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past dozen years, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Amazon.com and its ilk. Amazon grew from Jeff Bezos’ garage into a multi-billion dollar operation during the internet bubble in the late 90’s, and when others crashed and burned, Amazon stayed (barely) alive by virtue of its huge customer base.

Well, Amazon may be many things, but ‘the only alternative’ is not one of them. In the past few years several companies have waged war on the book giant’s dominance, and as the market leaders diversify into toys and power tools, the true book sellers have been building their stock in trade from the ground up.

AbeBooks is one such company. A book marketplace where booksellers from around the world can hawk their wares of new, used, rare, out of print and textbooks, this company charges the sellers a set flat fee as a ‘membership’ each month, which allows them to see as much as they want, to whomever they want, without limitation. Contrast that to Amazon, where the marketplace sellers pay no subscription fee, but have set postage and handling fees that rule them out of doing any business with overseas buyers, and you begin to see where the big guy is going wrong.

To try AbeBooks out for ourselves, we did a search for books by Hunter S. Thompson, and not only found several rare titles from that author for a few dollars each, we actually found one book selling for as little as a dollar.

That’s right - $1.

AbeBooks understands that Amazon’s independent sellers have precious few checks on the quality of the product being sold, so they’ve developed a system where timewasters and fly-by-nighters just aren’t likely to hang around. By charging a membership fee to sellers, you eliminate scammers and frauds, because it’s much easier for them to ply their trade elsewhere - where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.

Selling your textbooks? You can do that through AbeBooks, by virtue of a partnership with Buyback.com, where you simply enter the ISBN number of the book you want to sell, then their system gives you the price they’re willing to pay. If you accept, you send the book in, they pay for the postage (within the US), and they’ll send you a check.

Looking for a book club? AbeBooks has that too, with a free membership allowing you to talk about the books of the month online with other users.

Looking for a line on a cheap Harry Potter book? No problem - you can get as new copies of the latest Potter release for just $9.53, as of the time of writing. Looking for a first edition? Just click the ‘first edition’ link. Maybe you’re after a signed copy? That’s no problem either, with ten different signed copies available when we checked.

If boy wizards don’t interest you, how about the book everybody is reading - the DaVinci Code - which you can buy in good condition for $4.67, or signed by the author, Dan Brown, for $125.00?
There are many things we like about AbeBooks, from the free shipping to the easy as pie search facility, to the tendency towards supplying not just cheap copies of books, but also rare copies, first editions, out of print texts and new and used school text books. This is a book community for people who love books, and who want more than just the latest copy of the South Beach Diet - they want a great read.

The Product Trends rating: Four and a half stars - Take a look for yourself, and see what the little guys in the book business are doing that puts Amazon to shame.

To try AbeBooks for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: The NextStudent Scholarship Search Engine is one of the largest scholarship databases out there today, and it’s packed with over 800,000 scholarships worth over $2.8 billion. It’s updated daily, free of charge, advertisement-free and completely confidential. […] NextStudent gives you as many funding options as possible, with low-cost federal and private loans such as undergraduate and graduate student loans, parent loans, private (K-12) loans, federal and NextStudent Custom Consolidation Loan programs and college savings plans.

The big pitch: Lower your student loan payments by up to 60% - that is, between $100 to $500 per month.

One of the running jokes with the claim that the United States is the best place to live in the world (other than the lack of health care, the alarmingly high number of people living in poverty, and the limited number of political options) is the extreme cost of higher education in the country. Most people who go through college come out the other end with horrific student loan debts, some of which follow them around for decades, or even their entire lives.

But just as you can refinance home loans to get a better rate, or consolidate personal loans into one easy to manage debt, so too can you rearrange your student loans to make repayments lower, and get a better deal than what you’re used to.

NextStudent has a great set-up in which they offer you use of a free scholarship search engine with over 800,000 individual awards that you can apply for, free one-on-one counseling with a personally assigned Education Finance Advisor, a huge array of tips for getting the most out of your student financing, and a staggering line-up of low-cost student loans.

Take it with a grain of salt, but NextStudent advertises themselves as having the "lowest rate possible 100% free Federal Consolidation", and boasts that they can reduce your payments by as much as $500 per month. Maybe they can, maybe that’s bluster, but the important thing about the deal is that you can find out online, through their website, if you qualify and how much they WILL save you every month, without comittment.

Student loans, college loan consolidation, funding for graduate students, parents, high school students - NextStudent covers all the bases. They handle Federal Stafford loans, Federal PLUS loans, private loans, FAFSA, custom consolidation loans, and if you’re unsure what you need or how to go about getting it, you can just call one of their Education Finance advisors and talk it through with an expert.

In our opinion, NextStudent has everything you need to explore the world of college and high school financing from a position of advantage. If they’ll save you money, go with them. If they won’t - don’t. But either way, they make it easy to find out, and it won’t cost you anything to try.

So go take a look.

The Product Trends rating: We give NextStudent a solid 3.5 stars, with potential for more if we hear positive things from those who use the service.

To try NextStudent for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: Pixagogo offers an easy way to upload your photos to our secure data center and share these photos with friends and family, simply by sharing album links. By sharing these compact private album links instead of photos you by-pass e-mail technology limits and you avoid having to resize your photos. That means that viewers will be able to see your photos in all their full-resolution glory and have them printed if they like.

The big pitch: Unlimited photo storage for just $5 per month, create albums, share them with friends and family, order prints - all with a 15-day free trial!

We’re in the digital age, my friends, and that means that a growing number of people - most people in fact - have digital cameras that they take a multitude of pictures with. Friends, family, special events, sports, girls, guys - we snap whatever takes our fancy, and we keep on snapping because nowadays you don’t need to pay to get a roll of film processed to see your happy snappys.

And that’s great, because now the memories that would eventually yellow and fade are with us forever! Or are they…?

Whenever you see a big disaster on TV, be it a flood or a fire, the survivors always talk about how they grabbed their photos before they left the house. Or they talk about how they didn’t get their photos, and now they’re devastated. But in the digitial age, it’s a lot easier to lose your photos - one hard drive crash or virus and your memories are gone forever!

Thankfully, you can avoid that kind of heartbreak, by storing your pictures online through a third party service, like Pixagogo. Not only will that protect your images forever, but it will also stop you from being the ‘Annoying Photo Emailer’.

What is an Annoying Photo Emailer? They’re the family member or friend who thinks everyone in the world has a cable internet connection and thus should have their inbox filled with 600 large pictures of your newborn son, or your cat, or your ingrown toenail. Such people are a giant pain in the backside, on a par with telemarketers and lawyers, and if you happen to be one of those people… Just stop it. Stop it RIGHT NOW. You’re VERY annoying.

So how can you share your pictures with people you care about without overloading Aunt Millie’s email inbox? Simple. Get a Pixagogo account today.

Pixagogo will take as many pictures as you want to upload, as big as you want to make them, and for as long as you want to keep them. You use your Pixagogo account as a giant storage container for your digital images, and when you’re done uploading them, you can then put them into albums that your friends and family can look through free of charge, without any downloading of their own.

Here’s how it works: You download a tiny program from Pixagogo that sits on your desktop. Whenever you want to store images, you just drag them to the Pixagogo Uploader and it does all the work. Then, when they’re stored, you arrange them however you want, in online albums that are easy to personalize to suit whoever you want to see them.

Then, instead of sending 5MB of pictures to everyone you know, you just send them an email with the link to your album and they can look to their heart’s content!

Also, if you see images on your albums that you want real life prints of, you can order them direct from Pixagogo for less than 20c per image!

In addition, if you have your own website but have a lot of pictures to put on it, Pixagogo allows you to link to your pictures, so you can use your account as a tool for your online business ventures, at a cost far below that charged by many hosting companies.

Think about this now:
* You’ll never lose another photo to fire, flood, or computer crash.
* You’ll never have to sit for half an hour while your photos are emailed out to friends and family.
* You’ll never again wonder where the photo of Weird Uncle Phil is stored on your computer.
* You’ll never again wonder how to store images for your corporate website.
* You’ll never have to pay $30 to get prints for relatives that you’re not even sure they want.

Pixagogo does all the hard work for you, and in our experience, the software is simple and easy to install, the process in easy, and what’s even better - the pricing is dirt cheap. Just $5 per month, and you can upload as many pictures as you want. That’s right - upload ten pictures or 10,000 - it’s your choice.

And if you’re not convinced, Pixagogo offers a free 15-day trial during which you can try every single feature without limitation. Don’t like the service? Cancel it. But we’re convinced that, like us, you’ll think it’s well worth the $5 per month (or $50 per year) and will see this as an invaluable service that can protect your memories forever.

There are plenty of ‘photoblogs’ and ‘free picture’ archives out there, and all of them have limitations on how you can do things. Yes, sure, there are no-price options, if you want your pictures to have watermarks on them, or if you want relatives to have to register with a website to see them, or if you want to delete pictures to make room for more.

But Pixagogo just does what you want it to. It never says "file too large" or "storage space full". Just upload your pictures, arrange them as you like, send the link to whoever, and get the prints that will look best on your living room wall in a nice frame delivered to your door.

Pixagogo takes the usual credit cards, but it also takes Paypal, which makes it very easy for the user, and seriously, who amongst us doesn’t have a spare $5 floating around in our Paypal account?

The Product Trends rating: A great service, and once that we fully recommend. Five stars. Try the free trial for yourself. What have you got to lose? …Except your reputation as an ‘Annoying Photo Emailer’.

To try Pixagogo for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: Yahoo Search Marketing lists your site in search results across the web, so you connect with customers who are searching for what you sell. Reach over 80% of active Internet users¹. Advertise to people who are already searching for what you sell. And pay only when a customer clicks on your listing. Sponsored Search prominently displays your business in search results on leading sites like Yahoo!, MSN and AltaVista.

The big pitch: Target prospects searching for businesses in your neighborhood. Reach millions of motivated buyers through Yahoo! Shopping.

When people first launch their website, as new entrants into the global online ecommerce industry, most generally assume that thousands od people will beat a path to their door. Sure, Amazon.com might be the biggest bookseller in the world, but if you set up an alternative book website with better prices or better service, surely you’ll be able to take some of Amazon’s market share, right?

Wrong. In fact, just as the real world is dominated by those with deep pockets, so too is the online world. The sort of traffic numbers that would take you three years to build on your site can happen tomorrow if Yahoo decides to point their millions of customers your way, and the upside of that is that Yahoo WILL point customers your way, and be happy to do so…

If you’re prepared to pay them to, that is.

If that sounds like extortion, it isn’t. In reality, there are many options for you to take in generating traffic for your new corporate shop-front website, but the reality is that only Google and Yahoo can instantly send mass traffic to your website, and the mass sales that should follow.

On Yahoo’s side, they do have good service options. First, they offer a localized search option, so that when people from your area search for your industry, your entry is the first one they see. That’s handy if you’re a small business not too concerned with stretching your marketing dollar into areas that you can’t supply. For example, a roofing contractor has no need to spend money on traffic coming from the next state, so Yahoo allows him to only advertise to those in his area.

The next great tool is the Yahoo Sponsored Search, where your site is listed at the very top of certain keyword searches. For example, if someone searches for Canadian online DVD rental, and those keywords are the ones you’ve purchased, then for a few cents a time, your website will be #1 in that search - for potentially millions of people.

Yahoo also offers a ‘product submit‘ service, where you can offer your product for sale in thousands of Yahoo Stores, and Travel Submit, which does much the same thing for the travel industry, and finally, Directory Submit, where your site is listed the old-fashioned way, in Yahoo’s search engine database.

So how much does it cost? Not as much as you’d think, actually. Sure, if you want it all taken care of without any sweat on your end, Yahoo Search Marketing can do that for $199. They’ll handle everything for you, from account set-up to expert assistance with search term selection and titles and descriptions, and they’ll also give you expert advice in budgeting and marketing strategy. While $199 isn’t chump change, for what is offered, it’s not a bad price, and let’s face it, there’s nobody who knows more about what it takes to best exploit the Yahoo search engine than Yahoo themselves.

Handily, if you choose this option through us, Yahoo will knock $50 off the price.

On the other hand, if you prefer to do all the heavy lifting yourself, you can choose the ’self serve’ option, where you choose the keywords, the listing description, the budgeting, the strategy, and simply pay for the clicks themselves.

The way that works if, you decide how much you want to spend each month ($20 minimum), you decide how much you want to spend per click within that total (10c per click minimum), and then you deposit the money into your Yahoo Search Marketing account. A $30 minimum deposit is required, but if you go through us, Yahoo will top that up with another $25 free of charge, which gives you ample time to try the service out.

And what happens if you do? Well, worst case scenario, you get more traffic and it crashes your server. Best case scenario, you get more traffic and you’ve planned ahead to make sure your web hosting can handle the influx of new customers.

If the keywords you want to sponsor are in-demand, you’re going to pay more per click than the minimum - you should know that ahead of time. But rather than competing for ‘car parts‘ and paying $24 per click, we suggest paying $2 for ‘automobile parts‘ or 12c for ‘car seat covers‘. Be clever with your search words, and go for inexpensive niches rather than all-encompassing mega keywords.

The Product Trends rating: This is one of those instances where you definitely get what you pay for, and if you’re smart, you can utilize the Yahoo Search Marketing system to spend not a lot, and get a whole lot back.

To try Yahoo Search Marketing for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: We sell more hockey equipment from Bauer, Mission, Itech, Gear, Tour, Shock Doctor, TPS, Easton, CCM, Eddy, Oakley, Koho, Eagle, Reebok, Kuzak, BSB, Hyper, Factory and Nike than anyone! […] Hockey Giant’s business is carried on in a modern 55,000 sq. foot warehouse operation in Carlsbad, California which features a state-of-the-art inventory management and control system, teleservice, warehouse pick, pack and shipment, and customer service operations, all of which support the company’s internet and retail store operations.

The big pitch: Millions of dollars of new inventory, and live online help and call center support.

For a lot of formerly enthusiastic hockey fans, the return of pro hockey to the North american sports scene won’t register more than a ripple of enthusiasm, but for the millions of kids that strap on the skates each winter and play the game because they love it, you would almost think that hockey never left.

This year, as the kids prepare for another big winter season, parents will once again be forced to look far and wide for good quality, low-priced hockey equipment, and those paying attention will go no further than Hockey Giant.

If you’re looking to spend no money on your kid’s hockey habit, you’re probably already spending more time than you’d like in places like Wal*Mart, looking for a good deal and trying to nickel and dime the purchase to the nth degree. But here’s the problem with that: Wal*Mart sucks. Their products suck, their prices, while cheap, are cheap because the goods themselves have been produced in a way that can undercut the usual quality items.

To be sure, if you want a cheap toilet brush, go to Wal*Mart and pay a few cents for a piece of plastic. But if you want your kid to be safe, if you want them to have good quality equipment that will help them play well, if you want to only buy a pair of skates ONCE, and not have to replace them every few months when they fall apart, then you need to wean yourself from the bargain bin habit and look for a quality supplier.

Which is not to say that Hockey Giant is expensive - it isn’t. In fact, under the company’s clearance page we found deals like Bauer Mega 20-50 youth inline hockey skates marked down from $109 to just $39, and Hyper Titanium junior inline hockey pants marked down from $99 to just $29. We even found BSB Professional Race Oil discounted from the original price of $12.99 to just TEN CENTS!

Hockey Giant’s regular prices are decent to begin with, and regular weekly specials offer great deals on ice skates, goalie skates, elbow, shin and shoulder pads, helmets, composite sticks and shafts, wood sticks, replacement blades, hockey jerseys, caps, inline wheels, bearings, stick bags and much, much more. In fact, sign up for their specials newsletter, and when the prices hit the floor, you’ll be the first one in line to pick up the good deals.

Hockey Giant takes the usual line-up of credits cards, but one thing worth noting is that they also take Paypal payments - and for orders over $150, they’ll ship it to you for FREE!

Got a product question? During office hours their website features LIVE SUPPORT from someone at the company. Not sure about sizes? They can set you straight. Uncertain what piece of equipment will best suit your 8-year-old? They’ll help.

The Product Trends rating: Four stars, without question. This is a well run organization with great prices, a useful website, and whether your kid is a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, or a budding prospect, you’ll find whatever you need at Hockey Giant.

To try Hockey Giant for yourself, click the image below:

About the company: Cash Advance Network offers the FASTEST service available to provide the loan you need. Whether you need the money to pay monthly bills, or take care of car repairs, our cash advance service is here to help you with all of your emergency cash needs! […] Through our instant approval service online, we offer a convenient solution for those who need cash immediately. In just one business day, you will have the money you need to pay your monthly bills on time, pay for unexpected bills, or get your family through any type of emergency situation.

The big pitch: Get up to $1000 deposited into your checking account within 24 hours!

The payday loan business was once called ‘usury’, and going back to biblical times it was considered the worst kind of sin. Twenty years ago, it was called loan sharking. Today, it’s called ‘immediate finance’, and though nobody breaks legs in the Payday Loan industry anymore, you can certainly fall into traps if you’re not paying attention.

That said, there can be no doubt that the reason this sector of the financial industry has grown so quickly is that there’s a real demand for fast loans by people who might not have the best credit rating. Think about it - if you have high credit card bills to pay, and the kids are sick, and suddenly the hot water heater blows up in your basement, you can’t always ‘just put it on Visa’, and you don’t always have time to get approved for a personal loan.

Sometimes, whether God would have liked you doing so or not, you simply need a payday loan.

But how do you tell the difference between a company out to rip you off and a company simply offering you a little temporary refinancing? Well, in our opinion, you could do a lot worse than a company that doesn’t hide the cold, hard truth from customers, and Cash Advance Network is one such company.

Look in their FAQ and they don’t hide from you the fact that you’ll be paying high interest on your short term loan - expect to pay $30 in interest for every $100 you borrow in payroll advances, and the length of your paycheck loan will be 14 days - after that they’ll start applying financing charges to your account. If you’re having trouble paying the entire amount back, you can always renew the loan (up to 4 times) against a future paycheck, and in fact they make it easy to do so through the automated web-based system on the Cash Advance Network website.

If you’re paid monthly, you can still borrow money from Cash Advance Network, and they’ll still permit you to apply for instant cash loans even if you receive social security payments as part of your income.

One big selling point of Cash Advance Network is that they claim the process is 100% faxless - though that’s not entirely true. New customers must fax a copy of their most recent paystub or a benefit award letter, and their may be times that you’re asked to send in a copy of a bank statement of a voided check, but once your account is set up, you can get cash loans of up to $1000 in just 30 seconds.

As per usual, self-employed individuals won’t get any benefit from Cash Advance Network, as the income of such people is too hard to predict, but if you earn a paycheck, need cash in a flash, and don’t want to mess around with pawnshops, we advise giving a long hard look at the Cash Advance Network system.

The Product Trends rating: Let’s be clear, we at Product Trends are constantly alarmed by the growth of this largely unregulated industry, and the number of people who lose large pieces of their income to ongoing and impossible to pay off loans. That said, just like credit cards, there’s a lot of good that can come from them as long as you DON’T GET IN OVER YOUR HEAD. If you genuinely need short term financing, and you’re the kind of person who will do the responsible thing and pay back the loan in quick time, then we’d recommend giving Cash Advance Network a look. Three stars.

To try Cash Advance Network for yourself, click the image below: