AFO/FPO Shipping Info Added to Help Military Families

Last night we added a couple of new features to Shopping-Bargains.com that I’m particularly excited about. One feature was specifically created for military families shopping online. The other feature is for everyone.

Our new military-friendly feature was designed to assist military personnel and their families shop from online stores that ship beyond our national borders via AFO/FPO (Air/Army Post Office or Fleet Post Office) or military shipping. We wanted to make it easy for our military customers to tell at-a-glance if a store offered AFO/FPO shipping.

Since some stores do AFO/FPO shipping and some will not it can be frustrating to fill an online shopping cart only to find out during checkout that you will have to look elsewhere since they don’t ship to military addresses outside the country. Thus we added a simple “information pane” with this information. This information pane (see example on the left) resides in an upper right hand section on each store’s main page — the page that contains all that store’s coupons and deals.

Here’s how it works. If the store offers AFO/FPO shipping, a green “Yes” will appear. If not, a red “No” will be displayed. For stores and service providers that don’t ship anything (like Symantec with software downloads only) or for those few which with we have incomplete information in our database, nothing will be displayed.

The other new feature was designed to enhance shopper trust. Since we are beginning our 10th year of operation this month, we felt it would be helpful to show the year a store or service provider was first listed on Shopping-Bargains.com. Since we try to list only reputable and trusted entities and monitor customer feedback regarding them, it is helpful to know how long a store has been in business and listed with us.

So with this in mind, I invite you to try out these new features and let us know what you think. I know as of today we still have a few database updates to make to correct some listings prior to 2003 when we used an older database. Also, while yet unknown, we may have some AFO/FPO edits to make as well.

We hope these enhancements will make it easier for all of our customers to shop our more than 1,000 listed stores. We also have a few more ideas up our sleeve so stay tuned . . .