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Welcome to Marketplace Stories, a labour of love that essentially started back in 2002 when we wrote our first website application - SearchByProduct.com. We knew that the future of internet shopping would be incredible - but we saw the problems as well; lack of trust, cheesy sites, bad customer service, hard to find products etc.
We decided we could do better - we could provide a site that did the heavy lifting for you - by finding great retailers and products, creating a robust internal search engine and an easy to navigate user interface.
We left the safety net of steady incomes that year and wrote that application - populating our site with mostly bricks and mortar stores in our area. While successful, we ultimately realized that the costs of gathering information from them off-line was too labour intensive and costly. We then wrote our on-line retailer data-entry system, cutting down our labour costs and expanding our reach beyond our geographical region.
We also saw the internet changing - users wanted to be able to interact, give their opinions, share information and have a voice. Providing lists of retailers and products, however great, was simply not enough for the increasingly demanding internet shopper.
For instance, there are plenty of great sites out there that do price comparisons. But shopping is more than just who has what at the cheapest price. It is about finding quality sites that you can trust and building real relationships with. It's about easily finding those cool unique, amazing products, it's about making your life easier, it's about great customer support, it's about seeing the important details up-front, like shipping policys, costs and prices rather than when you are deep in the check-out process.
With that in mind we replaced Search By Product with Marketplace Stories on May 15th, 2008, building on the concepts of community, user interactivity and great service. We wanted to make our site more dynamic and research rich by providing markeplace stories - stories specific to the consumer based world so every day users could come to our site and read the latest exciting, informative or just plain strange stories submitted by ourselves and our members. We added the ability for shoppers to register with us so they could post their own stories, become 'friends' with each other, review stores and products. bookmark favorite stores, products and stories and comment on pretty much anything.
Another feature added was the ability to connect relevant retailers and products to the posted stories. This allows shoppers to go directly to stores that are in some way related to the products, brands or concepts mentioned in the articles they've just read, in order to garner even more information.
By providing shoppers with great stories, products and stores we hope you find our site informative and dynamic. Our goal is to help you capitalize on the time-saving, efficient and fun aspects of the internet shopping experience.
We would like to say a big thanks to our design consultant, Simon Dabbs, at Incendo Creative for his infinite patience and creativity. A thank you as well to Jacorre Design Studio for the beautiful flags.
If you have any questions, comments or opinions on how we can make our site even better, please don't hesitate to contact us at: support@marketplaceStories.com and we promise to get back to you.
Mike and Karen Allan, Vancouver, B.C. Canada
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