eCommerce News Flash - We Open Online Adventure Travel Store

S/V Billabong and Creative Cruising Concepts
join the eCommerce world

What? Are you crazy? Did you contract malaria or something?
All that sailing in exotic places must have messed up your minds.

We know what you are thinking, but here's the deal; we really like to help people, and people have actually suggested we are good at it. As you are getting ready, you have enough to think/worry about already without wondering if you are getting the right X, Y or Z for the job. And in most cases, it'll be too late once you figure out that what you thought would work, won't. Replacement costs typically rise exponentially once you leave the comforts of your home base. We've documented our experiences with what works and what doesn't, and discovered that we thoroughly enjoy helping others by sharing our ideas.

There's only one problem; there is no money in it and we have to pay the bills somehow. Out here, our typical "payment" is the look of satisfaction from someone who has been baffled by a certain problem that we have helped solved. Unfortunately, that look doesn't transcend the internet. Sometimes we even get a gift of a dinner, beer/wine, but we never ask for $ or charge for our services. We've had some people suggest we shut down our site and write a book instead.

How can you run a store while you're cruising?

We can't and that's were affiliate programs come in. We had looked into the program options when we first started Creative Cruising Concepts, but realized they were still in their infancy. When we arrived in Singapore we realized that there was enough validation of the programs and that most of the companies we regularly shopped at (and now can only dream about) support affiliates.

Here's the win-win

Let us do the hard work for you, at no cost to you, in fact you might save on the deal.

You get to shop at established stores, using us to help filter out all the various options, based on products and features we know will work. You pay the prices you normally would, and in some cases we can offer you better prices than if you shopped the affiliated store on your own. They deal with all the payment transactions, shipping, support and all things we know nothing about. We just know what works and what doesn't.

It's as if you were taking us Shopping with you to help you decide if the product will really fit your needs. The affiliate store pays us a small percentage of your purchase that we hope will support the time and cost of our free website content.

But You are out of touch with the latest and greatest

Don't worry we aren't going to send you off to get the camera we bought 5 years ago for $2000 when you can get the newer model with better features for $500. Certain things change all the time; consumer electronics, computers, communications, software. Features increase and prices usually drop over time. As a consumer you just can't lose. We know what features to look for in a product and use those to determine which one WE would buy, if we were replacing ours today. In most cases we are at the phase where we are looking to upgrade our existing equipment anyway, so we've done the research work already.

In certain cases, computers being the glaring example; the latest and greatest gear is not necessarily the best option. To me it screams "unproven" in our disconnected world. For examples, most navigation software is not supported under Vista. But then again you don't need the latest and greatest for our typical applications. A lot of communication equipment that interfaces to the computer still ships with a RS-232 serial port connector otherwise known as a legacy ports. I think my IBM T-22 laptop is one of the last Thinkpad machines to have a serial port and it was released in late 2001. Marine computing doesn't need the speed, whiz-bang graphics and all the gadgets that allow people to live in the "connected world" because that is not the world we live in. If you think it is, you might want to chose a more suitable transportation method or more connected destinations.

How it started

Before we left we spent we spent hours doing online research to find which products would work best for us. Then we spent hours trying to find out where to buy them. All-in-all we did an amazingly good job of it now that we reflect on the success of our outfitting phase. Maybe we could have saved 50¢ here and there if we had searched harder, but we had other things to do; like get ourselves and the boat ready!!

When we returned home for a short "vacation" from our voyage, we found that we were inundated with questions from people outfitting their boats and trying to get ready to leave. "Should I do this.. or that? Do you think this will work? What do you do about xyz?". At that point, two years and 13,000 miles into our trip, we felt that we had the boat, it's systems and the extras dialed in, we knew what worked; for us. Cruising has a steep learning curve, and we've learned a lot from our own mistakes (I mean experiences), as well as those made by fellow cruisers. We've spent a lot of time documenting what works, what doesn't, and some of the things we've added along the way and we made it available here on our site.

To the average cruiser arriving in Singapore after spending the season in the remote areas of Indonesia (internet once in three months), the shopping here is unbelievably overwhelming. They have six story malls filled just with computer related things and another with consumer electronics. People who arrived thinking they would update their systems were found walking in a mumbling exhausted daze through the Raffles Marina parking lot; empty handed. Others bought things but realized they didn't have all the pieces or it wouldn't work in their environment. Let's face it, it's rare to see an electronics sales person who has every set foot on a boat, let alone knows how to make things work away from the comfort of the "connected world".

It was rather entertaining to watch the stream of people come to Billabong for help, or even funnier, ask to look through our bags to see what we had purchased. So what did we do? We set up a virtual shop. We saved the boxes for what we had purchased and walked people through the various available options. It was as if we were shopping for them or with them, and it worked!! And that's when we realized that if we could do it for them, we could do it for you!

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