About Us and What We Do
Welcome to a better way to shop – The Smart Consumer.
We here at TheSmartConsumer.com take a great deal of pride in recommending awesome products. Simply put, our motto sums our mission up nicely.
“Stuff that makes your life better.”
The Problem
When the founders here came together we wanted to address some serious problems we discovered in our own day to day consumer lives.
The first of which is lack of information.
When you walk into a brick and mortar store it’s hard to get reliable facts about products or solutions that interest you.
It’s impossible to tell if the underpaid store associates are working off commissions and willing to sell you anything, or if the claims and marketing material on the product packaging are really true to their word. That’s of course assuming the product you want is actually in stock.
More and more we find ourselves shopping on the internet to circumvent insufficient information and inventory hurdles and take advantage of technology to make our lives easier. Vendors like Amazon have mastered their art and also crowdsourced their marketplace with reliable sellers and have seemingly endless inventory of simply amazing stuff.
Then another problem happened.
Suddenly there isn’t just one shelf or aisle to search in.
There is literally hundreds if not THOUSANDS of products, you find you need to click through 100 product pages just to find that one golden product – the one you really want.
By the time that’s said and done you haven’t really saved any time and effort at all.
Between Amazon and Google’s own sponsored or paid placements and businesses and product owners artificially inflating their own reviews to get more attention in a cut throat marketplace it’s getting more and more confusing to know who to trust.
A few great websites exist now to combat these issues but created the second problem..
Information overload.
Product reviews are awesome and sometimes we really do appreciate having as much information as possible. If you’re like me, and If I’m going to spend $1000 or more of my hard earned money I want to know that investment is going towards quality.
That being said some sites have really gone overboard and have gone on to write short novels of 15,000 or more words on products that are $10 or $20 bucks and still list a dozen products in front of us.
The Solution
We’ve narrowed our process very simply to comparing three really awesome products that we think you’ll really love.
In addition, we appreciate our frugal and budget conscious shoppers too. We like to throw one budget pick into the mix to try to help buyers get the most bang for their buck.
Without being too verbose, we think we give consumers just the right amount of information to help validate their purchase decisions while at the same time getting to the point and providing accurate products and prices. We’ve gone through rigorous testing to make sure it’s extremely simple to navigate our resources and we think you’ll be pleased with the end result.
A Side Note
We here at The Smart Consumer do not under any circumstance accept free or paid product placement in any of our listings.
We do not wish to create any type of bias or favoritism with any vendor based on being provided free stuff. We want to sleep well at night knowing our visitors found great gear at a good price without bribery or favoritism (or whatever marketing term big corporations use to make themselves feel better about this practice).
How To Support Us
Our reviews contain links that will forward you to some of the biggest and best marketplaces on the internet. Trusted websites and stores like Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target. We only recommend retailers who we feel will take care of you during and after the sale and that you can rely on time and time again.
When you make a purchase after clicking one of those links we receive a small commission through affiliate programs and relationships with those companies.
This relationship is mutually beneficial because we want you to feel confident about the products you buy. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t buy them and we here at the Smart Consumer wouldn’t have the resources to be here.
What makes us feel truly rewarded is when we see comments, discussions, or e-mails from our users that tell us how satisfied they are and that they found a great product and that we helped them make the right choice.