Andrew C.

I am a big steepandcheap fan. It fits into the "flash deals" category that woot.com first pioneered, except unlike woot, steepandcheap rotates it's deals throughout the day (woot is just one deal a day except during their "woot-offs"). This style of shopping is not for everyone as it requires a bit of luck and a lot of patience to find something on steepandcheap that you actually fits your needs. Clothing can be particularly tough to find deals on because often the size/color you want will be sold out by the time you check the site. Because of this I often wind up buying more equipment than clothing from steepandcheap (headlamps, ice axe, etc). Whenever you do find something that fits your needs you're pretty much guaranteed to be getting it for the best price on the web (and often the best price by a wide margin).

The checkout flow is fantastic. Once you're a logged in member of steepandcheap making purchases is extremely simple and hassle free. Also, this is one of the easiest sites I've ever dealt with for returns.

I was going to give a 3/4 rather than 4/4because of the slight hassle intrinsic to a flash deal site. However, they're not trying to be anything other than a flash deals site, so comparing steepandcheap to other sites in the same category I think it easily merits a 4/4 rating.

I've been buying and selling on Glyde for the past couple years and I love it. My experience hasn't always been perfect, but I used to use ebay to buy and sell my video games and Glyde is just so so much better. Like ebay, you're dealing with other individuals like yourself, so things do occasionally go wrong. However, unlike ebay, Glyde acts as the middle man for resolving your problems so you don't have to deal with directly with whoever did you wrong (and when you're in that situation it sucks to deal directly with the other person because they often get defensive and you have to worry about how they're going to impact your user rating and all that junk. Yuck). Over many many purchases and sales I think I've had to interact with their customer service two or three times. I usually hate dealing with customer service but the Glyde CS team has made all my problems go away within one or two emails back and forth with them... that's awesome.

Github is great. I've been using the site since it's early days and it just keeps getting better. Where the site really shines is in sharing and collaboration on coding projects.

Gilt has a somewhat restrictive return policy in that returns are only allowed for 21 days and then only for store credit. However, there customer service is great and I returned something months after receiving it and they still accepted it for a full refund. I'm guessing they saw that I was a good customer and wasn't returning a bunch of stuff and decided to give me a break (YMMV).

The prices are great for the quality of stuff. They email daily about deals, which can be a bit tiresome, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that those emails can be toned down through some time of user prefs... I've just never bothered because the emails don't really bother me.

Also checkout jetsetter.com, a luxury travel site that is part of the gilt groupe.

Sitejabber is okay. My biggest beef with sitejabber is that the 'volunteered review' model of review solicitation often leads to only those who've had bad situations bothering to leave reviews. This problem is particularly bad in the commerce sector, when I buy something on Amazon and it goes well I'd never bother to write a review, but if things go sour I'm going to shout it from the rooftop. Unfortunately, with the exchange of physical goods things are bound to sometimes go bad (usps screws up the shipping, I accidentally ordered the wrong item, the seller legitimately sent me the wrong item, etc). I became interested in sitegrabber when I noticed that groupon.com was the sites "most hated" site of the day a while back. I started looking at the reviews for groupon and sure enough, it looked like there was a vocal 1% who had a bad experience with groupon.