ExpertProfessionalAdvice.com

Congratulations, you made it!

This will hopefully be the beginning of a new, more productive life.

Expert Professional Advice

Why I exist: The Interweb is sloppy – it’s filled with sales pitches and low quality information that generally does not enable people to make better decisions – or it becomes too easy to get sidetracked on the way to making a decision.

Information is not power – information is merely information.

What we all need is actionable information – so, while this is merely version 1.0, I hope it helps:

Automotive:

OpenCarPrice.com, TrueCar, RealCarTips.com and PriceHub offer reader-submitted information about what previous buyers paid and tips on how future shoppers can get the best deals by negotiating.

TomTom Fuel Price Service

Beauty:

Makeupalley.com members give reviews on everything beauty-related, from makeup and skincare to hair dryers and perfume. The site includes detailed information about each user’s skin tone, hair color, skin type and eye color at the top of the review so that readers can gauge how well the advice will fit their own needs.

lensprice.com compares eight large online contact lens retailers for the best prices for over 15 of the contact lens brands. Findcontactlenses.com does the same, comparing the prices for 26 brands among 10 online retailers.

Health:

A comparison-shopping site for health care? rate-my-doctor - rate-my-dentist - ZocDoc

Medication comparison engine Medtipster finds its users the best prices on prescriptions, with the pricing given for specific pharmacies in one’s neighborhood.

Treatment Abroad, the leading online medical tourism portal, has launched a ratings and reviews system for medical tourists to share and rate their experiences of traveling overseas for medical treatment.

OurParents is a free eldercare matching service, focused on assisting children with aging parents. The service offers descriptions, services, photos, quality ratings, price info, etc for over 65,000 care providers and allows consumers to filter search results by location, cost, quality, distance and special requirements.

Fatburgr puts together the nutritional facts about a variety of fast-food restaurants and chains. Some 25 restaurants are currently listed on Fatburgr—including McDonald's, Subway and Chili's. For each of them the site lists the calories, fat, carbs and fiber content for each menu item. All data is available on the iPhone, too.

Dishola offers dish-specific advice and information instead of a traditional restaurant review. Members can read smart reviews by Dishola editors, industry professionals and other members, as well as post reviews and photos of their own favorite dishes. Local review site Yelp boasts the first iPhone app with augmented reality. Users can put their iPhone camera in front of a restaurant, with Yelp’s reviews then overlaying their real-world views. GraffitiGeo, a mobile service that allows users to share brief reviews of restaurants, is working on a similar iPhone app.

Services: Angieslist.com

- Law and Education - Avvo profiles legal professionals, including their experience, areas of practice, and ratings from clients. Ratemyteachers does the same for teachers. Also check out Yollege.

Price shopping:

Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, Shopping.com, Kelkoo, Google Product Searches, Bechna and Roboshopper

Apnoti watches Amazon for price drops. You can use it either by dropping in the Amazon product link and your e-mail address, or by installing a tool bar that adds the option to watch a price to Amazon.com. Similar services are offered by ZingSale, Ookong, WishRadar, PriceDrop.

mySupermarket is a free shopping and comparison website for supermarket shoppers that links the online portals of the UK's four main supermarket chains (Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury's and Ocado) and compares prices on the fly. Also check out Grocio, which claims 18,000+ registered shoppers (as of August, 2009).

Apps --

Shopsavvy, an Android app, allows the user to scan almost any barcode using the phone’s camera, and it will then search over 20,000 online and local retailers to find the best price. Once the best deal has been found, users can either purchase online, or use the phone’s built-in Google Maps feature to find their way to the store. Impulse shoppers may benefit from postponing their purchase… for a few minutes ;-) Shopshavvy won the 2008 Google Android Developers contest and has been launched in the US, UK, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic. A version for the iPhone is in the works.

SnapTell says half a million iPhone and Android users have downloaded its application (photograph a product using a camera in your phone, then upload it to the website for reviews, recommendations and best prices), resulting in more than 1.5 million image queries so far. More than one in three buyers click through to an online retailer, earning SnapTell commissions. SnapTell is owned by Amazon.com, who also released its own, free, Android mobile application, which allows users to take photos of an item on their phone, or scan a barcode, and then have Amazon search for the same product online, enabling immediate comparison with the physical-retail price. If the price is right, users can purchase the item securely from their mobile device.

Product reviews:

Members that post a review on Epinions are rewarded with so called Eroyalties credits, which are in turn are based on an ‘Income Share’ program. The Income Share pool is a portion of Epinions' income, and is split among all authors based on how often their reviews were used in making a decision (whether or not the reader actually made a purchase). Reviewers then can redeem their Eroyalties credits in US dollars.

UK based comparison shopping service Shopzilla teamed up with PowerReviews.com, a provider of customer reviews, to add product reviews to its product and price comparison service.

Bazaarvoice Bazaarvoice now works with UK retailers Argos and Halfords to feature customer reviews in paper catalogs (Argos alone reaches 17 million UK households with its catalogs).

Sears Holdings, the retailer, launched its own review sites: MySears.com and MyKmart.com.

Google’s Rich Snippets program allows the search engine to now display product rating, review count, and actual review text direct in Google search results.  

App --

Product ratings and reviews provider Bazaarvoice’s ShoutIT app enables reviewers to have their reviews effortlessly appear on their Facebook, Digg or Delicious pages as well, while Netflix has hooked up with Facebook to allow users' reviews to be shared on their profile pages.

Leisure:

KaBOOM! Playspace Finder is a user-generated online directory that lets anyone enter, search for and rate play spaces. Users can add photos and comments for each play space, as well as detailed descriptions including available playground equipment or amenities. Some 16,000 play areas across the USA and Canada are now listed on the Google Maps-based site.

Liftopia lets ski resorts sell discounted lift tickets online. Visitors choose dates and regions where they want to ski, and then scroll through a list of budget-priced lift tickets.

Travel:

Liligo, Expedia and Ctrip all provide fare alerts to help travelers track tickets and hotels that match their preferences and alerts them by email when prices drop, but Yapta will alert travel buyers when they are eligible for a refund from the airline. Since launching its initial airfare tracking service in May 2007, Yapta claims it has alerted over 600,000 travelers to more than USD 170 million in potential savings.

FareCompare.com offers historical prices for trips in 77,000 markets in the US and Canada. It seeks out fares and destinations at a billion combinations per query, while keeping track of 500 airlines serving more than 270,000 markets around the globe. Farecast offers airfare predictions from over 75 US departure cities to major domestic destinations, as well as for 200 international routes.

booking.com and TripAdvisor which boasts close to 25 million reviews and opinions on more than 490,000 hotels and attractions, while attracting 25 million+ monthly visitors, earlier this year signed syndication deals with VisitBritain.com, easyJet Holidays and its sister site Hotels.com.

-Hotels - TripKick tackles an equally important aspect of travel: hotel rooms. Coverage of each hotel includes detailed information on which rooms to request— which floors are better, and which to avoid.

Oyster Hotel Reviews employs 13 professional reporters who independently review hotels, paying for their own stays. Once a review of a particular hotel has been posted online, Oyster invites other travelers who've visited the same hotel to add their comments and reviews.

Raveable now provides a comprehensive view of hotels across the United States by aggregating and summarizing more than 35 million reviews of some 55,000 US hotels.

Homewoodsuites by Hilton Hotels offers guests the option of picking their hotel room. Guests can view hotel floor plans and book specific suite types based on their location, photographs and descriptions.

Farecast offers rate indicators for hotels in 30 destinations. Each of the 5,000 hotels on the site has its own "Hotel Rate Key" with a chart showing what they've charged in the past and what they will (probably) charge over the next 90 days. The site capitalizes on vast amounts of data that have been accumulated over the last decade. Farecast is part of Microsoft's Bing search engine.

- Airports - Sleeping In Airports has over 6,300 reviews of how airports around the world rate for sleeping in public areas.

- Seating - SeatGuru helps passengers select airplane seating, in-flight amenities and airline information based upon the airline and type of aircraft they’re flying. The site now features 25,000+ user comments, and offers more than 650 airline seat maps covering 90+ airlines. The service has now also been incorporated into its parent site, Expedia.

- Bus - BusJunction shows discount fares on a dozen of the big bus lines with routes between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City and Boston (as well as further west in hubs like Cleveland, Buffalo, Chicago).

Technology:

Fixya is a tech support site, where 15 million members help each other with product support questions on 1 million products. It has now added product recommendations to its website.

Printer.com provides information on a wide range of printers and cartridges; the site currently features more than 4,500 printers and over 1,950 cartridges.

Environmental impact:

GoodGuide is an information clearinghouse for green consumers, integrating hundreds of databases that evaluate the life cycles of over 70,000 products, such as food, personal care, cleaning products and toys. An iPhone application is available, too.

Project Label strives to produce people-powered social nutrition labels. Think food nutrition labels, but instead of showing the health impact, labels will show a company's social and environmental impact.

In July 2009, Walmart announced plans to develop a worldwide sustainable product index during a meeting with 1,500 of its suppliers, associates and sustainability leaders. The index will establish a single source of data for evaluating the sustainability of products. Eventually, the goal is to translate the product information in the index into a simple rating for consumers about the sustainability of a product.

Notes:

Comments @ expertprofessionaladvice