Down With Electronic Purchasing Frustration Word Count: 708 Summary: Ever set out to buy a new high-tech product, only to find yourself confused, frustrated, and lost in a sea of technology? You’re certainly not the only one. After all, today’s marketplace is flooded with high-tech products, each claiming to be the newest, the fastest, or the best, and tech companies hardly cater to the average person when they are writing up technical specifications for their products. Yet now buying a great gadget doesn’t have to be a traumatic experience, t... Keywords: mps players, pda, techselector, electronics, technology Article Body: Ever set out to buy a new high-tech product, only to find yourself confused, frustrated, and lost in a sea of technology? You’re certainly not the only one. After all, today’s marketplace is flooded with high-tech products, each claiming to be the newest, the fastest, or the best, and tech companies hardly cater to the average person when they are writing up technical specifications for their products. Yet now buying a great gadget doesn’t have to be a traumatic experience, thanks to a new website: www.techselector.com. Designed to help consumers research, select, and purchase new high-tech products, the site makes technology accessible to everyone, whether you’re already tech-savvy or you’re a newcomer to the Internet. Techselector.com’s co-founders understand first-hand how frustrating finding new tech-products can be. In fact, the site was inspired by one co-founder’s own disastrous shopping experience. In 2004, Mark Ensio decided to buy himself a personal digital assistant (PDA). In his search, he visited numerous electronics stores, surfed the web for hours, and viewed dozens of similar products. He listened to countless sales pitches and struggled to sort through the different product specifications and decipher the technical jargon. After several frustrating weeks, Mark felt so overwhelmed that he abandoned his search without ever buying a PDA: “I was totally bewildered. You know, I’ve run successful companies for the last thirty years, so buying a PDA shouldn’t have been too difficult. But all the PDAs looked pretty much the same to me and everybody gave me a different story. I had no idea how to pick the right one. It was unbelievably frustrating, and just not worth the hassle.” After his disastrous PDA shopping experience, Mark did some research and discovered that he wasn’t the only one who found shopping for high-tech products difficult. Inspired by his findings, he decided to do something to help others who, like him, feel lost in the sea of technology. Together with three more tech-savvy partners, he founded Custom Techknowledgy LLC, a company dedicated to making shopping for high-tech products less frustrating and more fun. For the next few years, the company worked to develop an informative, user-friendly website which would quickly and easily help even the least tech-savvy consumers find products to fit their needs. The result is Techselector.com. Techselector.com offers a different kind of shopping experience. The website has been developed with the needs of the consumer in mind, and as a result its design and content ensure that those who visit the site are able to find a great product without the stress and frustration that often accompanies shopping for technology. Clean, simple, and user-friendly, the website clears up much of the mystery surrounding high-tech products. Visitors are guided through the product selection process, important technical terms and phrases are defined using images and everyday language, and biases and sale pitches are eliminated. The site is centered on the TechSelector, a product-selection system designed to quickly sort through the thousands of available products to find the best ones for each individual consumer. Visitors to the site need only choose the category of products they’re interested in, and then complete a short series of simple multiple choice questions designed to help focus the search and get the visitor thinking about the important features of each product. Once the questionnaire is completed, the TechSelector can take over. Using the answers as a guide, the TechSelector will sort through the thousands of available products and determine which ones best fit each consumer’s criteria. Within a few seconds, a Product Report, which details the products selected by the TechSelector, is generated. Using the Product Report, consumers can quickly compare key features, view detailed specifications, see the prices offered by major retailers, and even purchase their chosen product online. Mark hopes that Techselector.com will help those who, like him, are confused and frustrated with other online shopping sites and traditional shopping methods: “I’m really excited about the site, because I think it will save a lot of other people from experiencing what I went through. Finding the right product can be confusing—but that shouldn’t stop anyone from finding a great new gadget.”