Thank you for visiting Royal Steele Ventures. I appreciate the opportunity to tell you about my website and blogging efforts.

Online since December of 2004, the online shopping website was christened with a new name after five years. As 2010 began, royalsteals.com was born. The site is still intended as a shoppers' tool to make shopping online even faster and easier, while helping consumers save money. The concept is simple enough, summed up in the banners — royalsteals.com: compare. click. save.

The site links consumers to sales from the .coms that they know and trust, including Amazon, Babies R Us, Buy.com, Modell's Sporting Goods, Overstock, the NBA Store, Radio Shack, Staples, The Baby Outlet, Toys R Us, Walmart, and more.*

Someone who goes online to buy their books, electronics, or pretty much anything, probably just goes to the same site all the time instead of looking to save by hunting around for a sale . . . even online. Or those who do shop around can spend hours on search engines and still miss the best prices. But people who use royalsteals.com as a starting point avoid wasting time, have the convenience of just going to one site, and get to see where the best deal is at a glance. Plus, consumers still have the security of buying through the larger sites.

Here's an example of how it works. If you're looking to buy some books, you can click "Book Store" on the menu. You'll find the best offers from throughout the internet instantly. If Walmart has a special on best-sellers, or Amazon has a "buy 4 get 1 free" offer, or Overstock has a special offer of free delivery on all orders . . . the list goes on . . . you'll see them ALL at once in the book store.

Let's say you clicked on a link for Buy.com. You're sent directly to the sale on the Buy.com site to take advantage of their offer. There's no extra cost, and you simply purchase your items as usual through the larger site. It's that easy.

Having started with a site featuring books, I decided to make things even easier by adding to the site. I've always had links to deals on more than books, CDs, and DVDs, but the various pages make it easier to find the deals you want. Looking for sports equipment? Click "Sporting Goods." Need that latest gadget, TV, or piece of computer hardware? Try "Electronics." You can shop for the kids, or check out "Home & Office" to buy new patio furniture.

Quick Search offers an added dimension to making your shopping easier. Let's say you're looking for a specific product that may not be featured or fall under any of the sales on the site. With Quick Search as your "home base," you can use the search boxes from Amazon, Borders, etc., to search their sites. I even put a "mini quick search" on the first page of royalsteals.com to make searching even easier.

For example, if you want to buy the Star Trek DVD, just type the title into any of our search boxes. Click "Search" (or "Go"), and you'll see what's available at that site. If you're not satisfied, you can just do the same search in another search box at Quick Search and get results from another store. Search results appear in a new window. If you're dissatisfied, just close the newly opened window to get right back to Quick Search.

I get questions such as, "Why wouldn't people just go to Amazon or the other sites, instead of royalsteals.com?" Hopefully, the answer is already clear, but if it's not I have another reason. Amazon isn't going to alert you when Buy.com (or any other site) has a better deal. I will! I simply have no preference as far as which site you buy from; instead, the purpose of my site is to put the best deals . . . or "steals" . . . in one spot for you to choose from.

In early 2010, I put the website on Twitter to make it even easier for our customers to save money. Follow royalsteals.com for alerts about short-term deals, fun products I find, news about the site, and more! We've also taken steps to vastly improve our Quick Search, which I believe will take the site to a whole new level. Details will be forthcoming soon.

While building a great tool for consumers remains the top priority, I have always wanted Royal Steele Ventures to be about more than a shopping website. When this website was launched, part of the "About Us" was the "ultimate goal" of helping to build a rec center geared toward people with disabilities. This was removed when the site was connected to a charity. I am reinstating the idea of building a rec center as part of "About Us" as a long-term goal. It is meant as a statement of the belief that people with disabilities, like myself, must take more direct control of their own advocacy.

My experience working for a non-profit, as well as efforts to build a relationship between a couple non-profits and this website, lead to this decision. I want to make sure my efforts go towards something that truly respects people with disabilities and does something positive. My experiences involved being treated as a poster-child and seeing so-called advocacy groups merely employing able-bodied people looking for funding to keep their jobs. That's not what I want to be part of.

While funding a rec center is a long-term goal, I will be looking for concrete things to do to support the disability community. In November of 2009, I launched PhillyACCESS, a user-driven source of information and opinions from the disability community of Philadelphia and surrounding areas. I will also continue to write about disability issues, especially on my own blog at Rob Q. Ink, encourage others to join the discussion, and seek out others writing about disability issues. Most of all, I will continue to work to make royalsteals.com a viable business owned by a person with a disability.

If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions, please feel free to contact me. Due to excessive spam, I no longer put a direct e-mail address here, but assure you that use of the link in the previous sentence will get your message directly to me. You may also feel free to "friend" me on Facebook as a means of communication.

Thank you, and don't forget royalsteals.com: compare. click. save.

Sincerely,
Rob J. Quinn

*From time to time the list of sites we are affiliated with will change for reasons beyond our control.