[Stephan Whelan]

Angus,

Good points (as always!)

Online shopping is always a touch and go thing - being on the 'net from the (very) distant days of 1990/1, and generally being a first adopter, I find online purchasing second nature - but am not so short sighted as to see that a lot of people do not see online buying the same way as me.

As I said before, we are in the formative stages of deciding if it is something our visitors want - we're not even close to implementing yet (or if we indeed do).

The store i'd invisage is one that carries all major brands of fins, masks, and suits. I also have good working relationships with people such as Seven Tenths, publisher of "The Blue", and other "interesting" items. I'd want to make sure that we covered a wide series of products and be competively priced.

As far as endorsements go, I have a policy - any pages that we directly sell products on (not affiliate deals where we get a tiny percentage that usually isn't even worth our while) will not carry advertisments, so for example this store would not carry any ad's of any kind.

This way the eCommerce elements of the site and the "magazine" orientated parts are not dicatating to one another. This is of course easier said than done, but I can tell you now that I have turned down potential advertisers (and some serious $$$) before because they wanted the site to endorse their product above another. I am very strict on this policy - I originally founded this site (and all the current staff follow the same policy) of being independent of governing organisations and advertisers. I have no problem taking money from advertisers and endorsing their product if it is extremely good (e.g. The Blue) but we cannot be "bought".

Anyway, i'll get down off my soap-box now ;-)