First, we have a confession to make. Before we started looking at the equipment category, we had about 20 links to various chess shopping sites and were sure that we had only scratched the surface. Now we have almost 60 links and we still believe that we have only scratched the surface!

One reason we had never expanded our list is that we weren't sure how to describe the sites. We have personal experience with only a very small number. Even with those we aren't comfortable giving a general opinion when we have bought only a small selection of available items.

Many online shopping stores tend to look similar. They have attractive photos of their products which are described as the highest quality at the lowest price. Before we did this exercise, our descriptions were filled with our own phrases like, 'big selection of boards, pieces, etc.', or 'wide selection of chess related materials', or 'comprehensive and reliable with competitive prices'. That's not very helpful, is it? We decided to describe all stores using the following technique.

• Name of the business

  We use the web address (the URL) to identify each online store. Where the store has another prominent name, we mention that also.
  
  

• Description of the business

  Here we decided that the most important piece of information is the geographical location of the store. Online stores are located throughout the world and their customers are also located everywhere. We feel certain that, given a choice, most people are more confident buying from a source located nearby.

  For a brief description of the business, we decided to copy or paraphrase the description of the store that we found on the home page. Since this is missing for a surprising number of online stores, our second source for description was the meta description from the source of the home page. This looks something like:

  META NAME="description" CONTENT="This page is about..."

  We were confident that all online stores would have this basic page header tag. Even though the text ('This page is about...') is not displayed by web browser software, it is used by many search engines to describe the content of a page returned as the result of a search.

  We were very surprised to find that many stores have ignored this key piece of data for describing their home pages. It is often missing, uninformative, or filled with keywords that are more useful for web spiders than for human beings. In those cases where we were missing a suitable description of a store on the home page, we took it from an 'About Us' page.
  
  

Having almost 60 links on a single topic is still too many, but how can we further classify these links? We thought of separating them into Retailers, Wholesalers, and Manufacturers, but here the lines are even more blurred than in our Equipment, Books, & Software categories. We'll save this problem for another time.

One more thing worth mentioning : we talked to a number of people -- not chess players and not necessarily web users -- about shopping on the web. We learned a lot about why some people shop on the web and some don't. Since one of the common concerns is safe shopping, we added a number of links to our higher level Products & Shopping category. These links, which have nothing to do with chess, point to sites which offer tips on how to shop safely.

Our next article on external links will continue with Products & Shopping. See you then! [All articles in this series can be found under Resource Reviews (see the link box again).]