Latest news with #Editors'Choice
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Shopify
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing. Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform that's one of the best options for processing digital and physical sales online. It features several useful integrations, numerous free and premium themes, strong customer support, and AI tools for when you need to launch a site in a pinch. Although the many options may prove intimidating to novices, Shopify's excellent toolset elevates the service above a packed playfield to join Wix Stores as an Editors' Choice winner for e-commerce platforms. Shopify offers three standard packages: Basic, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. Basic ($29 per month) lets you sell products on social media or a website (either hosted on Shopify or another platform). This plan includes a website, blog, SSL certificate, and unlimited product listings, storage, and monthly data transfers. The Shopify plan ($79 per month) includes everything in the Basic plan, plus five staff accounts, reporting, international pricing, and abandoned cart recovery. Advanced Shopify ($299 per month) has 15 staff accounts, an advanced report builder, and automatic shipping rate calculation. Shopify accepts all major credit cards. Alternatively, Shopify features several plans for niche-use cases. Shopify Starter ($5 per month) lets you exclusively sell products through social media platforms. The Retail plan ($89 per month) focuses on selling items in person. Enterprise users can opt for the Plus plan ($2,300 per month) or the Enterprise Commerce tier, which has custom pricing. These tiers introduce wholesale and B2B options. Shopify has transaction fees that get cheaper in the more expensive tiers. Online card rates start at 2.9% plus 30 cents in the Basic tier, while the Advanced tier lowers that to 2.5% plus 30 cents. These are standard rates for the category. Rates are even lower for in-person and third-party payments. Shopify has a three-day trial that lets you set up a store and test transactions before committing to the software, but it lacks a free tier. That's par for the course in the business-centric website builder category. Shopify makes it easy to get a store up and running, though site-building novices may be intimidated by the many options. After I created an account with an email address and password, Shopify calculated my tax rate and currency based on my physical address. The service also used my store's name to create a customized URL. This way, you can kick the store's tires even if you haven't registered a domain name. The intuitive dashboard lets you view information about existing orders, product inventory, and customers. It's easy to add third-party e-commerce apps, including ones for recurring billing and loyalty programs, to enhance a store's capabilities. In addition, the theme store offers attractive, easily editable templates. The app marketplace is extensive, with plug-ins for external sales channels on social media, accounting tools, help desk tools, and even access to other sellers. Be aware that adding these features will make your monthly bill skyrocket. I entered a product's name, description, images, pricing information, and associated SKU and bar code on the Add a Product page. In addition, I set up Shopify to track inventory and save the total shipping weight information. This page is where you can specify variations, such as size, material, style, or color. In testing, Shopify automatically assigned prices and unique SKU codes for each variation. At the bottom of the page, Shopify displayed how the product page would look in search engine results; this helped us focus on search engine optimization (SEO). Shopify offers more than 200 free and premium themes in several categories, including Accessories, Art, Books, Clothing, Electronics, and Food. These clean, good-looking store themes rival those available from Wix Stores and other competing services. Once I was happy with a theme, I clicked Publish to apply it to the site Customizing a theme using the drag-and-drop editor and tweaking the HTML/CSS through a text editor is simple. Unlike Wix Stores, Shopify lets you easily switch themes. An online store isn't just inventory pages and order forms; you also want your shoppers to find the information they need via a blog or an About page. The service let me add Google Analytics code to pages for web metrics. In addition, you can capture customer data via user accounts (users can also access these to see their order status or enroll in a loyalty program). An email marketing tool is available for creating strategic customer campaigns. I had the choice of using an existing domain or registering a domain through Shopify and letting the company act as my domain registrar. Prices begin at $11 per year for uncommon domains (like .online), $14 to 20 per year for standard domains (like .net and .info), and then they balloon much higher for custom domains. Shopify provides thorough instructions for configuring your domain's DNS records to point to Shopify's servers. Like many other website builders, Shopify has a suite of AI tools to help you swiftly make a store with little effort. Shopify Magic's e-commerce-focused AI feature helps you create product descriptions, remove distracting background images, and streamline marketing emails. It also has site-building tips. If you're extremely pressed for time, you can design an entire store only using an AI prompt (though I'd argue that human-made designs are superior). The easiest shopping cart software is worthless if customers can't find and pay for products. Shopify offers a simple, seamless user experience for both sellers and customers. By default, Shopify uses its own payment gateway, Shopify Payments, and PayPal Express Checkout. However, if those aren't your cup of tea, Shopify integrates with 70 other payment gateways. Shopify also supports payment systems based on cryptocurrencies and other alternative currencies, such as BitPay, Coinbase, Dwolla, and GoCoin, as well as checks, money orders, and bank deposits. If you're uncomfortable with Shopify automatically charging customer credit cards or want to wait until everything has been shipped before charging the card, you can manually charge the card when you're ready. Shopify offers a helpful page explaining the difference between automatic and manual payment capture. Shopify lets you use the same platform for online and physical store sales. You can also put a Buy button on another website, which may be useful if you don't want to use Shopify's tool. Shopify offers 24/7 phone and chat-based support when emailing isn't enough. There is also an active discussion forum. Customers in Australia, New Zealand, North America, Singapore, and the UK have a designated regional phone number. I found it easy to get someone in chat even at 1 a.m., and the phone support representative delivered helpful answers about the different options available in each package.
Hamilton Spectator
19-05-2025
- Hamilton Spectator
Drawn from the dark: How shocking B.C. killings spurred by new novel written thousands of miles away
Canada doesn't often serve as a foreign writer's muse; indeed, even Canadian writers often look elsewhere for inspiration . Yet author Vijay Khurana, an Australian based of late in Berlin and London, was drawn — from thousands of kilometres away — to news of a bloody tragedy in British Columbia. That led to 'The Passenger Seat,' his debut novel published in March, about two young men on a car trip and the increasingly shocking, violent choices they make. The book has been hailed by critics and anointed as a New York Times Editors' Choice. Here, Khurana explains what attracted him to the real-life crimes of Canada's Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, and how his own past, surrealism and video cameras entered the mix. In the summer of 2016, I was on holiday in France and found myself by a river, watching a group of boys jump from a high rock into the water below. The river was shallow, alarmingly so. It reached no further than the knees of most of the other bathers. The rest of us looked on with a mixture of fascination and alarm as the local teenagers, shouting and laughing, jumped from a height of several metres. Even though the boys must have known that the river below the rock was deeper than elsewhere, it still seemed like utter stupidity. And yet I knew why they were doing it. They were doing it for the same reasons that I had forced myself to jump from similar heights when I was their age. Beyond the thrill of vertigo, there was surely also a subliminal urge to exhibit courage, a desire for status within a group, and a desire simply to be watched, especially by the girls who were sunning themselves on the opposite bank. That scene, and the thoughts that came with it, stayed with me, and over the next few years, I found myself writing a series of short stories about friendships between young men, some of which involved violence. I was interested in how men perform their masculinity for other men, and how that performance affects how they treat those around them, especially women. I had begun to think about exploring these ideas in a longer work, a novel, when I read about two teenagers who had killed three people while on a road trip in Canada, before killing themselves as well. Bryer Schmegelsky, left, and Kam McLeod are seen in this undated combination handout photo provided by the RCMP. The two youong British Columbia men led police on a cross-Canada manhunt in 2019 and died by what appears to be suicide by gunfire. I first learned about the 2019 British Columbia killings , in which two Canadian men not yet 20 years old killed three people in a week, some months after they had taken place. The case was both shocking and sadly unsurprising, because of the regularity with which young men commit such acts of violence. But it immediately burrowed into me, because it resonated so strongly with the questions I had been grappling with in my stories, especially when it came to the connections between male violence and male friendship. I wanted to know more about the types of young men who were capable of doing something like that, and what — if anything — they might have in common with the rest of us. I knew that I needed to do more than observe male violence from the outside, like the many media reports and opinion essays I saw online. The writer Émile Zola once compared writing fiction to the work of a scientist in a laboratory. Discussing two of his protagonists, he said that his task had been 'to plunge them together into a violent drama and then take scrupulous note of their sensations and their actions.' That was what I planned to do with my own characters, in order to explore what I saw as something dark and difficult about masculinity. The novel I began writing was informed by the real events I had read about, but also by the short stories I had written, by the fiction I was thinking about at the time (a wide range of stuff, from Ottessa Moshfegh to Dostoyevsky), and of course by my own experiences of male friendship. A transposed version of the scene I had observed by the river in France became the opening chapter. As I wrote, I found that my characters bore less and less resemblance to the Canadian perpetrators I had read about. And yet there were details from the real case that I felt were vital to the story I was telling. RCMP search an area near Gillam, Man. in this photo posted to their Twitter page on Tuesday, July 30, 2019, amid the hunt for Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky. One of these was the road trip itself, which is as much about the claustrophobia of the vehicle as it is about the freedom of the open road. That juxtaposition of freedom and confinement seemed key to how the relationship between my characters influenced the actions of each individual. The road trip is often associated with 'coming-of-age' stories, and certainly the most meaningful journeys I remember are those I took with a male friend in Australia in the 2000s, when I was around 20 years old. I remember the comfort of companionship and the heightened thrill of shared experience, but also the boredom and irritation that could well up over hours spent in a car with somebody. Thinking back to those road trips, it felt like I had been driving both towards and away from the adult life that lay beyond the horizon. And that too felt important to the story I was telling: the sense that if someone is not prepared to accept masculinity as it is offered to them, they might improvise their own, twisted version of it. Other details from the real-life events also became part of the fiction. One was the use of a video camera used by my characters to document and narrativize, an emblem of their obsession with being observed, as though they could only understand themselves when they imagined being viewed from the outside. Another was a juvenile attempt to disguise a car so as to evade the authorities, which brought to mind the logic of very young children who clumsily aim to conceal their missteps in the hope that they might go unnoticed. I had read about surrealist Roger Caillois's categories of play, one of which is make-believe, pretending to be something you are not. Details like the disguising of the car and the characters' interest in video games were a way to draw a connection between these harmless aspects of game-playing and a much darker kind of play, in which young men move through the world with an artificially elongated sense of the distance between actions and consequences, and frequently treat those around them as playthings. Vijay Khurana, author of 'The Passenger Seat.' Ultimately, 'The Passenger Seat' is not a retelling of any true events, nor does it come to any comforting conclusions about any of the recurring instances of male violence that happen in our society. What I hope it does do is explore some troubling aspects of masculinity in a way that couldn't have been done by sticking to facts, to what was observable from the outside. Fiction seldom answers its own questions, but that is also one of its strengths when it comes to engaging with the dark and the difficult. It is meditative rather than calculative, it embraces the ambiguity, complexity and contradiction of human consciousness, and it leaves the reader with more thinking to do. 'The Passenger Seat' by Vijay Khurana is published in Canada by Biblioasis.
Toronto Star
19-05-2025
- Toronto Star
Drawn from the dark: How shocking B.C. killings spurred by new novel written thousands of miles away
Canada doesn't often serve as a foreign writer's muse; indeed, even Canadian writers often look elsewhere for inspiration. Yet author Vijay Khurana, an Australian based of late in Berlin and London, was drawn — from thousands of kilometres away — to news of a bloody tragedy in British Columbia. That led to 'The Passenger Seat,' his debut novel published in March, about two young men on a car trip and the increasingly shocking, violent choices they make. The book has been hailed by critics and anointed as a New York Times Editors' Choice. Here, Khurana explains what attracted him to the real-life crimes of Canada's Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod, and how his own past, surrealism and video cameras entered the mix. In the summer of 2016, I was on holiday in France and found myself by a river, watching a group of boys jump from a high rock into the water below. The river was shallow, alarmingly so. It reached no further than the knees of most of the other bathers. The rest of us looked on with a mixture of fascination and alarm as the local teenagers, shouting and laughing, jumped from a height of several metres. Even though the boys must have known that the river below the rock was deeper than elsewhere, it still seemed like utter stupidity.
CNET
15-05-2025
- Business
- CNET
Drowning in Subscriptions? I Saved $400 in 15 Minutes With Rocket Money. Here's How You Can, Too
I used Rocket Money to identify subscriptions I was wasting my money on and had it cancel them for me. Getty Images/Rocket Money/Amy Kim/CNET Between tariff worries and economic uncertainty, you might be looking for ways to scale back your spending. If you're a victim of subscription creep like I was, you might be able to save hundreds by getting rid of unwanted subscriptions. In the latest CNET survey, we found that 61% of US adults are reconsidering their paid subscriptions due to the state of the economy. With the average American spending over $1,000 a year (which includes more than $200 on unused apps), it's likely that you can find significant savings by just paring down your subscriptions. I've tested many budgeting apps, and Rocket Money stood out to me for many reasons, but its ability to identify and cancel unwanted subscriptions for you was the most interesting to me. I tested it last year to see how much I could save, and fifteen minutes later, I was able to add an extra cushion into my budget. Here's how it works. Rocket Money Not only can it help you rein in your spending, but Rocket Money can also help you find and cancel unwanted subscriptions. Details CNET editors choice winner for best budgeting app See at Rocket Money Rocket Money saved me more than $400 in 15 minutes Rocket Money is a budgeting app that monitors your income and expenses, helps you set savings goals and tracks your subscriptions in one place, whether you use the free or paid version. It's also my pick for the best Mint replacement app and recently won CNET's Editors' Choice award. Rocket Money's paid version, which costs $6 to $12 a month, can also find and cancel some subscriptions for you. You can try this service by navigating to the Recurring tab on the app menu. You'll see subscriptions coming due in the next seven days, ones coming due later and how much you spend on these subscriptions in a year. The first thing I noticed was that my subscription to HGTV Magazine, which costs $50 for a year, was up for renewal in four days. Given the enormous pile of back issues I've accumulated but not yet read, canceling this subscription was a no-brainer. Rocket Money gave me two options: The app could cancel this subscription for me or I could call the number they provided to cancel it myself. I chose to have them do it for me. The app asked for some basic information, including my name, billing address and the reason I wanted to cancel, then confirmed that it was working on it. The process was fairly painless but I have one complaint. I didn't know until after I'd submitted my cancellation request that it could take two to seven days for Rocket Money to complete the cancellation -- I found out from the pop-up confirmation I received after submitting. Fortunately, I was able to respond quickly to the email confirmation Rocket sent me and I received a response within minutes from a customer support rep who said they'd fast-track my cancellation. The next business day, my subscription was canceled. I was hooked. What else was I spending money on without realizing it? I reviewed my other subscriptions and identified a handful I no longer needed: HP Instant Ink: $4.34 per month (for a printer I don't even have anymore) $4.34 per month (for a printer I don't even have anymore) New York Times Digital: $4 per month (the number of free articles I get is usually enough for me) $4 per month (the number of free articles I get is usually enough for me) Wall Street Journal: $4 per month (same as above) $4 per month (same as above) Pandora: $10 per month (a recent switch to Amazon Prime Unlimited made this service unnecessary) $10 per month (a recent switch to Amazon Prime Unlimited made this service unnecessary) Spotify: $10 per month (same as above) I'll admit I barely noticed these small amounts when they hit my bank account each month. I'd grouped them under "Miscellaneous" in my budget and never really thought about them because that category tended to stay within my spending goals. But viewing them all grouped together, it was easy to see how quickly they could drain my budget. By canceling these subscriptions, I saved myself $32.32 per month going forward, for a total annual savings of $387.84. Add that to the savings on my HGTV Magazine subscription and that's an extra $437.81 in my pocket annually. What's nice is that, even though I only installed the app a few months ago, Rocket Money pulled in subscriptions from years past, allowing me to catch ones that were coming due even though I hadn't paid for them since installing the app. In total, reviewing my subscriptions and having Rocket Money cancel six of them took me about 15 minutes. Not bad to get more than $400 in savings. Rocket Money's free version can still help you Rocket Money's free version only shows subscriptions -- it won't cancel them for you. To access the cancellation service, you'll need the paid version, which costs $6 to $12 per month. You choose your amount and you'll enjoy the same features regardless of the amount. Because I already have Rocket Premium, this wasn't an issue for me. But if you don't want to pay extra for the convenience of having Rocket cancel your subscriptions for you, you could just as easily use the free version to identify your subscriptions and then cancel them yourself. You can also try using Rocket's bill negotiation service, which can help lower your monthly costs, but you'll pay 30% to 60% of your first year's savings if it's able to save you money. How to save on subscriptions without Rocket Money I used Rocket Money to trim my subscription costs because it's the budgeting app I regularly use anyway. I'd rather save a few minutes, especially if it doesn't cost me anything extra. But of course you can cancel your subscriptions yourself by calling a customer service line or logging into your online account. These tips can also help you maximize your savings: Note your renewal dates. Whenever you sign up for a new service, note when it's due to renew. Then, set a reminder on your calendar for the week before so you can decide if it's worth renewing and cancel if not. If you sign up for a free trial, use a virtual card to make canceling a breeze. Review your budget regularly. Going over your budget weekly can help you spot subscription charges that have already hit your account and cancel them before they cost you more. But don't just take a cursory glance -- look at each transaction, even the minor ones. I was keeping a general eye on my spending but I wasn't always doing it line by line to evaluate if each expense was truly worth it. Rotate your streaming services. You can only watch so much content in a month. One of the easiest ways I've found to keep my subscription costs down is to only subscribe to one streaming service at a time. For example, when one of the shows I love dropped its new season on HBO's Max, I canceled my Netflix subscription and signed up for a month of Max. I watched everything that interested me on Max before the month was up, then I canceled it and moved on to another service. Take advantage of complimentary subscriptions. Some subscriptions give you free access to other services. For instance, Walmart Plus members get a free Paramount Plus subscription. Amazon Prime membership comes with perks like a free Amazon Music subscription and a free year of Grubhub Plus. Take a look at your existing subscriptions to see if they offer any free perks you can take advantage of. Visit your local library. Many library systems offer free access to newspapers, magazines and movies and TV series on DVD. Check out your local library to see what you can enjoy free.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Mic Check/Price Check: 38% Off the HyperX QuadCast S USB Microphone
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing. Snag a solid $60 off, which translates to a 38% discount, on one of the most streamer-focused out there. The HyperX QuadCast S doesn't just capture your voice with impressive detail but also lights up your setup with customizable RGB effects and comes with everything you need, including a built-in pop filter and shock mount, right out of the box. Whether you're recording your next podcast episode, chatting on Twitch, or running a virtual interview, this mic will get the job done. You get four polar patterns, including cardioid, stereo, omnidirectional, and bidirectional, which adapt easily to your needs, whether you are doing solo streams, group chats, or two-person recordings. It's plug-and-play for most setups, and you can monitor your sound in real time through the headphone jack. As our expert notes, 'The QuadCast S sounds excellent for spoken words,' which is exactly what you want when your voice is front and center. That's why it earned an 'Excellent' rating and the Editors' Choice award in our 2020 . What sets it apart is the blend of form and function. The dynamic RGB lighting adds style while the tap-to-mute top cap and onboard gain dial make adjustments intuitive. Its 48kHz/16-bit recording with three internal condensers ensures your voice comes through crisp and clean, while the onboard controls and shock mount help cut distractions and vibrations. You can even tweak lighting and monitor levels using the HyperX Ngenuity app for that personalized touch. If you're ready to upgrade from a headset mic and sound like a pro with minimal fuss, this is the mic to grab. More Microphone Deals on More Microphone Deals on More Microphone Deals on
