New Payment Option for Retail and Custom Micro-Batch Cosmeceuticals

When we can find a way to do it, we always like to support our shoppers’ personal preferences. That’s very much what www.the-formulator.com is all about: if you like your skincare to have a certain aroma, to use a specific oil or vitamin, or to include your favorite active ingredients, we’re happy to listen to your description of the skincare of your dreams, and even happier to manufacture it for you. Maybe that particular combination is not what anyone else would choose, but with The Formulator from Elsom Research your unique preferences are not a problem.

Beyond the skincare and cosmeceuticals we make, there is also room for choice and preference in the process of placing and paying for an order. For example, we have some shoppers who would rather mail us a check than use a credit card; that’s always been fine with us, and it still is.

Most of our shoppers choose to pay online by credit card; since 2007, the method we have offered for this has been Google Checkout, which securely processes MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express payments. Some shoppers, though, have asked for a way to pay us by credit card without relying on Google’s services; we are now happy to provide that option through the services of Paymate, an Australia-based company which securely processes MasterCard, Visa, and Discover payments in 57 countries.

This is an additional option: you are still welcome to pay online via Google Checkout or to pay offline by mailing us a check or money order.

Our Shopping Help page includes illustrated explanations of the checkout process, which is the same for our retail cosmeceuticals and our custom micro-batch formulations. In general, after you have placed the items you wish to purchase in your shopping cart, look at the lower right of the shopping cart page and choose one of the checkout options:

click to pay online through Google Checkout, which can process MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express.

click  to choose from two sub-options:

• pay online through Paymate, which can process MasterCard, Visa, and Discover
• pay offline by mailing us a check or money order.

This also gives us two ways, through Google Checkout or through Paymate, of sending an online invoice for large orders, non-retail items, and special processing. It’s always good to have choices!

We hope this new payment method will be convenient for many shoppers; in our testing, it has been very easy and fast to use, but of course the best test is for shoppers to try it. Please contact us with your questions, comments and feedback about this or any aspect of Elsom Research products and projects.

Searching within Elsom Research

Elsom Research manages a BUNCH of websites! The ones we think you might be interested in in are listed on the right side of the main blog page, under the heading “Blogroll“. Most of our sites have internal search tools (see the “Search” button on the upper right of the main blog page), so you can easily search an entire site for a word or phrase you hope appears somewhere within the site. What hasn’t been so easy is to search multiple sites: maybe you read something in a forum posting, or maybe it was a Journal of Topical Formulations article, or maybe it was announced in this weblog or explained on a product information page at the main Elsom Research site, and all you know is that it’s out there somewhere and you’d like to see it again.

To make it easier to find information without searching each site separately, we have used Google Custom Search to configure an Elsom Research Search Engine. We’ve placed a Google Gadget giving access to our custom search engine on several pages already: it’s available at the main Elsom Research FAQ, on our Shopping Help page, in the header of every page in our cosmeceuticals shop, and here:

The Latest News from Elsom Research

Beginning September 23, 2007, this is the news and announcements page (web log) for Elsom Research products and projects. Only brief announcements will be posted here; longer essays and presentations will continue to be provided in the Journal of Topical Formulations, and interactive discussion is still available through the Topical Formulations Forum.