America’s Future Blog

America’s Future was proud to release our very first newsletter on Tuesday, April 22, 2008.   Customers can now choose to be updated regularly on new products, publishers and sales by adding their email addresses to the subscribe box on our home page, or by clicking subscribe when creating an account. 

We will also be adding RSS feeds to our website so that customers can get instant feedback on hot new products, limited time specials, and clearance merchandise immediately.  These new capabilities will give our customers the opportunity to stretch their education budgets even further, as they will be able to act quickly on hot items, or hard-to-get titles. 

 America’s Future is excited to be able to add these two new features to our business, and will continue to upgrade our customer experience.  We want to make America’s Future your first choice in homeschool curriculum and educational products!

We are once again facing a USPS postal increase as of May 12, 2008.  I was unaware that when negotiating the increase of May 2007, the USPS will now have the ability to increase rates each and every year, which means like everything else, we will see inflation affecting shipping costs across the board. 

America’s Future will have to eventually raise our shipping costs as well, due to the fact that all three of the shippers we work with have raised their prices.  As much as we try to absorb increases, it would be impossible for us to keep the business afloat if we ignored the continued increases. 

Unfortunately, even education will see inflation affecting prices for millions of families across the world.  America’s Future will continue to keep shipping as low as possible, and in many cases, work with customers individually on large or heavy orders to provide the best service for the most economical price.  It never hurts to ask us in advance what options there may be, and it could even help you stretch your budget even further.

Last weekend our hosting company moved our site to a new server, with promises that our site will now be running faster and more smoothly than ever.  We are impressed with the speed in which our website was back up - less than 48 hours from start to finish.  Pretty good rate for a company that was moving thousands of accounts over a weekend!

We are continuing to add product to the catalog, encompassing product from a wide variety of publishers and manufacturers.  America’s Future has established accounts with three new distributors in the last few months, which will expand our resources to include hundreds of new publishers from those three alone. 

New server and more publishers mean that you will find what you need faster than ever!

In just a few short days, America’s Future will be adding hundreds of new products from our newest publisher, American Educational Products.  This will allow us to offer you many new and exciting products for hands-on learning, including the very popular Teaching Tanks.

We have been typing as fast as possible in order to get their product line added to our catalog, and you will start to see the items trickling in starting tomorrow morning.  First in line, Teaching Tanks, one of the most popular science aids on the homeschool market! 

You will also be glad to see Clever Catch, Tumble and Teach, Morphun, Bingo Bus, Pattern Blocks, Microslide Viewers and Lesson Plans, Gonge, Yellowtail, and so much more!  Science kits - Biology, Earth, Physical, Astronomy, Anatomy, Physics….. science, science, and more science!  Did I mention outdoor games?  Indoor games?  Family games?  Learning games?  I think you get the idea!

Come visit us and take a look at what’s new at America’s Future.  I’m sure you’ll find something you like!

In the interest of improving our website, America’s Future is currently working with programmers on making dozens of upgrades.  While not everything we are adding will be visible to customers, you can be sure it will benefit everyone in the long term.

Just a couple of new options customers will have is a printable catalog page, that can be sorted by product title, model number or price.  This module is currently available, but modifications are in process to make it more user friendly, and provide more information for your use.   We have also added a new search function that will improve search capabilities over time, as we will be able to implement options that take into consideration common spelling errors and punctuation, so your search will be as accurate as we can make it.

We are also testing our our updates to the shipping modules, which will allow customers to choose the Media Mail option for orders consisting of books, cds, dvds and charts.  Another benefit will be new programming that will allow us to designate free shipping on specific products, such as product bundles or software.  Third, we have our programmer working on the free shipping over $150 that has been sporadic at best over the last few months.  These recent updates should make your shopping experience stress free, and hopefully help stretch your education budget when shopping for media products only.

Our new ‘Contact Us’ page will allow you to leave a more detailed email, and can automatically insert your name and email address if you are logged in, as well as allowing you to specify an order number and choose from a variety of drop down menu choices to make your email stand out.  You should always feel free to email us at any time, but this new function will help us forward your concern to the best person for the job.

Last, but not least, you will soon be able to choose to call in your credit card if you are not comfortable leaving payment details online.  When processing your payment, you will just need to click the radio button for will call, and the order will be put on hold until your payment details have been processed.  This option will be available by the end of the week. 

There are many other new capabilities being added such as new newsletters, increased search speed, suggested matching products, new information pages, and customer review options, just to name a few.  You can be sure that your shopping experience with America’s Future will be a pleasant one!