Welcome to Shopping Essentials, created to guide and inform your virtual shopping experience?

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Welcome to Shopping Essentials, now on Canoe. Our team aims to provide Canadians with the latest and greatest in online shopping, lifestyle and entertainment spaces. Whether connecting with an expert, testing out a product’s efficacy or digging deep into secondary research, we provide Canadian readers with honest, accurate, unbiased and unsponsored information.?

It can be difficult to trust online reviews that live on brand websites or Amazon product pages. There’s a lot of market incentivization as well as bot traffic that skew reviews. Insert us —? an editorial team on a mission to combat this, connecting Canadians with incredible products and experiences through first-hand (rigorous) testing and in-depth research.

There’s a gap in the Canadian e-commerce space, and our mission is to fill that gap. When Googling “best mattress,” we can learn all about beds that don’t ship to Canada (or cost way too much to ship here). Though e-commerce makes buying goods from international retailers more convenient, it’s not a seamless experience. Our goal is to make your online journey as smooth and effortless as possible. Plus, we like to support Canadians. You’ll only find products available in Canada, ideally purchased using CAD and Canadian-made and manufactured whenever possible.

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We want to do the product research for you, share new, exciting and innovative items and offer curated gift ideas. Below are just a few examples you can expect from us — but we’d love to hear from you. What product should we review next? Which expert would you like to hear from to understand which products they recommend and for what?

Product features and reviews: It can get cold in Canada — it’s important to stay protected. We bundle up and head outdoors to see which winter coat can support your cold-month goals, featuring jacket reviews and roundups of the top contenders. We review all sorts of products across many categories including home, wellness, fashion, tech, travel and more.

Gift guides: Going to a baby shower? Is it your significant other’s birthday? Are you sick of chocolate for Valentine’s Day? We have a gift guide for that. Our gift guides are constantly updated to ensure that your giftee feels appreciated and understood. For example, check out our top gift recommendations from the year and the hottest toys of the season. Check out all of our gift guides, including editor favourites every month.

Entertainment: From what’s streaming this month to the latest from the Toronto International Film Festival, we cover the latest in film, TV and more. Head to our entertainment section if you’re looking for what movie to watch or a celebrity interview.

Travel: Sure, we cover where to go, but we also recommend what to bring and even pack in. Shopping Essentials travel guide focuses on destinations and products to support your travel — we even share travel hacks to save on trips.

Deals: We cover the deal holidays in a big way. From Prime Days to Black Friday and Boxing Day, we share the best deals available. What’s the difference among all the deal holidays? We got to the bottom of it. Check out the latest in savings on our deals page.

More: We cover so much more and do so to support our readers. Our goal is to provide our readers with valuable content that supports their goals — your goals. To ensure we’re keeping up with your interests, we recommend signing up for our newsletter and sending in any of your thoughts, questions or suggestions at shoppingessentials@postmedia.com.