In today’s product Spotlight, we’re featuring a great picture frame from Nations Photo Lab.

Nations Photo Lab, or NPL to their devoted customer base, was started in 2005 and has grown to be one of the largest professional labs in the U.S. Offering innovative, top quality photo and home decor products, NPL has built a reputation for professional quality products at amateur prices, backed by a stellar customer service team. They sell a wide variety of photo and home decor products.

NPL saw ShopLocket as a great way to drive sales for their business. They viewed ShopLocket customers as “savvy an discerning”, a quality that most retailers are looking for in customers.

NPL has been primarily marketing their product through their Facebook fan base, which has been very successful for them. They also plan on sending out ShopLocket deals as part of an email campaign.

When asked what they liked about ShopLocket, they said that they like “…how seamless the ShopLocket interface is to navigate and complete a sale. The simplicity of the concept also entices customers to complete the purchase process.”

The frame is currently 37% off and is part of our promotion where one lucky buyer will win an iPod Touch!

Buy a product featured on the ShopLocket Pinterest page in the next 24hrs and be entered to win an iPod touch!

What do you need to do to enter? It’s simple, just purchase any product off of our Pinterest page within the next 24 hours. One buyer will win an 8GB iPod Touch! There is no limit to the number of entries.

Contest ends Saturday May 19, 2012 at 11am EST.

Get shopping!

— The ShopLocket Team

Around the world, some 75 million children have no opportunity to attend primary school. It’s a haunting number. Even one child not being able to attend primary school is too many, but when more people than the population of the United Kingdom aren’t able to get an education, you know it’s a major problem.

This is the problem that Daphne Kim Nguyen, Bryan Hutchinson and Leo Thom knew they had to do something about, so they started the organization Thought Threads, to be able to subsidize the cost of education for children in developing nations. Subsidizing the cost of school for 75 million children around the world with an organization of four people is a daunting task, but the team is up for the challenge. Beyond that, Thought Threads is hoping to also enlighten (pun-intended by them) others about the education inequality that faces the world. Living in a first-world nation, we take for granted the fact that not everyone has the chance to attend primary school.

Thought Threads tried different ecommerce solutions, but found that ShopLocket was the best fit with their mission. Founder Calvin Chan said, ”Shoplocket is a perfect option for those who are looking to start an e-commerce store but lack the budget for it.  It is extremely easy to use.  We are able to setup our widget in less than 10 minutes!”

Thought Threads collaborated with California based independent clothing company The Imaginary Zebra to make the shirt. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of the shirt will be going toward the organization. Donations will be used to cover school tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, notebooks, and stationary. ShopLocket is waiving our normal selling fees to ensure that the money you’re donating goes directly to the people that need it the most.

To help support Thought Threads, you can purchase a shirt on their website, on their product page or even on this post. You can also get the word out by sharing on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest or even embedding their shirts right on your own website. Simply click on the “Embed” button and put the code on your own site or blog. For video tutorials on how to do this, visit our Youtube Channel.

On our blog, we’re going to be doing weekly spotlights of products sold on Shoplocket. Today’s product spotlight is of a Black/White Zebra Dress by Lois Eastlund of New York City. Lois, born in New Jersey, studied fashion at FIT. She now resides in NYC and has a store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Lois sells some merchandise on her website, but ShopLocket allows her to get a more social reach. Lois has had work featured in Seventeen Magazine, Sassy, Women’s Wear Daily, The Village Voice, New York Magazine, Sportswear International, Swing Magazine, Children’s Business, ElleGirl Magazine, and The New York Times.

Her product that we’re featuring is a Zebra Diagonal Dress

Lois’ store can be found at 153 Ludlow St. in New York City.

We’re extremely excited to announce support for Stripe payments. Starting today, sellers can connect their Stripe accounts to ShopLocket, giving buyers an alternative to PayPal. Its as easy as connecting your Facebook account, but for merchant accounts.

Our goal at ShopLocket is to help our customers sell anything from anywhere in minutes. That means anything we can do to make either the buying or selling experience better or easier, we’ll do. Stripe is a great partner for us for many reasons, particularly because of the innovations they are making to take away the pains around setting up a merchant account. We couldn’t be happier to be working with the Stripe team on this integration.

Stripe’s dedicated following has dubbed them the easiest way to start accepting payments online. This makes Stripe an excellent partner, given our focus on removing barriers in the online commerce space. Thanks to this integration, even users who have never sold a product or made an online purchase can begin selling and accepting payments instantly. A simple authorization is required for those with existing merchant accounts, similar to connecting your Facebook account to a third party site. For those wishing to create an account, ShopLocket and Stripe will walk you through a simple step-by-step process.

In addition to ShopLocket’s one time $2 publishing fee and 2.5% transaction fee, Stripe only charges a 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee and only when a product is sold. That means no setup fees or listing fees. At this time, Stripe is available exclusively to US customers.

ShopLocket has been using Stripe to power its own invoicing system. We’ve had an incredible experience with Stripe both as a customer and a partner.  We’re very excited to make the Stripe experience available to a new class of merchants through this integration.