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eRegimens Affiliates and Affiliate Reviews
Affiliates of eRegimens include the following vendors who were chosen for their selection, pricing, and reliability. The most reliable large online supplement vendors with the lowest prices, best ordering process, good customer service, and fastest shipping tend to be Vitacost, iHerb, HerbsPro, and HerbsMD. Regarding shipping times, note that the location of the business plays a large role in how long it takes to receive orders. iHerb, for example, is located in Washington state so offers faster delivery to the west coast while Vitacost is based in Florida so offers faster delivery to the east coast.
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iHerb has excellent prices, selection, and service. They carry an excellent selection of most of the popular brands including Now Foods, Twinlab, Enzymatic Therapy, Natural Factors, Garden of Life, Jarrow, Nutribiotic, Natrol, Rainbow Light, and Planetary Formulas as well as a great many minor brands.  They have among the best prices and widest  selection on the Now Foods as well as Eclectic Institute lines. Like Vitacost (see below), they do not carry the Solaray or Solgar brands (for these products, see Herbs Wholesale, HerbsMD, or VitaminShoppe below). Pricing is similar to Vitacost with deep discounts on most lines. Full disclosure of most product ingredients is provided. The website design is simple, clean, and their search engine is excellent. A limited number of products can be shown on one page without the ability to display a large number at one time. Given their excellent selection and pricing, with some of the best pricing online, especially for the Now line, this can be easily overlooked. iHerb also features a Natural Library with information on alternative therapies, herbs, and supplements, as well as the German Commission E Monographs. |
 Vitacost is another of the best all-around supplement sites on the net. Prices and selection are excellent. They carry the complete lines of many brands such as Garden of Life, Enzymatic Therapy, and Planetary Formulas at discount up to 40% or more, which is among the best pricing available. They also carry most Allergy Research products. Vitacost provides a well designed website which is easy  to shop with the ability to display a great number (up to 100) of the products of a given brand or type on one page, a feature more website designers should consider. They provide complete descriptions and content of most products, so it is a great site for research. The only downside to their website is it tends to get busy and, worst of all, there is sometimes a popup asking if you want to sign up for a newsletter, obscuring one's view of the page. Vitacost does not carry products by Now Foods or Solaray, but their discounted (50%+) house line of high potency vitamins and other supplements by Nutraceutical Sciences Institute (NSI) is excellent. Vitacost is the best supplement website for international shoppers since they guarantee pricing, converted into local currency, with no hidden charges or additional fees to the price quote (except perhaps customs fees). Shipping is fast with in-stock items and, unlike almost every other vendor, will tell you when items are not in stock so you have the option of deleting them to speed shipping, having the order ship separately, or waiting until they are in stock before the order ships.
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 HerbTrader and Starwest Botanicals both offer an extensive selection of bulk herbs as well as essential oils and other health products.  HerbTrader mostly carries the Frontier line of botanicals and Starwest offers their own famous line - Starwest Botanicals. Both offer bulk herbs in pound sizes in vacuum packed nitrogen flushed double layer bags and both are highly regarded as are their herb extracts. Shop both to see which has the best price on the desired product. Starwest's website is a little easier to navigate perhaps since they don't have quite the breadth of products that HerbTrader offers. Both sell essential oils - HerbTrader carries Aura Cacia and Frontier essential oils and Starwest has their own line. Both website are annoying in that listing all the herbs, essential oils, spices, extracts, etc, they don't have an alphabetical index, so it is easier to do direct searches than to browse, HerbTrader's website is harder to read since it has gray instead of black text. Note that Kalyx, reviewed below, sells Starwest Botanicals bulk herbs for less cost than Starwest themselves, but Starwest ships directly while Kalyx drop ships, so is typically slower. Although |
Essential Wholesale sells essential oils as well as a large number of other health care products including their specialty cosmetic bases, bulk ingredients, shampoos, and other body care items.  Note that Starwest Botanicals and HerbTrader have larger selections of essential oils than does Essential Wholesale but EW offers much better prices plus sells wholesale size essential oils, up to 25 pounds. Essential Wholesale's website is hard to navigate since to purchase products you start with a little "pull across" menu selector in the left margin and it is difficult to pull across two levels to get to the correct selection without "falling off" the menu, and you cannot click a selection to "hold" the menu as you might think, but once you get adept at it it does make it easier to access other sections of the website from any other page of the site. Note that you start with the "Shop Online" selector to get to the product descriptions and pricing. |
 HerbsPro, also known as Universal Herbs, is another Mega Online Supplement Store, like Vitacost and iHerb. HerbsPro carries, in general, the same lines as iHerb including the heavily discounted Now, Jarrow, and Twinlab brands, but like iHerb, does not carry Solaray. They do offer premium brands like Enzymatic Therapy, Eclectic Institute, Herb Pharm, and many others. HerbsPro usually has complete product ingredients listings, but not in a convenient, easy to read tablular form like iHerb and Vitacost.  Prices are usually slightly higher than iHerb. HerbsPro uses squashed jpgs to display product pictures in their search results and the pictures on the product pages are tiny. HerbsPro has flat shipping rates (free over a certain amount, currently $89) for orders up to 3 lbs, and after that they provide a $5.95 credit towards shipping. They offer a rebate program - cash back on purchases - similar to Drugstore.com (see below), but would be better to just discount their prices a bit more to match iHerb's. |
 HerbsMD, like House of Nutrition described below, carries a very wide variety of supplements at discount pricing, although Vitacost is usually lower in price. HerbsMD has the complete line of most common brands including Solaray, Twinlab, Now Foods, Enzymatic Therapy, Doctor's Best, and Jarrow at deep discounts. They also carry some of the excellent brands which are typically hard to find online, especially at a discount, including Gaia, Eclectic Institute, Herb Pharm, and Thompson. HerbsMD is one of the few websites which carries  Nutribiotic's excellent line of powdered vitamin C and mineral supplements including Meta-C, Electro-C, and Hypo-Aller-C, all highly regarded, although Herbs Wholesale also carries the Nutribiotic line and they are a more reliable vendor. Descriptions and content of many products are given, but it is disappointing that many products do not state content. House of Nutrition has a slightly better selection of obscure and hard to find supplements like those of Cardiovascular Research, but HerbsMD prices are generally lower. The search engine of HerbsMD is among the worst of any supplement website, plus they only display a small number of items in a search, which makes finding items time consuming. In the past, shipping and customer service has been slow. This improved a great deal in 2005, but as of 2006 greatly increased sales has slowed them down again as with many other online health vendors and orders of even in stock items are taking approximately two weeks to be delivered.
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 Herbs Wholesale like HerbsMD. described below, carries a very wide variety of supplements at discount pricing, and similar in pricing to Vitacost. Herbs Wholesale has the complete line of most common brands including Solaray, Twinlab, Now Foods, Enzymatic Therapy, Doctor's Best, and Jarrow at deep discounts. HerbsMD is one of the few websites which carries Nutribiotic's excellent line of powdered  vitamin C and mineral supplements including Meta-C, Electro-C, and Hypo-Aller-C, all highly regarded. Descriptions and content of almost all products are given, plus a product review forum is provided. House of Nutrition has a slightly better selection of obscure and hard to find supplements like those of Cardiovascular Research, but Herbs Wholesale prices are generally lower. The search engine of Herbs Wholesale is very good and they display a large number of items in a search, which makes finding items easy. Shipping is fast on in stock items, but they don't tell you when you order items that are not in stock plus they may not respond to email inquiries to orders, so this is not a top-tier rated company by Electroherbalism standards due to the poor service.
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 BodyBuilding.com is one of the largest and best online merchants of bodybuilding, strength & endurance, weightloss, and other supplements. Their website is broken into two sections - one is the online shopping cyberstore and the other is the supersite which features a great deal of information on bodybuilding, weight loss, muscle gain, and competition, plus discussion and  chat boards. An excellent feature is the wide variety of non-bodybuilding supplements including a deep selection of popular brands like Now and Solaray, but not Garden of Life or Jarrow. BodyBuilding.com website design is a bit annoying with a default black background and red, white, and blue text on all their pages and products can be hard to find, but since they offer excellent pricing, very fast shipping, and such a wide selection, this can be easily overlooked. Bodybuilding.com also has excellent customer service and even followups on orders to ensure satisfaction.
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 eVitamins is a popular online vendor of supplements such as vitamins and has a very large selection of products and brands. However, they have a minimal discount on most of their products. While they have the complete line of Now products like iHerb and HerbsPro and the complete line of Solaray products like HerbsWholesale, and the complete lines of Enzymatic Therapy and Twinlab like VItacost, and many body building supplement like Bodybuilding.com, eVitamins prices are generally higher than any of them, on a par with Vitamin Shoppe, who also offers only minimum discounting. |
The Vitamin Shoppe is one of the oldest and largest supplement websites on the net. They have a huge selection of vitamins, supplements, health foods, bodycare items, and alternative healthcare books.  They are one of the only discount websites that carries the entire Aubrey Organics line. When a promotion code is  provided via email or on the website, pay attention since it may be needed to get free shipping or other discounts. When displaying a large number of products in a category, the Vitamin Shoppe website only allows a few to be displayed per page, a design fault that many websites with extensive product lines are now correcting. Prices are okay, with a typical discount of around 20%, but not as good as the vendors above. Product display pages are excellent with full disclosure of ingredients for most items. Shipping is fast and reasonable in cost and usually free with large orders. Since Vitamin Shoppe has over 250 outlets throughout the US, there are many states in which sales tax is assessed when purchasing online. |
The Vita-Mix is a powerful blender that produces drinks which are composed of whole fruits and vegetables. It is the same machine that is typically used in smoothie shops and for frozen drinks in bars. It  comes in commercial configurations and for home use, but the same durable motor is used in all of them. The Super 5000 series is variable speed and comes with two pitchers with blade assemblies - one for drinks and soups and one for dry foods such as grains and herbs. The Vita-Mix does not produce pulp like most juicers so cleanup is very easy, but some liquid  like water must usually be added before grinding to make it a drinkable consistency. It supposedly grinds foods to the molecular level so that all the nutrients are easily absorbed, and it certainly includes more nutrients and fiber, most of which is in the pulp, than regular juicers. It is also an invaluable appliance for herbalists. An excellent, fast, and nutritious smoothie is as follows: put frozen berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, etc) in the "wet" pitcher, add a handful of baby carrots or other vegetables, two scoops of a good whey protein powder, and some raw nuts like walnuts or almonds, or flax or pumpkin seeds. Add enough pineapple juice to cover. Grind for about 20 to 30 seconds on high speed until smooth. Makes a sweet smoothie suitable as a meal for both kids and adults. It can also be used to make drinks of the not-so-healthy variety such as frozen margaritas and daiquiris. |
 House of Nutrition carries probably the widest variety of supplements at discount pricing of anywhere online, although Vitacost and HerbsMD are usually lower in price on specific items. House of Nutrition has the complete line of most common brands including Solaray, Twinlab, Now Foods, Enzymatic Therapy, and  Jarrow at 25 to 50% off list price. They also carry some of the excellent brands which are typically hard to find online, especially at a discount, including Gaia, Eclectic Institute, Herb Pharm, Cardiovascular Research (Ecological Formulas), and Thompson, as well as Douglas Labs (a professional line sold at retail). House of Nutrition once carried Nutribiotic's excellent line of powdered vitamin C and mineral supplements including Meta-C, Electro-C, and Hypo-Aller-C, all highly regarded, but these have been discontinued (they are still available at HerbsMD, described above.) Some descriptions of products are given, but the full content is usually not provided. When ordering at the House of Nutrition website, submit the Coupon Code HOUSE when checking out to get an additional 5% discount.
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 Kalyx is mostly known as a vendor of discount bulk herbs, but carries a wide variety of products. They have a huge selection of herbs and herb extracts at very good prices and offer many of their herbs in 1 to 25 pound bulk  sizes. Many of their bulk herbs sold in the pound size are nitrogen flushed vacuum packed from Starwest Botanicals and excellent. Their selection of Chinese and Ayurvedic herbs is among the best and they carry some of the harder to find herbs like neem and wormwood annua as well as culture kits for medicinal mushrooms. There is probably no other place on the net where you can pick up a few pounds of bulk herbs along with a reed for your bagpipe, stakes for your camping tent, and a Barbie laptop computer for your kid all at the same place. Shipping can be slow, probably since most of their products are drop shipped. For Starwest Botanical Herbs, see the link above but note that Kalyx sells Starwest Botanical herbs cheaper than does Starwest. If in a rush to get the order and don't mind paying a little extra, it might be worth ordering direct from Starwest since they are an excellent and reliable vendor. |
Drugstore.com is a very popular website to purchase all manner of items typically found in a conventional  drug store, not many of which are recommended by those in alternative health fields. However, they are an excellent source for a wide variety of natural household cleaning products including those by Caldrea, Earth Friendly Products, Seventh Generation, Mrs. Meyer's, and Bi-O-Kleen. They also sell Weleda, Tom's of Maine, and Burt's Bee bodycare items. Shipping is free with a $50 order and is very fast plus they have an excellent rebate program. |
 The Life Extension Foundation offers some good products. Prices are generally high even if one gets the member discount (membership costs $75 per year) but for some high potency and well-formulated products they offer the best value for the money. They also sell powdered forms of many vitamins and minerals otherwise hard to find. What sets LEF apart is the extensive research they sponsor, reports of which are available on their website as well as in their monthly magazine. They also offer testing and diagnostic services through conventional labs. LEF was one of the first large organizations to provide information and supplements for all types of health problems as well as weight loss and body building, and the founders, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw are pioneers in the supplement field. |
Only Natural Pet Store offers thousands of products from the leading manufacturers of natural pet care products, including vitamins, supplements, medicine, food, treats, chews, bones, flea control products, grooming supplies, litter, cleaning supplies, and much more. They also offer many hard to find products like organic food and treats,  herbal remedies, homeopathic remedies, raw food, flower essences, and natural flea control products. They carry dry kibble by Solid Gold and Wysong. ONly Natural provides a link for holistic veterinarian consultation, which is expensive at $75 per half hour, but they also have a free monthly newsletter on natural pet care and a section of Q&A by a holistic vet. Shipping is fast to very fast with FedEx and FedEx Express, or Priority Mail for light shipments. |
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