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Don't ask me how, but my daughter burns through at LEAST one school bag a year. This year, I was bound and determined to get her (and her younger brother heading to kindergarten) bags that would make it at LEAST until June, and hopefully, beyond. A quick survey around town, however, turned up few name-brand bags with good staying power in options that my kids would buy into. Enter eBags.com, with a selection you aren't going to find in any store.

::: Sometimes It Pays to Stick to One Thing :::

eBags.com has actually been around since the first dot-com boom, when everyone and their brother thought it was a good idea to "specialize" in one thing. Obviously, they are doing something right, since they've been in business a long time and have a great many happy customers.

eBags.com focuses on just one thing: bags. Luggage, backpacks, wallets, kid luggage... If you need to carry something, this is the place to find it.

The site is well-organized and makes it easy to find exactly what you are looking for, allowing you to search by type of bag, by manufacturer, by use (business, school, "girl bags"), and even has a seasonal tab for items that would make good holiday gifts.

Deals are prominently displayed on the splash page, but that's usually not the end of the savings; buy a bag on eBags.com and odds are you'll get an email asking you for a review of the bag, which will net you savings on a future purchase. They regularly have shipping deals at certain price points for total purchase, and they also offer a 110% price match guarantee. Add in the Points program, where you earn back 5% of your purchase to use on future purchases and frequent customers can net themselves a great deal.

eBags.com also goes out of their way to ensure you have any way you'd like to pay them, accepting both PayPal and GoogleCheckout as well as Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and Diner's Club. Fax/Mail orders are also accepted for those who are wary of sharing payment information online.

::: THREE Purchases Later... :::

In ordering my children's school bags (and then another), I ended up availing myself of nearly every possible customer service necessary. My first order was a messenger bag for my daughter and a backpack for my son. When the bags arrived, the messenger bag was obviously far too small for my tall second grader, and had to be returned. eBags.com processed the return quickly and efficiently, no questions asked other than the reason for return.

As I was going through the ordering for the kids' school bags, my programmer/photographer husband decided that he needed a new bag that he'd found online that would allow him to carry along both his 17" MacBook Pro along with his digital SLR. Of course, the bag was what I considered WAY out of our budget, but I found it online at another online retailer for far less than it was on eBags.com. I decided to check out just how the 110% price guarantee worked before ordering, and received a quick email response from their customer service telling me exactly how the guarantee worked (you order the bag, then send them your order number with the other price information and a link and they credit back your payment method), even going so far as to make sure I realized that since the other store only offered the bag in one color choice, the price match was only good on the one color. Now that's classy; my experience tells me that most retailers would have let me order a different color and then come back with the "sorry, wrong color response."

My husband's ordering and bag arrival happened while I was in the return process for my daughter's bag, and his review of the bag on the site netted us a discount on my daughter's new bag, making me even happier at the savings I was able to manage. I paid less for three name-brand bags at eBags.com than I was paying for the cheapy bags at local retailers!

Overall, I couldn't be more satisfied than I've been with my eBags.com purchases. They are also a contributor to Upromise, but even if they weren't, I'd be planning on hitting them again next fall when #3 heads off to kindergarten. And don't tell my husband, but I regularly check the "new arrivals" in the purse section as well.