All orders placed after 3:00 pm today (December 19th, 2008) will be shipped after the New Year.  With the upcoming holidays, UPS and USPS are either closed or showing that they are behind in their deliveries.  We here at Instead Electronic Cigarettes have decided that to ensure there are no lost packages or delays beyond our control, we will not be shipping any orders between December 20th, 2008 and January 2nd, 2009.  We apologize for any inconvenience.  All orders will be shipped on January 2nd and depending on your location, should arrive to you between the 9th and 10th of January, hopefully earlier.

Before placing your order, please read our recent post on Paying for Your Electronic Cigarette.  By following these step-by-step directions, you will guarantee that there are no issues with placing your order and that we will be able to ship out to you on January 2nd, 2009, preventing any further delay in delivery.

One further note on holiday shipping:  If your electronic cigarette purchase is a gift, our deadline for shipping to arrive before Christmas was Wednesday, December 17th, 2008.  We apologize, but any orders placed after this date cannot be guaranteed delivery before December 24th, 2008.  As it is the holiday season and many packages are traveling through the UPS and USPS system, even an over night package cannot be guaranteed.  This is beyond our control.

And as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.  We are here for you and happy to help!

Prompted by questions from our customers, here is a quick faq and tutorial on paying for your electronic cigarette from our website.

Fact #1: If you live in The United States, you DO NOT GENERALLY need a Paypal account to purchase an electronic cigarette from our website. 
Fact #2: We use Paypal to process all transactions.  This means, even if you don’t have a Paypal account and you want to use a credit card to pay, the transaction is still completed by Paypal.  We do not capture or store any of your financial information.  If you want to re-order by calling us, that’s fine, but have your credit card number handy because we won’t have it on file.

Fact #3: Paypal is owned by eBay and although it has its critics, it is a very safe method of completing an online transaction.  We have opted to use Paypal because of their security.

The Process Assuming You Don’t Have a Paypal Account:

Step #1: After adding items to your cart, entering your name, address, etc., and clicking the check out button, you will be brought to this screen:

If you have a Paypal account, you can login on the right hand side of the screen.  If you don’t have a Paypal account and want to pay via a credit card, click the “Continue” link indicated by the red lines and arrow.

Step #2:

After you click the “Continue link, you’ll come to a screen to confirm your address and be asked to enter your credit card information.

Step #3:

PayPal may try to get you to login to PayPal once more.  There is no need to do this.  On the right hand side of the screen there will be the Login area and directly under this is a link to “Continue Without Logging in”.

Next you’ll confirm the order and make payment.  You’ll then be taken to this confirmation screen:

IMPORTANT: You need to click on the orange box link to return to our website.  This box is indicated by the red circle and arrow above.  This ensures all the order information is sent back to our system from Paypal.  This includes the type of electronic cigarette you want as well as nicotine levels and flavors for any e-cigarette cartridges or e-Liquid (smoke juice) you may have ordered.  If this is not done, we must contact you to verify your order information and shipping address.

Step #4:

After you click the link to come back to our website, you may get this pop up:

If you do get this message, don’t worry.  The only information you are sending back to us is your order details such as how many refill cartridges you want or the nicotine strength of the eLiquid.  Click the “Continue” button.

Step #5:

That’s it.  your order is placed.  You will be back on our website.  Please do keep an eye on your email though, just in case we need to contact you to confirm something or to notify you of a low inventory issue.

If you do have questions, feel free to contact us via our online form or by phone.

Enjoy your Electronic Smoking!

With the holiday travel season coming up quickly, we have been answering some questions about our #10 place to use your electronic cigarette, on an Airplane.  With more and more people becoming aware of this wonderful gadget, more and more places are getting their first taste of having to deal with electronic smokers.

The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has, as of the date of this posting, is not listed the electronic cigarette on the list of items that cannot be used on a plane, however, they do warn that the individual airlines, captain and crew have the final say on what is acceptable in their cabins.

After a little bit of research, we have discovered that there are currently three airlines who have added the electronic cigarettes to their lists of unacceptable devices on planes.  They all basically state that because the electronic cigarette looks so much like a real cigarette, they are worried that others might think someone is actually smoking and either freak out or start smoking a real cigarette themselves.

According to a thread on CabinCrew.com, regarding the electric cigarette, it appears that crew members have mixed emotions.  Some believe it is a fun little gadget and totally harmless.  Others believe that it is just easier to keep all patrons happy by not allowing anyone, anything.

As of this post, the airlines that have made definite decisions on the electronic cigarette and DO NOT allow their use while inflight are Virgin Atlantic, TUI and Thomson, and Thomas Crook (TCX).  TUI and TCX are British airlines who primarily fly within Europe.  None of these three have any mention of electric or electronic cigarettes anywhere on their websites.  However, their cabin crew members have said they have been given the no-go.  Please note that as of 1/10/2009, Continental has included the e-cig on non-usable in flight items.

So what does this mean for you?  Can you smoke your electronic cigarette on an airplane?  We strongly suggest that if you fly any of the above three airlines, since they do have policy, you respect their policy.  If you are flying on an airline that has not taken a position, ask first. And since you are on a plane, one suggestion is to hold your electronic cigarette cusped in your hand, hold your vapor for a wee bit longer, and blow it towards your feet.  Acting like you are in a bar will draw attention to you and anger your cabin crew. Even with permission it is best to avoid making a spectacle.

Act respectful.  Heck.  Even take an extra cartridge/mouthpiece with you so if a crew member wants they can play with it!  If e-smokers make the cabin crew our friends, they might be more open to helping with policy in the future.  And of course, if the cabin crew asks you to put your electronic cigarette away, it is their airplane, so do it.

Either way, the electronic cigarette will make your holiday traveling that much easier.  You won’t have to go through security to sneak that last minute smoke.  Our final say on using your electronic cigarette on an airplane is that on most airlines, there are no rules against it, so don’t ruin it for the rest of us by acting like a fool.

Order your Instead electronic cigarette. 

Lately, we have had a lot of people contacting us saying they have a great idea for the sale of electronic cigarettes.  From gas stations, bars, and restaurants, to flea markets and concert venues, the electronic cigarette seems popular among retailers.

With smoking bans popping up worldwide, bar and restaurant owners are feeling the crunch.  Average patrons are feeling the economic pains right now and have opted to stay home.  It is an easier decision to stay home and enjoy your beverages if you are a smoker who is forced to not smoke while out.  Bar and restaurant owners are perfect candidates for wholesale electronic cigarettes.  If you sell T-Shirts and beer, why not sell an electronic cigarette?  Your customers will love you for it and who knows… you could be the first on the block who offers smoking, inside!

Smoke shop owners are also prime for wholesale electronic cigarettes.  While offering all other forms of cigarettes, pipes, tobacco, and what-not, why not sell an option to those who are looking to change their habits? 

Golf Courses!  You are perfect for wholesale electronic cigarettes!  Why have your beautiful greens trashed from spikes putting out cigarette butts?  Why pay a person to drive around and empty ashtrays throughout the course?  Offer your golfers an alternative.  Offering them an environmentally friendly alternative to smoking.  If your course hasn’t gone non-smoking yet, the heated argument between smokers and non-smokers could find a happy compromise with the electronic cigarette.

Locally owned drug stores are another great candidate for wholesale cigarettes.  Are you tired of watching your friends come in and opt for a pack of smokes?  Offer them something different.   Help your community change it’s smoking habits, one smoker at a time.  Once you sell one, you WILL sell more.

There are so many businesses and people who can benefit from the electronic cigarette.  Small businesses or persons who are looking for wholesale electronic cigarettes, please feel free to contact us.  We will be happy to help you get started.  Your initial investment can be as small or as large as you are comfortable with and we will help you determine the best way to move forward in this new and exciting industry.

Please, serious inquiries only.

In today’s day and age, we are all looking for ways to leave a smaller carbon footprint.  It is kind of hard to escape the fact that whether you believe in global warming or not, we need to find better ways to run our appliances and vehicles.  From electric cars to electric cigarettes, many are looking to change their habits and lead a more sustainable lifestyle.  Now, if I could just get the 1982 song by Marica Griffiths out of my head… “It’s Electric!”.

The electric cigarette is just that:  It’s Electric!  All of our kits include a battery charger.  To use your battery charger, you will unscrew the battery portion of your electric cigarette and screw it into your electric cigarette battery charger.  The light on the end will turn green and that means that your battery is charging.

By having an electric cigarette, you will not have any need for lighters.  By using the standard electric cigarette battery charger or the electric cigarette car charger, you are able to enjoy your electric cigarette where ever you want.  And since you are provided two electric cigarette batteries, you can always keep one on the charger, ready to go.

The electric cigarette does not contain tobacco so it does not burn.  This means that you are not emitting the usual carbon dioxide that is a part of traditional cigarette smoke.  The atomizer within the unit, heats up the nicotine solution housed within the cartridge and creates a vapor.  That’s why smoking an electric cigarette is most commonly referred to as “vaping”.

Since you are not burning anything, the electric cigarette does not require you to toss a butt when you are done.  Simply replace the nicotine cartridge or if you really want to go green, try purchasing a bottle of e-liquid and placing a few drops on the electric cigarettes nicotine pad (housed within the mouthpiece) and you have no waste.  We do suggest that after about 3-5 recycled uses, you do use a new nicotine cartridge.  This will allow you to get the most out of your electric cigarette as well as providing you with a fresh and clean mouthpiece every so often (especially if you have shared your electric cigarette with someone else!).

So INSTEAD of flipping your traditional cigarette out of your electric car window… here is an option for you!  Try the electric cigarette!  You will never have to worry about cigarettes catching the wind and landing in your backseat.

This post is completely unrelated to the electronic cigarette world, but we felt we had to share.

Tonight, the UFC and Spike TV have partnered with the Intrepid Fallen Heros Fund to sponsor the Fight for the Troops.  The Intrepid Fallen Heros Fund provides help to our heros and their families who suffer from traumatic brain injury and other head injuries.  They are currently on a quest to build and design a center to help our heroes receive the proper care needed to live a better life.

We figured the least we could do would be to give them links so our friends who might not be UFC fans but are fans of our heroes, could post a donation to help.  They are also running an auction with some great prizes like the UFC Ultimate Experience, The Octagon – A book by Kevin Lynch, and an alligator duffle.

Donate to Fight for the Troops

The Intrepid Heros Fund

UFC and Spike TV

As it is that time of year, it is strongly suggested that if your purchase of an electronic cigarette will be a gift for a smoker, please make sure you place your order no later than Wednesday, December 17, 2008.  We will do everything in our power to ensure that your gift is to you in time for wrapping and/or stuffing in the sock!

The electronic cigarette makes a great gift for any smoker.  If you just can’t figure out what to get that smoker of yours, try our Instead E-Cigarette Sets.  The kit comes complete with:

2 x Atomizers
2 x Separate rechargeable battery
1 x Charger & Cable
1 x User’s guide
5 x Empty Cartridges
Optional: 1 x 15 ml bottle of ELiquid

We hope that everyone has a wonderful winter season and whether this is a gift for you or someone else, we do hope you enjoy it!  The electronic cigarette is a wonderful smoking alternative so you can still feel like a smoker, without the butts, the smoke, No Joke!

Sadly, it has come to our attention that there is a no-good, shifty person out there, stealing our content and claiming it as their own.  What’s worse is that this person is not only reproducing our information word for word on one site, but on many websites.  This person is selling electronic cigarettes directly out of China and has absolutely no regard for hard-work and respectable business practices.

Now, we are not ones to normally write about this stuff, but here at Instead we believe that in the electronic cigarette industry, there is more than enough business to go around.  However, it concerns us that competing companies would take our content. This does not do the Electronic Cigarette industry any good.

Here is the evidence of our claim:

First, this website (www.e-cig.org) was first created in August of 2007.  Our homepage content “The electronic cigarette is a revolutionary device that acts much the same way an ordinary tobacco cigarette would, but rather than toxic smoke, it produces vaporized nicotine…” was written on August 22, 2007.  Our “content thief” unfortunately, does not seem to be aware that even though she/he has post dated all of our content or “their blog posts” to show up as August of 2007, her/his URL’s were not created until May of 2008.  Hmmmm….

This is causing several problems.  The first being that we are forced to contact innocent people who are lifting our content not knowing that it is copy written as original content on www.e-cig.org.  Our content was apparently so good, that people, Internet wide are using our words, verbatim. The second problem being that original content is in fact the property of the person who wrote it and therefore, it is illegal to copy someone’s work.  Changing a word or adding your phone number to someone’s article does not constitute original work.

Now, since the above is really all that anyone needs to know that this particular business is up to no good, we will cite the following articles that this person just could not keep their hands off of!

Our content:  Top Ten Places to Use Your Electronic Cigarette
Infringing Web Pages:  http://www.e-cigarette-global.com/top-10-places-to-use-your-electronic-cigarette-b270

Our content:  Homepage of E-cig.org
Infringing Web Pages:  http://www.e-cigarette-global.com/about-e-cigarettes-electronic-cigarettes-t46
Infringing Web Pages:  http://www.e-cigarette-blog.com/about-e-cigarettes-electronic-cigarettes-t46
Infringing Web Pages:  http://www.e-cigarette-mart.com/cms/about-e-cigarettes-electronic-cigarettes-t46

Our content:  Electric Cigarette or Electronic Cigarette
Infringing Web Pages:  http://www.e-cigarette-global.com/electric-cigarette-or-electronic-cigarette-t271

Our photo:  Mini Electronic Cigarette Photo
Infringing Photos:  http://www.e-cigarette-mart.com/super-electronic-cigarette-deluxe001-blue-device-starter-kit-p-63.html

http://www.e-cigarette-mart.com/index.php?main_page=product_reviews_info&products_id=72&reviews_id=45

http://www.e-cigarette-mart.com/index.php?main_page=product_reviews_info&products_id=63&reviews_id=40

http://www.e-cigarette-mart.com/index.php?main_page=product_reviews_info&products_id=63&reviews_id=39

http://www.e-cigarette-mart.com/index.php?main_page=product_reviews_info&products_id=63&reviews_id=38

***Please note:  we do have the original file from the photographer as proof this was lifted from our site and tagged as their own.

The owner of the above sites also owns several other sites but we figured we had enough content infringement with just the three above mentioned sites to follow through with our claim.  So, SmokeyTom, Bob, Yongmei Chen or whoever you claim to be:  Please be advised that we are onto you and we are taking the necessary actions to ensure that you cannot do this to other businesses.  This is unacceptable and you should be ashamed.  As we know you are constantly visiting our website, you will surely get your copy of this very post!  You have ignored our requests to either take down our content or give us credit!

For anyone looking for electronic cigarettes:  There are many online distributors who are good, decent, hardworking folks who will treat you right and not try to claim to be more than one person.  Whether you choose to do business with us here at Instead Electronic Cigarettes or not, please know that we do not have it out for our competitors.  We participate with them in forums across the Internet and find, that as a whole, they are great people who share the same philosophy as us:  The electronic cigarette is a great alternative to smoking for many long time smokers.

With that said, others such as the owner of the websites below are obviously unethical based on their disregard for others content, images, and video.

http://www.e-cigarette-mart.com

http://www.e-cigarette-blog.com

http://www.e-cigarette-global.com

http://ecigarettes.offerchina.com/

http://www.e-cigs.org

If you want to buy an electronic cigarette, we recommend you do it from a supplier who has the morals to create their own content. If you want to buy from us, visit our electronic cigarette store.

Is this happening to you? Check out our Hub on How To Deal with Content Stealing Online.

UPDATE 12/12/2008: It appears that we have gained the attention of the above person who has gone and made changes to the following websites:

http://www.e-cigarette-mart.com

http://www.e-cigarette-blog.com

http://www.e-cigarette-global.com

We are still waiting on the other two!  However, this an excellent step in the right direction and we thank the owner for finally accepting our request!  If you are interested in seeing the archived pages of the above three websites, please visit www.archive.org.  So even though you can’t see the copied content now as it has been changed, you can see what it did look like!

It was bound to happen!  An informative review by WPVI-TV Philadelphia, PA regarding the electronic cigarette, where Dr. Richard Wender, Jefferson University Hospital family doctor and previous national president of the American Cancer Society, stated that “Anything that gets you off real cigarettes is better for your health.”

This is big news for the electronic cigarette world.  With the spreading visibility of the electronic cigarette, more and more are beginning to notice and ask questions.  Smokers who don’t want to quit because they love the action, can use this as a smoking alternative.

There are ongoing conversations regarding whether the electronic cigarette is a quit smoking device and should be regulated by the FDA.  However, one fact still remains, that unlike the patch, pill, or nicotine gum where one is forced to cease the habitual action of smoking, one is not forced to do the same with the electronic cigarette.  The user is still able to participate in the hand-to-mouth action as well as the dragging and exhaling.

So if you have been wandering around the kitchen, dying for a cigarette out of your secret stash and don’t think you can bear it anymore, try the electronic cigarette.  Also available with no-nicotine.  So if your patch has gotten you out of the nicotine phase but you find the action is missing from your life, give an electronic cigarette a whirl.  Buy your electronic cigarette today!

Also, the electronic cigarette made the top 10 list for 2008 on “The Doctors”!

One of the most dreaded holiday excursions for a smoker is a flight to anywhere. In a car, you can pull over and smoke just about anywhere. In the airport transportation system, not so much. If you aren’t brave enough to risk going through security, you are pretty much attached to your bad mood and nicotine gum reserve, that is now probably stale. Traveling and not smoking can be a horrible, horrible experience for yourself and fellow travelers.

So what do you do to ensure that your traveling and smoking addiction go peacefully? Make sure you have your electronic cigarette on hand and ready to go. Keep extra nicotine cartridges or ELiquid in your checked luggage and throughout your carry ons to get you through your trip. Don’t forget to carry your charger and extra battery with you, just in case you find yourself in travelers hell, trapped in a non-destination airport.

If you haven’t completely transitioned over to the electronic cigarette, this will be a breakthrough for you. As mentioned in our top 10 places to smoke your electronic cigarette, you will cause stares. Note though: Most other travelers will be either envious or curious. That is why they are staring. And if you aren’t one who can handle conversation, puff away in the toilet. No-one will have any clue what you are up to as there is no smoke.

The electronic cigarette is the perfect travel companion. And, if you decide to travel by car, this is an excellent option too. INSTEAD of showing up smelling of smoke, try the electronic cigarette. You won’t be disappointed. Your mom won’t be able to complain about your bad habit and you will be dosed with your nicotine to help you handle your holiday travels.