You can help support U.S. businesses — who need help more than ever during the coronavirus pandemic — by using a simple tool made by a company named Cultivate.
Cultivate is a small startup supported by Mark Cuban, and I'd only heard about it after he tweeted on Tuesday that it's a useful tool for finding products made in the United States.
Cultivate has two facets. First, there's a website where you can search for anything you want: maybe coffee beans or socks or an iPhone case, and it'll return results for items it says are made in the U.S. that you can buy on Amazon.
Or, you can install a plug-in for the Google Chrome browser, and it'll automatically show you similar items that are for sale on Amazon.
If you're using the Chrome plug-in on Target's website, for example, and search for socks, Cultivate will show you results on Amazon for U.S. companies that make socks. You just tap a small Cultivate icon in Chrome and it'll show you the results.
Cultivate gets an affiliate commission from those sales (but you pay no extra cost to Cultivate).
According to Cultivate's site, it verifies that "made in the U.S." claims are true before it puts them into its database:
"Our processes are built to due diligence various databases and sources in order to verify that claims are, in fact, correct. We use a mix of technological and manual research to build our proprietary product catalogue from which our users see locally made products."
How to shop for products made in the U.S.
- Go to Cultivate's website from Google Chrome.
- Tap the "Add to Chrome" button.
- It'll take you to the Chrome Web Store where you click "add to Chrome" again.
- Click "Add Extension."
- Now, in Chrome, tap the little puzzle-piece icon on the top-right of the browser window.
- Click the pin icon next to Cultivate so it's pinned in your browser and always appears.
That's it.
Now, when you're shopping online, (I noticed it worked on Amazon, Best Buy, Target and other sites) you'll be able to see comparable products made in the U.S. that you can buy from Amazon. Or, if you already know you definitely want to buy a product that's made in the U.S., you can just search for it on Cultivate's website.
