PayPal now accepted on gemdiamond.com

We are pleased to announce that we have recently added Paypal as a payment option in the gemdiamond.com shopping cart. Originally developed to facilitate trading on Ebay, PayPal is expanding rapidly into mainstream e-commerce worldwide. With Paypal users now numbering in excess of 56 million and growing, there is obviously a strong demand for this method of online payment.
Making a purchase on the gemdiamond.com site and choosing Paypal as payment method will take the buyer to the PayPal site where they will login to their account and complete the purchase. If they do not yet have an account, the buyer can easily establish one at that point enabling them to complete the purchase.

Paypal accounts can be funded through any major credit card, debit card, or directly through a bank account. One distinct advantage for the customer is that financial information only has to be shared once with PayPal. It is then possible to shop any site offering Paypal as a payment option without having to supply financial information to each individual merchant. It is not surprising that millions of savvy internet shoppers consider Paypal to be the most convenient and safest method for making purchases on the internet.

So, buying certified diamonds and fine jewelry just got a little more convenient for gemdiamond.com customers. Becoming part of the PayPal merchant network in turn intoduces www.gemdiamond.com to a huge number of new customers who are already well aware of the benefits of shopping online.

Gem Diamond - Ebay Featured Store

Gem Diamond Company is please to announce the launch of our featured store on Ebay. There are currently over 150 million Ebay users worldwide! Plugging into such a large and vibrant marketplace of millions of buyers that are comfortable shopping online is a very natural step. Not only does it extend our reach domestically but also provides an additional channel for international sales. And it provides variation in our selling format.

For our regular web customers, this represents an additional "department" that will be very interesting. We will feature many items in our ebay store that are not available on our website such as loose colored gemstones and pre-owned jewelry. We will also send some items from the website to auctions with low starting bids and no reserve. Other selling formats such as "best offer" will also be available allowing customers to name their price!

Gemdiamond.com customers will want to check the ebay store regularly for up to the minute special opportunities on select loose diamonds, fine jewelry and high quality pearls. The link to our Ebay store can be found inside gemdiamond.com Outlet Department is also accessible from our Specials link on the top of each page of our website.

You can take a look right now by going directly to the Gem Diamond Company Ebay Store.

Certified Diamonds - Ideal Cut or Excellent?

Perhaps the biggest news in the jewelry industry in the past several decades is the launch of GIA's new cut grading system. Beginning this month GIA diamond reports on round brilliant diamonds will contain an overall cut grade.

After the most exhaustive scientific study ever conducted on diamond cut, GIA has settled on a grading scale consisting of five overall grades:

• Excellent
• Very Good
• Good
• Fair
• Poor
  

GIA will not use the term "Ideal" although most, but not necessarily all, diamonds considered Ideal by other labs or industry professionals will fall into the Excellent category. By the same token, some stones not considered Ideal by some will fall into the top grade!

The GIA system was developed with the use of state-of-the art computer "light ray tracing" software and validated by over 70,000 controlled human observations involving 2300 different diamonds.

The resulting system has calculated the cut results for 38.5 million proportion sets based on the assessment of seven components:

• Brightness
• Fire
• Scintillation
• Weight ratio
• Durability
• Polish
• Symmetry

GIA will only provide a cut grade on round brilliant diamonds initially, but plan to extend grading to fancy shapes using the same basic technology and methodologies. The first fancy shape to roll out will be Princess cut at a time yet to be announced.

It will be very interesting to see what impact the new system has on the certified diamond market. Will all the competing claims surrounding Ideal diamonds be silenced? Or will certain entities in the diamond world dispute the validity of GIA's system? It will be very interesting to to watch it shake out.

It is likely that because of GIA's global stature and the extensive research that has gone into this project, that their cut grading system will become the new standard. It is also probable that all those companies selling certified diamonds who have been marketing feverishly around the terms Ideal and Super Ideal will resist abandoning those terms. There will almost certainly be a period of controversy and repositioning of marketing strategies as the certified diamond industry adjusts to the new paradigm.