How Should You Do Online Shopping?

Do You Like Online Shopping?

'Online shopping' has become a fashion of purchasing and the trend is increasing in India. While >80% of the net users in America are buying things online, around 60% of the Indians do so. The 'influencing factors of online shopping' are friends having better purchasing experience than visiting shops, the discounts announced by the online stores and results of induced by the advertisements and spamming mails. It is expected that the online purchase will grow up to 75% in next year. Modern technology advancement and the young society of India take this further.

online shopping

online offers

Well, 'is online shopping advisable?' Does it burn a hole in your pocket and bring some stressful days? Let us analyse a bit on this along with my personal experience in online purchases.

The 'pros and cons of online shopping' in India:

Pros:

• Saves time in our hotfooting lifestyle.
• Saves travelling cost (especially in this high fuel cost period) 
• Easy to compare the prices
• Availability of varieties that may not be available in physical stores we visit easily. This is possible because they have a network with various dealers and manufacturers in all over India and other countries sometimes.
• Cheaper than the stores in our town/city by announcing discounts. (It is possible due to many reasons like running cost of online stores is cheaper, real estate cost is almost zero, fewer staffs are enough to run the business etc. in reality online stores are making better profits)
• Free door delivery of even heavy electrical, electronic and furniture.
• Returning the goods is possible if you are not satisfied. (Should careful of some online stores’ return policy)

pros and cons

Cons:

• Causing stress of delay in delivery
• The products appear in the website may be different from the actual or delivered. In this case we ought to have stress by calling them and reporting and a horrible process of returning and getting the refund. However, some of the online stores are properly responding and making the refunds.
• Cheated by showing the products’ description as high in quality but actually untrue.
• Getting confused and ended in buying a brand we are not aware of.
• Many cheated by 'huge discounts'. Majority of them are being cheated by clicking spam mails’ links.

What is the conclusion?
'On-line purchase' is really pocket friendly and saving most of our time and travel if we are careful and getting (not reading in the site) suggestion from others have experience.

Do not purchase if you are not sure about the brand.
Buy products with 'manufacturer’s warranty'. Do not purchase the vendors’ warranty items and unknown manufacturer’s warranty.

Visit the popular and having track record online stores.

Read the company’s 'return policy'.

Do not enter into gambling like 'auction sites'. Some appears “pay 399 and get a nano car or apple ipad 3” etc.

Comparing and buying branded products always profitable.

Never try to buy from a foreign company asking you to pay some one’s Indian bank account.

Do check for secure online transfer from your bank account, debit or credit cards

In my experience in the past seven years of purchasing mobiles, laptops, data cards, camera, clothes and other electronics, 75% of the purchases are from satisfactory to excellent. Some of the recommended 'safest online shopping sites' are snapdeal.com, which has been merged with flipkart.com recently, tradus.in, myntra.com, naaptol.com and ebay.in. Now Indiaplaza.com has been closed but still accepting orders and payment. Do not even enter into the site. 

Some of the sites caused stress and I had a very bad experience with timtara.com, and 100bestbuy.com 

Beware of timtara.com

I had a couple of bad experiences. Recently I have ordered three items on 13^th April 2012 and didn't receive the items till date. They promise the products will be delivered in 14 days. When contacting them very unprofessional and adamant replies I received. They said that the problem was not with them but with the vendors, they are in contract with. Look at the lack of ownership and no logic to believe because the three products are from three different suppliers. It shows that they have a poor network with the suppliers and poorly trained people to answer. They hardly attend the calls after I created a scene of complaining in consumer forum.

I never recommend 100bestbuy.com because of their tricky ads and high cost.

Ebay.in is a good site but when buying we should be very clear on what kind of product we need to buy. Because the site is full of with branded, new, packed and with complete manufacturer’s warranty, cheaper unpacked, imported and without warranty items. We need to visit the site thoroughly and purchase.

Have careful and cheerful online shopping!

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