With online market booming in America and around the globe, these top 10 tips for online shopping will surely help you in enhancing your online shopping experience.
Table of Contents
1. Do Research & Read reviews
Online commerce has not only brought a plethora of choices for its customers but has also empowered them. With the evolvement of web 2.0, it is impacting the economies as consumers come and place their reviews directly on the website and various consumer forums.
You must review all the aspects of the brand of the product you are buying and the after service provided by the online company that is selling it.
These days the early adopters are fairly using the new products available online and giving out they first-hand reviews of its pros and cons. These reviewers are often gurus or experts of the specific kind of product like tech gurus or beauty gurus and have their dedicated channels and blogs where they keep experimenting new products and post their reviews.
These reviews are often true to its sense and what better than to listen to the horse mouth.
2. Compare Before your Shop
The online shops these days come with inbuilt comparison engines. Here, you can select the various range available from different brands of the product you want to buy. It gives you the side by side comparison on various aspects of the product available from different brands that you have chosen for your review.
3. Do not forget Coupons
Many online shopping websites are dedicated to providing available discount coupons on various websites. They generally have an affiliate marketing sort of link with the sellers and promote their products through these discount coupons. These discounts generally range from ten percent to fifty percent.
4. Do not go with the fashion fad
You may get attracted towards latest trends. However, most of the fashion brands follow fast fashion these days. That is these become outdated very soon and a new slot is introduced in next cycle. Also, these fast fashion products are not developed well and often include low wages to the people in poor countries and hence is a direct product of human exploitation.
Rather you must opt for a piece of cloth, that you can style in different ways and can make a part of your wardrobe for longer durations.
5. Buy Off Season
You must respect the global clock and buy the latest fashion items which might be on sale due to offseason in another part of the world. After all, we all must benefit from this global market brought together by online space.
Also, often there are big discounts on clearance sales on these online stores. Often, the cost of shipping the unsold items is much more than giving them on discounts. And in this world of fast fashion, these products will lose their self-life very soon.
Hence, it’s is more convenient for the manufacturers to offer them on discount rather than calling them back or scrapping them. These online stores have tie-ups with various retailers who are supplying these products and they will market them to your place once you have paid for it online.
6. Sleep Over it
Often, we tend to add many items to our shopping cart which are not so useful for us. Hence, I recommend that you can shop all you want but sleep over it for one day before you make your payments. This way you can review your cart once more and will save yourself from wasting any money.
7. Clear your Browsing History before you go Shopping
The online shops often come with the intelligent system, that record your buying behavior by installing cookies into your browser every time you shop. They use the data from these cookies to adjust the prices of various commodities on their site to expedite your shopping decision. You must delete these cookies from your browser to shop without getting biased prices.
8. Get Cashback for the Exchange of your used items
Many online shopping stores like Alibaba and Amazon, often give you discounts on the exchange of your used items. You must look out for these options if you have any old item which you are trying to replace the new one.
9. Get Compensated for the Price Difference
Many times, you experience that you have bought an item online and immediately after few days it has gone on sale. Many established and reputed online stores are ready to compensate for such instances.
You only need to call their customer care center and brief them about the price difference that you have noticed. They shall certainly give you back the price difference or else will provide you with the equal number of vouchers for further shopping on their stores.
This can also happen if you see major price difference elsewhere like on an advertisement on the television or any other website selling the same product.
10. Drop it Before just Before you are about to Pay
This comes from personal experience. The online stores these days are so mad at turning every opportunity into a sale, that they can be tricked with this act. All you need to do is, you want to shop all you want and go to the payment page. You can even fill in your credit card details for the payment. Just at the time you are about to pay, cancel your order.
Make sure that you have filled in your contact information before you cancel it. Now probably by next day, you will get the call from the customer care of that online store and they will try to know the reason for why you canceled your order. Keep nagging until they offer you some good discounts. And voila, you are done.
This often works for first time user on various websites. As explained before, this does not work for regular purchasers as they keep recording your buying behaviors with all the login information they ask you for.
