Booming online shopping in Asia

Last year, we bought two second-hand units of HTC Hermes for our daughters. We bought them directly from their owners whom we found through TipidCP (tipidcp.com). My husband arranged for meet-ups to inspect the units then made the purchases after deciding the units were in good condition and the prices were right.

They weren’t our first online purchases but those were the first cell phones we bought through an online buy-and-sell site. We used to buy cell phones in Greenhills until about two years ago when I wanted a PDA and went around looking for an I-Mate JASJAM. A stall carrying the brand said there was no such thing as a JASJAM and the seller was cockily conveying that he was the ultimate authority on everything I-Mate. Had I been less conversant on the gadget lingo, I could have been easily swayed and convinced to buy another I-Mate unit from this guy. But I had done my homework before going to Greenhills. I said thank you and walked away. Two stalls down the aisle was an I-Mate JASJAM.

I didn’t buy the JASJAM (bought an iPhone from a reputable shop a few months later) but I learned a very valuable lesson that day—a lot of sellers in Greenhills pretend they know about what they’re selling but most of the authoritativeness is feigned. They will overwhelm a buyer until he is convinced that the seller is right in all his assessments and recommendations. In fact, with some real pushy sellers, they manage to make a buyer think he knows so little about the cell phone he wants so he simply ought to take good advice from the expert. I’ve never gone back to the gadget section in Greenhills since. And when my older daughter started hankering for HTC, she took it upon herself to scour the Web for information, compare prices and look for sellers.

Not all online marketplaces allow prior inspection of goods and that makes a lot of Filipinos shy away from online shopping. Many still think it isn’t safe, that most people offering anything on the Internet are scammers and that there’s nothing better than hopping from one shop to another, inspect the goods and compare prices before making any decision.

But online shopping is booming. Even in Asia where Internet penetration is a mere 17 percent, compared with 73 per cent in North America and almost 50 percent in Europe (from internetworldstats.com, quoted in “Asian shoppers go online as barriers fall” in globeandmail.com), online shopping is becoming more and more popular everyday and people are buying everything from gadgets to clothes to toys to household items. Just look at eBay (ebay.ph) and those free personal Multiply (multiply.com) sites. This is a generation where the smart entrepreneur will think twice about spending thousands of pesos per month on rent. He will also opt for direct selling because dealers and distributors jack up prices unnecessarily. In short, a smart entrepreneur will keep his overhead expenses down to a minimum so he can sell his goods at lower prices.

On the part of the buyer, it means cutting down on personal transportation costs, doing away with incidental expenses (snacks and unnecessary purchases that go with malling) and having the luxury of having the goods arrive at his doorstep. In the Globe and Mail article mentioned earlier, a 23-year-old student in Taipei cites another reason, “I like to shop for clothes online because no sales girls will pester me.” Amen to that. Just a couple of months ago, I was looking at a pair of Nike slip-ons at a shop in Greenhills (not the flea market but a real shop) and was told my size was no longer in stock. I was given the pair on display, they were an inch and a half longer than my feet but the sales girl gushed and exclaimed how they fit perfectly. I wanted to throw the slip-ons at her face.

Online selling and shopping can be a wonderful experience. For the seller, it means selling to a global market sans export headaches. All one needs is a reliable courier. In Etsy (etsy.com), a US-based online marketplace for handmade products, Filipino artists cum entrepreneurs are successfully selling fashion jewelry, lace capelets, crocheted dolls, beadwork, papercrafts and trinkets to shoppers from all over the world. For the shopper, the Internet has indeed broken down barriers because it means access to goods that used to be available only to international travelers.

Is online shopping risky? For the smart online shopper, the risks can be minimal. Online market places like eBay and Etsy have made online shopping more secure by providing user generated feedbacks on sellers. If a seller doesn’t make good on what he promises, it is reflected on his online profile for the whole world to see. And if he does make good each and every time, he builds himself a reputation that makes him a sought-after seller. One simply has to be cautious and to learn to tell between the good and the bad, good talents to hone whether shopping online, in malls or in flea markets.

[Republished from my column in Manila Standard Today]