PIcture Credit Credits Karma by frankieleon ,Licensed under CC BY 4.0
When it comes to buying products we prefer to go to stores and purchase whatever we desire, but nowadays with the availability of the internet most of us prefer to buy the products online rather than going for traditional shopping. Whichever the method is picked ,The important things to consider when it comes to shopping are saving money and buying quality products without wasting a lot of time. For some it is just buying good quality products and services, for others buying something to get things done regardless of the quality, but we all may prefer to reduce the waste. There are many advantages when it comes to the traditional shopping:
Advantages of Traditional Shopping
- It Allows You To Be Social: You can hangout with your friends while doing shopping, you can talk with new people like the salesperson, other customers, etc.
- Discover: You can find new products while searching what you want.
- Bargain: You can bargain with the store owners if the product is too expensive which is impossible to do in online.
- Touch: If you are going to buy cloths, you can try before purchasing you can even feel it and see how it fits on you. You can also take your kids with you let them to pick whatever they want.
- Cash Payment: You can pay with real cash and at most places even with card.
- No Waiting Period: You get the item at the same time without waiting for hours or days until the item is delivered at your door step.
The Advantages of Online Shopping.
- Home Delivery: The biggest advantage is that the product gets delivered at your door step. This allows you to stay at home and make yourself busy with your own work without thinking about what a burden shopping could be.
- Instant Payment; You can also pay with your credit or debit card which is attached with your bank account, so whenever you purchased something instantly the money is withdrawn from the bank to the seller’s account. If you don’t want to provide your debit card’s information, you can simply use an online service like Paypal or Skrill and then use that account to pay instead of directly paying through your debit card. This is good because then you don’t have to worry your debit/credit card get stolen. Some e-commerce websites also allow cash on delivery as an option.
- Wider Range Of Products: When it comes to browse products, online shopping has always been the easiest as you can check thousands of products in different categories while sitting at your home without using a lot of effort unlike with traditional shopping.
- User Friendly: Modern websites went through a lot of phases, improving the graphical interface while also being user friendly. Hence, users can search anything they want and buy it instantly.
- Wider Varieties Of A Single Product: The other big advantage is when you do the traditional shopping you are limited to the items in that particular shop, but when you do the online shopping you are opened much more wider amount of choices and not restricted to any brand or labels.
- Importing Goods: You can even purchase foreign items and then make them to ship at your home without wasting money on a plane ticket to travel.
However, there are a lot of disadvantages too, such as, when you do online shopping there is a huge risk of being robbed if you are being careless. Therefore, having tight security is quite important for protecting your money. Using many services like Paypal and Skirill protects your credit/debit card. You can use a secured browser like Google Chrome/Firefox, purchase a good VPN service to secure your line, and a strong password for your online accounts to tighten the security of your accounts. If you can not remember all those complex passwords you can use a professional password store which keeps all your passwords in a secured environment. If the basic security isn’t enough, the phone verification or pin verification can be used to go even further to secure your account.
So online shopping may be having a lot of risks, but if you know how to use it properly and wisely there will not be any issues. But I understand that not all people are tech savvy; therefore, being a victim is quite easy. In the traditional shopping, if someone stole from you while doing shopping, you at least have an idea what is going on and there is someone who might help you to catch the thief. You know the thief is catchable as they have to run all the way to their home or whatever their destination in order to escape and their faces were captured in the store camera. However, in online shopping you may never know, whether you were robbed or who robbed you because everyone is behind a monitor, everyone is far away from you, probably in another country where they might not even have proper laws to protect people from online thefts.
Both methods have pros and cons. At end of the day it’s up to you to pick the best method. but I strongly believe that there is no point of doing online shopping when it comes to everything. If you want to buy a simple thing then it’s better to go to the nearby shop and buy it instead of buying it from online as purchasing items from online might cost a bit more. It might not be so apparent for expensive items, but if it’s a cheap one then you might probably pay more for the tax, exchange fee, shipping charges and all other intermediate fees than the actual product. Also if you want to purchase something which is not available in your own country, I think it’s a good idea to use the internet to purchase that particular item instead of wasting money on a plane ticket. Besides, it not only wastes your money, but also wastes your time.
Nowadays, I have noticed that most of video game publishers tend to sell their products over the internet as it saves huge amount of money that they otherwise have to spend for the manufacturing the disk and the covers. So in that case you have no choice other than doing online shopping, but it might not be a good solution for those who have a slower internet or a limited connection as downloading a huge amount data might take a load of time and also a lot of money.
The technology is being improved everyday, even as we speak at this moment, so we never know where it is heading. But I am quite sure that in one day the traditional shopping method be replaced by teleportation. Then our life will be much more easy than it’s now. But as always, bad things come along with the good things so always be prepared for the worst and hope for the best.
