Do you find online shopping really profitable ?
By akumei1269
@akumei1269 (1749)
India
June 14, 2007 8:46pm CST
I have found , of course , from my limited experiences in online shopping ,that most of the sellers on sites like ebay , amazon etc plays a trick of keeping price low but claiming an exhorbitant shipping charge . Ultimately the cost to the buyer ( price+shipping cost) remains tooo high .
Recently i used to search onlinf auction sites including the two mentioned above for books . What i found surprised me a lot . Because , even used copies of certain books cost much more than what we have to pay to buy from local stores in my cities .
But my experiences may not be exhaustive and hence donclusive ,given my limited exposure .
Can me enlighten me in this respect?
3 people like this
5 responses
@ltmoon (1008)
• United States
13 May 08
A lot of it depends on what you are buying.
Got to find a good to first with.
Shipping has to be reasonable or free.
And you have to figure in sales tax to balance it all.
For those that live in rural areas and small towns, online shopping may be our only choice to get some items.
@twinrachel (215)
•
13 May 08
I have found that you need to be very careful. In the UK version of eBay it is against their rules to charge an unreasonable amount for postage so you can report sellers who charge too much. I always take the postage into consideration when I am calculating the cost of an item I am buying. i do know people who buy things form cheap shops and then sell them at ebay for a profit so I am sure that you could probably find some of the things cheaper elsewhere but I guess it depends on how rare the item is that you are after.
@cblackink (969)
• United States
16 Jun 07
When you shop online, you are paying for the convenience of having the product delivered to your door. And that's only fair, because the delivery companies have to make money too.
@senthil2k (1500)
• India
15 Jun 07
Personally, almost all the products I have bought online has ended up very cheap for me. Even recently I bought my Sony Ericsson P990 almost Rs.2000 less than the market from one of the online site. That too with a good product quality, with warranty and all the other stuffs I can get from the stores.
Also the other products I have bought so far are of good quality only. The only suggestion I can give you is that, check the reputation of the site before you purchase anything. Also check for the security of the site before you pay online. Thats all I did.
@hkgirl (51)
• Canada
16 Dec 07
I think it depends on what you are buying maybe. For instance, i wanted to buy the first season of a show on dvd. it is a show i used to watch a few years ago, it only ran for 3 seasons then got cancelled. Well its really hard to find in stores, i only saw it in a store once and it was 100 bucks! Well i got season one off of Amazon.com for like 24.99 (brand new)and with the shipping it ended up being only 30.00 total. I live in Canada but i ordered it off the american version of the site seeing as it was a bit cheaper and our dollar is realy good but then when i got the package i noticed it was sent from within ontario (where i live), so i thought that was pretty cool!
