Online Shopping is a brand new experience for me, that i have enjoyed over the last 3 years in my very limited shopping experiences in life.
I was brought up under extreme cost cutting by a struggling family, where more than necessary was spent on food, there were best government areas to live but there was no money for purchases, so I wore whatever my mother bought me out of her own choice and wore hand-me downs and old clothes from all members of my family with no shame whatsoever, which included old pants and trousers of my father, old indian style clothes of my mother and old leftover clothes from my older sisters. I have to admit that since I was growing up on consumer advertisements when I was younger, if my parents had the money to give me or if I was permitted to take up work, I would have loved to make personal purchases like clothes, shoes,bags,makeup,beauty products, technology but I saw my parents struggling financially and I trained myself to not want anything and not want to make any purchases. Later in life, when I started earning through low paying jobs like 5 or 10,000 rupees a month I could make my own purchases for work clothes but a working lifestyle gives little money but also little time to choose and shop. In my one year life experience in Melbourne i experienced the mall culture that didn't exist in India then and over the years as malls came up in India, shopping was more of a hang out event-like activity in the air conditioned comfort of a mall instead of struggling through open markets in the heat. I have experienced shopping in Delhi markets and when i lived on my own in Bombay, I looked at the streets of Bombay but with just a little shopping experience and no life or lifestyle to live.
So, How different has the world of online shopping been, compared to previous experiences? Very different and very liberating.
I want to make low cost free shipping purchases from all over the world and that is still a dream but until the world gets there, there is still so much of new experience that has been added through technology.
Shopping online is the birthday party style of shopping, where I can make whatever purchases I want to make as a gift to my own self or others and they arrive in Boxes, wrapped with gift wrap if I like them to be, So instead of shopping bags of the traditional style of shopping, now there are a lot of boxes to keep or discard.
Now shopping is not bound by any time, the whole event style of dressing-up to go shopping is done away with, so I can do that when I want but I am not bound by it, and instead I can make web purchases at any time in any way, early morning or late at night.
True, there are shipping costs involved locally even if free shipping sites also exist, but if you were to go shopping into the local market, you will still have to spend petrol money and parking fee etc so you are saving that and paying low local shipping costs.
It is No Noise shopping, unless you want to communicate with the sellers on your own. It takes away the entire noisy experience of marketplaces, haggling, bargaining which now seems like a culture and space of its own, running its own buying and selling show live in physically visible marketplaces with its own sound, feel, smell etc.
Shopping for those difficult small things has become easy now, whatever little things we had to go looking for in shops that were not easily accessible and were a struggle to get to now can be seen and purchased online and will be delivered home.
Of course the as-soon-as-possible shopping experience and need is still a day away as most products can only be delivered the next day at the earliest, so if you need anything asap you will still have to enter a marketplace so nobody has done away with the need for markets and shops.
Products are now so much closer by being visibly displayed online in photos and videos and also with buyers' experiences published online and each product can be seen and studied visibly with as much time as you like to spend on it before purchasing reading and watching reviews and buyer feedback.
It's the modelling style of shopping where you can also be more scientific in making purchases if that's what you want and if the site offers it. Online shopping offers greater access into the makers' world by offering measures and specifications and other descriptions for every product which we usually don't pay attention to when shopping in markets. While shopping for clothes for example, usually you can just go to a shop, feel the cloth you are purchasing and try on, while shopping online you cannot feel the cloth but there are photos and videos and descriptions that help in knowing the product and sizes and measurements as well as knowing about the materials the product is made of.
Also, its virtually very liberating, when you don't own so many things, you can view products online, feel as if you own all those clothes and products in your own closet and make any purchase for the day and it will arrive at your door step and you can wear and use it the next day or within the next few days.
Sure, you cannot touch and feel products the way you do in marketplaces but if you know what you want there are greater chances of locating it online. No surprises then that products like Books for which all you need to know is the title and publisher became so popular to be purchased online.
On the other hand, shopping for perfume for example on line, there's no way to smell it of course, but if you go to a marketplace, identify the brand name, you can locate it online and purchase it.
I have very little experience of making branded purchases and no experience of designer products of any kind in my life, but all kinds of products are available online from known brands to competitive unbranded products and it's convenient to make both kind of purchases, when the brand is well known, it is convenient to locate it online and purchase. Whereas products which are not advertised otherwise and might otherwise not be known can also be seen and purchased online.
I would have really liked to buy more products from Kashmir online if I ever had the money to buy them but till then I only located and experienced www.kashmirbox.com.
If time is not a factor and you want to experience a lot of shopping within limited money, then www.aliexpress.com located in China is the best place online to buy anything from clothes to collectibles. It all depends on your budget, you can get the same kind of product in various price ranges so it is up to you how much you want to spend and even low cost products under $1 are a great buy for need as well as just the experience of buying them, other than of course the more you can spend the pricier things you can buy. The quality you purchase is your own decision. If you buy a similar product for $10 or $100 you are deciding the investment made on it's quality on your own after all. But then all products here take up to 2 months to arrive and I haven't experienced returning any products here at all.
www.amazon.in for the local Indian market and with it's popularity of Book and Electronics selling is still the most convenient for regular shopping and makes returns and replacement easier (unless it's things like technology and beauty products, so you need to always check the return and replacement policy of the product you purchase) but I always wish I could one day make purchases from all amazon sites throughout the world with free shipping :p
Other Indian sites for online shopping that I have experienced recently are www.limeroad.com, www.luluandsky.com, www.flipkart.com, www.myntra.com, www.nykaa.com, www.pepperfry.com, www.urbanladder.com, www.quikr.com
Though I would really like if more traditional markets of India and those of countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East also had online shopping sites with free or paid shipping, maybe they exist but I don't know about them yet.
Also, I wish there was some app to keep a track of all purchases made across all shopping sites because while the packages keep arriving I need to keep remembering and noting what I ordered from what site and then act upon keeping them,returning them, return,refund status etc.
The independent world wide sites that i have experienced are www.asos.com, for clothes, www.feelunique.com for beauty products, both of which I have experienced very little because of the high costs involved while surfing through several other online brands that offer products with shipping costs. But in some of these cases, there was extra money paid up to the Indian system as customs fee on receiving the product.
Among other sites that exist that I have located but not experienced are www.overstock.com and www.etsy.com one for handmade and vintage products and would really like to know about more such convenient online shopping sites for brand new and vintage products which are truly life-changing!
