The perils of online shopping

I have been shopping online for the longest since. Amazon, ebay, taobao, gmarket, Redmart, you name it. I have shopped on both international sites as well as local sites. International sites simply because I could only get those products on those sites, and they are not available locally. Local sites mainly for grocery shopping, and others.

It is not difficult to shop online. In fact, with just a click, you could easily load items into your cart. And before you might realise, within 10 minutes, you have loaded your cart full of items. However, as you do not load it in a physical basket or trolley, you probably won’t be able to tell how much you have actually added.

And when you decided to view your cart at this point in time, you might be surprised how much you have already added in. But the question is, have you really added in the important stuff yet? Or are you just randomly adding stuff in because the picture of that hershey’s just seemed to hard to resist and it’s on promotional offer!

Also, one of the conditions required for many of these online shopping sites, is that you have to hit a minimum order before they offer free delivery. Of course, who will want to pay for that extra delivery charge? As such, more often than not, I’ll try to fill up the cart so that it hits the minimum amount, never mind that those other added on items are probably “not needed”, but it does the job of adding up to the amount.

With all that, how do we shop online avoiding buying in excess?

How are a few tips:

1. Create a list – write down what you need, or what you need to get and focus on these items first when you start shopping. This will help to avoid buying items that are not necessary.
2. Provide a timeframe – we can sit in front of the machine and start adding in and clicking in items easily. Give yourself a timeframe when you do your online shopping and try not to exceed them. It will also help you to narrow down and focus on the items that you need first without browsing through other unnecessary items.
3. Budget – Just like your normal grocery shopping, set yourself a budget, for some the budget is the minimum order delivery.
4. Other add-ons – What if you do not meet the minimum sum for delivery? You could add on other items but this is the tricky part. What items should we add on? For grocery shopping, it is fairly straightforward, you could add on other discounted items with longer shelf life. For instance, if a can of pasta sauce is on discount and granted that you might already have 2 cans at home, you could still purchase this, since it has a longer shelf life and discounted, it will offer you some savings. However, other items might not be as straight forward and you might end up getting things that you don’t really need. If so, you might be better off paying for that delivery fee rather than spending a whole load more for items that are not required. Weigh the difference between the 2, and the answer will be quite obvious to you.

How do you shop online? Will love to hear your experience as well.