Internet Shopping: Consumers Don't Remember the Downside.

The advent of internet shopping has helped overcome the difficulties associated with offline shopping.  Offline shopping involves walking or driving down to a physical store to do shopping.  This is time consuming and difficult for people working long hours a day.   It is also difficult for the elderly and less abled persons to shop offline.

In contrast, internet shopping can be done anywhere and anytime.  It can be done at work during break time.  It can also be done at home late at night.  None of these involves travelling.   Thus, the time spent travelling to the physical store is saved for something else.

These benefits however tend to cloud our mind from the dangers associated with internet shopping.  Some online retailers may use pictures to distort the true state of their products.  We can easily be misled to buy these items on the basis of these pictures.  We only tend to discover this distortion after we have made a payment for and received these goods.

Returning an unwanted item bought online because it does not fit the description provided for it on line or because the item is faulty is not easy.  Some online retailers tend to stipulate in their return policy that items purchased online can only be returned via postal or courier means.  In other words, you cannot take such items back to the store in person for a refund or replacement just as you can do for an item bought offline. 

You must send the unwanted item(s) back to the retailer using the stated instruction for returning items.  Depending on the retailer, getting a replacement item or fund for a returned item can take up to 28 days.  You may be forced to buy a new item all together if the item you are returning is needed urgently for things such as wedding.

If you are fortunate that the item you bought online fits the description, you may not be so lucky to escape from receiving junks.  We are asked to register for an account when buying things online.  We disclose our email address during this registration process so that information about the transaction can be sent to the address.

However, online retailers may use the email address we leave with them during account registration for a host of things unrelated to the transaction.  They can use the email address to send us their so-called newsletters or updates.  This can occur even though we have not explicitly subscribed to these junk mails during the account registration. 

Online retailers can go further by selling our email address to third parties who will bombard us with junk mails.  If you have ever wondered why you are receiving a lot of junk mails in your inbox wonder no more.  Most of such junk mails get to your inbox through the nefarious activities of dodgy retailers who have sold your details to third party companies rather than through spammers sending junk mails randomly to millions of email users.

We should not consider that receiving junk mails from an online retailer or third parties after an online transaction poses too much problems to us.  We can decide to blacklist all emails from unknown or untrusted sources.  We can also decide not to open anonymous emails. 

The major problem associated with internet shopping for which we all should be concerned is cybercrimes.  It is true that online card payment processors use secured connection (https or a locked key icon) to ensure that the personal and bank details of shoppers are encrypted and secured during transaction.  However, hackers tend not to target such information on transit.  Instead of targeting information on transit, hackers appear to target the data already stored on the server.  They have succeeded in doing this as demonstrated by recent cases in which bank details of shoppers were stolen from online servers and used for criminal activities.

There is no doubt that internet shopping has made shopping experience far more enjoyable for us than offline shopping.  However, this has come at a great price as shown by the problems above.  It is up to us to determine how far we can go to pay this price.