I know it’s a bold claim, but online shopping can actually improve your life.
1. Online Shopping Can Reduce Stress
How many times have you gotten stressed when you’re shopping? Pushy sales people, traffic problems, trouble finding a parking spot, having to wait in line for ages, items out of stock in one store, having to go to another store, kids screaming, feet aching….
You have none of these stressful problems when you shop online. You can sit back in your favourite chair, put on some music, grab a coffee and enjoy your shopping from the comfort of your home.
2. Online Shopping Can Save You Money
This is a big advantage of shopping online. Not only do you get the chance to buy products at lower prices, but you also have no transportation costs. Rising gas prices mean nothing if you are shopping from home!
3. You Can Compare Products More Easily
I remember once going into a sports store to buy an exercise bike. I looked at the features of the first one the salesperson showed me but it didn’t have all the features I wanted. I asked him to show me another one, but even though I specifically asked for a calorie counter on it, it didn’t have one. He demonstrated a third, which finally had all the features I wanted, but by this time he’d got a bit annoyed with me I think, and made me think I was wasting his time.
If you’re buying on-line, then you can compare the features of different products easily without rude sales personnel, and without getting frustrated.
4. Great Real Customer Reviews And Feedback
If you want to buy something, you can’t really stand outside a store and ask customers who have already bought something what they thought of the buying experience. online you can do that. You can read reviews of retailers and also of the products you are interested in. This makes the whole shopping experience much more reliable, and again, less stressful.
5. Discover New Products
Internet search engines are wonderful things. They can help you find what you are looking for but sometimes they give you alternatives that you may not have heard about before. I was researching fitness programs and only after searching on-line did I find the P90x, which I love. By shopping on-line you can increase your knowledge of each product before purchase, and even make some new contacts.
6. I Shop Online To Find Great Fitness Equipment
The last point brings me to this one. Almost everyone wants to improve their fitness, and the internet is a great place to buy fitness equipment. Since equipment is often bulky and heavy, it makes sense ordering on-line and having it delivered.
I recently wanted some Bowflex dial dumbbells to use with my P90x workouts and decided that it would be much easier to get them online. So not only was it easy to buy P90x DVDs on-line, but, the equipment to use with them is also often better bought on-line.
You can also find a lot of advice on the web to help you use your equipment more effectively, and often there are links on the retailer’s website.
7. Shop And Buy From Anywhere In The World
When you shop online, you are not limited to any one region. If there isn’t a seller in the USA that has the product you’re looking for, then you can look at Canada, Europe or Asia. If you do buy from further away, make sure you check the shipping costs though – I’ve almost been caught out by that a couple of times!
Online shopping improves your chances of getting the products you want.
8. Be Safe And Secure
As long as you are careful, you are actually more likely to have an accident or be a victim of crime in a shopping mall than you are to have security problems internet shopping. How many times has someone scratched a car in a parking lot, or lost something important on a shopping trip? If you follow basic guidelines for internet safety then online shopping can be a very safe activity.
9. Buy Whenever You Want
If you work long hours or shift patterns it can be difficult to get to the stores when you want to. If you buy goods on-line you can do it at any time of the day or night. You can shop as much as you want 24/7, 365 days a year.
10. Free Up Your Time
As well as being able to do it whenever you want to, shopping online saves you time. You can make your purchases in a fraction of the time it would take to go to the mall (or more than one mall) to buy something. This can give you more time to relax, spend time with the family, or whatever else you really enjoy doing.
So next time you pack the kids in the car to go on a shopping trip, ask yourself if you really need to. Could you buy the products on-line instead, and actually improve your life by doing so?
Have you had any good experiences shopping online? Can you add some tips to the list?
By: Derek Carroll is interested in home education, business, health, and fitness. He currently lives in rural Northern Ireland with his family, and runs a website offering reviews of popular health and fitness products.