Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Lazada Puts a different Twist to local online shopping


The online department store lazada.com.ph/  as I want to call it can be considered as the Philippines’ Amazon.com. It is very inadvertent that comparisons are going to surface out and it is also inevitable that you might mistake one for the other at a glance. The comparisons and similarities though are all positive.  I myself, just by looking at the Lazada Philippines website can’t help but relish the good old days of amazon.com online shopping when there were no local online shopping websites like Lazada Philippines.  What makes the two online shopping websites comparable? Well the concept is almost identical in that they are both online retail companies and not online market place platforms just like ebay and sulit.

The difference between an online market place website and an online retail store is apples to oranges in that you can easily identify one from the other. When you look at online market place websites, you will notice that there are a lot of people involved in selling products. These people or sellers are members of the website. Membership is established through the creation of a user account or a seller profile. A seller only need to fill out a membership form online, provide basic details like email address, physical address, date of birth and of course his or her name and they can start posting the merchandise that they are selling. Most of the items being sold by these online sellers are second hand, however, there are some online sellers that sell brand new goods. That is why, online market place websites are a perfect haven for people who are considered as bargain hunters and those that are searching for specialized and rare items.

I myself became hooked in these online market place stores for quite some time because of my hobby. I am into gadgets and collectible toys and online market place websites are a great place to scour for those rare collectible items. It is a great concept but one has to have some sort of negotiation skills and some kind of keen sense to pull off a successful transaction because you will be dealing with strangers that you have not met before and if you are not careful, there is a big chance that you might chance upon a con artist, one that only asks for money but never deliver the product. To avoid being in that kind of situation, I try to meet up with a seller as much as possible.  On the other end of the online shopping hemisphere is online retail stores like Lazada and Zalora, these websites are called online retail stores because they are comparable to an online shopping mall in terms of selling structure just that they are online.

The advantage is that, you are guaranteed quality items almost 100% of the time since you are only dealing with the company and if there are complaints about the products they delivered, the company is more than willing to help you process a replacement since they have established procedures for those types of complaints.  Those kinds of advantages definitely added a twist to the local online shopping scene.

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